half baked orv fic. so i think you get where i was going. its under 1k words i think and i dont feel like expanding so i am putting it here
Dokja was never someone special. He’d been alive fifteen years and had never been outstanding; his grades were always average, he was never loud or outgoing(as far as anyone could recall, at least), and was largely friendless. The only people the high-schooler consistently spoke to were his teachers (when they called on him), Yoo Sangah, and his online friend, Black Flame Empress. Even she was hesitantly communicated with.
Sometimes Dokja liked to think that he wasn’t disliked, just ignored due to his demeanor, but his bullies refused to allow the notion to stay longer than simply a fleeting dream. Days passed in blurs and bruises, words brushed off, and passages read.
Those ‘passages’ were the only things completely unaffected by his personal struggles. Normally, opportunities were stripped away, whether because of his status as ‘son of a murderer’, or due to his bullies. The days that they hit the hardest, the blankness came in full force. He felt like he was a husk at times. Often, even, Dokja would wish he had simply been born somewhere else, to another family, or just not been born in general. The disassociation hit hard. I am Yoo Junghyeok, he would chant under his breath.
Willing himself to wake up each morning was difficult, especially knowing what each day would herald. Somehow, though, he picked his way through life, eternally convincing himself it would get better. It never did. The only thing that did get better was the number of chapters on his favorite webnovel, or his favorite streamer SupremeKing’s subscriber count.
At 1, his family had been together. Dokja was too young to understand anything, so life was simple. There was little arguing. He was named reader, or only child depending on how one wished to interpret it. His mother, Sookyoung, had been the one wishing for the meaning reader, however, Dokja’s father wished for it to be only child to signify strength despite singularity.
At 2, he babbled away, constantly surrounded by literature. Rising tensions were hidden by pictures and colored pencils- despite the need to keep a child happy and entertained, even completely excluding mental health, the man of the household demanded that everywhere was kept clean. He didn’t seem to understand that a child wouldn’t understand what he wanted of them when Outings were common enough.
At 5, Dokja’s father began consistently coming home drunk. Chances were that he had been drunk before, just never to the point he was at then. He began preschool. His drawings were filled with dreams of a happy family. He held his mother and father’s hands under a crayon-drawn shining sun, with little birds and creatures all about. Reflecting on this, he can at least realize it was a naïve dream.
At 9, Dokja’s teachers started noticing that things may have been wrong at home. He flinched at loud noises and covered his head and face with his arms when there were sudden movements at times. He wasn’t good at making friends, either. Dokja, on top of that, had mystery bruises he could never explain- and didn’t make eye contact when they asked about it either. They accepted it as normal.
At 12, Dokja’s father was fired from his job. He went to find a new one. This one’s income was higher than the previous. Luckily enough(maybe?), the hours were much more taxing, and he was home much less.
At 15, he killed his father. Life was a blur. His mother and her lawyer never even had to tell him that it was her; that his mother had dealt the blow in self-defense when her husband lunged at her with the knife- he couldn’t remember anything. She was sent to prison at Seodaemun Prison. Society never knew a thing. Any skeptics were silenced when she published her book. It was called A Murderer’s Notes from the Underground. The young boy was never told why she published it: perhaps she reasoned that he would tear himself apart from the inside out. He did anyway, and when he didn’t, his peers did. Kim Dokja attempted suicide. He survived.
At 18, he completed high school. He was a good student, though he never had time to complete homework due to others. He moved out, away from his relatives completely, and
At 20, life felt hopeless. He had been hopping from job to job, never kept, though his bosses often said he did the right amount of work. Dokja just never acted socially or extremely positively. His first manager had told him a year prior that he should just go back to his parents, back to a sheltered life, back to where he fit. Words like those echoes through his mind constantly. Dokja wondered why he would say that if he knew Dokja’s background, that his mother was the author of The Book. The book. What more could he do? The antidepressants stopped being enough. He stopped taking them altogether when funds were low.
At 25, he was flickering through jobs like a spark in dry bracken. Life was tough; his apartment was of low quality, and all he could manage to scrape together was enough for instant ramen every night. The rest was put towards novels, commuting, or rent.
At 26, he found a puppy in a trash can outside of his then workplace(a small café with some cringy pun as its title) half dead. He adopted it. The new animal was named Yoo Junghyeok after what had sustained him for so long- his driving force. However, it needed to eat. It needed to be taken care of- it was extremely small, and was incapable of regulating its own body temperature. So what, I skipped more meals, Dokja would tell himself. It was a mix of selflessness and naïvety that got him through. Oddly enough, the dog was similar to his protagonist in many ways. Even when the puppy had gone through his teething stage, the designated toys were the only items demolished, let alone harmed.
At 27, Dokja discovered that the puppy he had so benevolently worked his ass off over was a dire wolf pup, not just a normal dog. Perhaps the animal’s odd mannerisms should have been taken into account, or its size, or how it made sound(albeit rarely). Dokja wished he had been able to save up enough money to vaccinate the wolf pup sooner, because at least then he would have known what he was raising. Hey, at least he didn’t die from malnutrition by the time the wolf was an adult.
