los angeles is a cesspool; its underground a home to the disenfranchised & the naysayers, the rebellious & the dangerous, the corrupt elite & the crude bottom feeders.
can’t take a step outside the dump the real estate agent had marketed as a house without stepping on a ley line and triggering ten different silent alarms. can’t even look marginally in anyone’s general direction or you’d get the stank eye from a beast wearing the skin of a teenaged boy’s wet dream. can’t fucking do anything in this goddamned city without somebody knowing – like those so-called linchpins, those make-believe gods.
never in a million years would he have imagined being washed up in a city incapable of living up to its namesake. never would have imagined being marooned on what felt like an island ruled by a pale imitation of meritocracy but was, in secret, pandering to oligarchy – the weak & the powerless having to resort to sucking dick & kissing elite ass for a shred of leftover sympathy and a poorer-than-a-beggar’s portion of the underground’s mounds of blood money (the worst kind of dirty money, really).
it made seungho sick to his stomach to think that his mistakes are what landed him right smack in the middle of a playing field with no exit in sight and a whole lot of anger (and nerve, mostly reckless nerve).
so when he receives a seemingly nondescript invitation in the mail, sealed and signed in gold with a welcome note to what is quite possibly the stupidest thing he’s ever heard of, seungho laughs for a long time.
then he burns the invitation, rsvp and consequences be damned.
come and get me, i dare you.
(and in between the minutes it takes for dawn to paint the sky in sunset golds, he’s out the door with a one-track mind & a bone to pick with a soothsayer who had claimed to know absolutely nothing.)
she feels the lick of flames like a chill running down her spine, foreboding and dangerous. every inch of her poised on the precipice; her nerves hanging on the knife edge between exhilaration at the thought of a challenge accepted and wary anticipation for what was likely to come.
or, rather, who would soon appear on her doorstep, hell on his heels and a whole lot of explaining she was bound (obligated) to rehash verbatim---”cult rules, you insufferable little---”
the underground living beneath the concrete jungle was tedious, needlessly arbitrary in small measures--particularly in recruitment and initiation. surrounded by millions of people, mina often wondered just how many humans truly believed they were among equals. wondered just how many of these fools truly pretended nothing was amiss in their very city. wondered if turning a blind eye to corruption and back-alley dealings, to broad daylight muggings and late night kidnappings, to every other person walking by, would help them sleep better at night.
perhaps, to those who choose not to worry about anyone other than themselves, ignorance truly is bliss.
but people like her can’t afford to be stupidly naive (or even childishly obtuse).
being a pawn in a game with your life on the line will turn you into a monster. those who ruthlessly fought against their assigned roles were slaughtered like pigs. those who tried to escape faced a fate worse than death. and then, there were those like her: an innocent forced to wash their hands (and later, their entire body) with the blood of other innocents in the name of survival.
but that’s the thing with becoming a monster: you don’t become one overnight. you don’t become one with just one hunt, one prey, one kill. you don’t become one just because someone calls you one.
no, you are already a monster the moment you are born. the cry you make when you slip out of your mother’s womb is a testament of your survival---you are here, you are alive. it is society that shuts you up and teaches you how to shut up. to quiet you, society teaches you right from wrong, white versus black when you’re old enough to understand--old enough to make choices (choose the right one, dear. you know that’s wrong, right? do the right thing----).
society forces you to swallow the monster that you are, lock it behind a cage of bones, and teaches you to starve it to death.
but animals don’t react well when backed into a corner----and neither do humans.
They know this---she knows this. long before she was snatched off the streets, mina had known.
(you cannot turn a monster into a heroine.)
and still, she waits----knowing death was climbing the stairs two at a time (one, two, three flights--he’s here)---and opens her door.
