READ: here’s how you end up a bodyguard. your veins are busy but your eyes are always clear. you grow with untapped anger and a means to vent. you catch the eyes of a superior. you train. you get assigned. you kill. the gaps of leeway left in between you fill with narcotics, alcohol, sex. you know the point of this is to wean yourself off your vices and yet you find yourself stuck in a time loop. you train. you guard. you kill. rinse, repeat, with a dash of cocaine dashed in between.
tonight isn’t much different from the last twenty. lee yeonju is a vision in black, a stark contrast to the pale of her skin, the white fit of her companion’s. tonight, haejin is a blur in movement, her palm pressed firmly against the older woman’s back, yeonju is unyielding in the way she leads her out—fist bunched in the coat of man they came for. poor thing, he had better hoped to die here rather than making it back to the playroom.
“hurry the fuck—” the snarl on her lips is riddled with impatience, aware of the bodies rushing out behind them; the panic in their steps, how it teeters the line of being a stampede. nobody wants to be caught by a smpa dog. “go, down there—” she points down a road most taken, urging the older and scumbag dragged with them. “i’ll catch up.”
it isn’t in the job description—to be a distraction. but yeonju figures, she likes haejin well enough. biding for the urged steps on her tail (just one second, perhaps two), yeonju doesn’t move till she catches a glimpse of the relentless dog, rounding the corner to shoot straight down an unfamiliar alley—only to notice far too late, the ominous red brick wall not too far ahead; end of the line.
the shot comes before she can double back—leaves her ears ringing and nerves on edge, hands lifting slow in surrender (her finger slack on the trigger of the pistol in her hand). fuck. it’s hard to ignore the way her heart pounds, palms cold with sweat, yeonju is slow (and hopefully seemingly submissive) in the way she turns to face her captor (or soon to be murderer), expecting little beyond the swell of dread in her stomach.
but for the world to give way—utterly shatter—at her feet?
(for kang wonil to be standing before her now after five years with his gun cocked and grin crooked?)
it'd be so easy to say he'd been made this way, that these impulses are nothing more but a cruel design of those months under the grueling mercy of those who’d taken every bit of human in him and wrung it out to rot. dna and the wiring of your brain simply don’t cut it. darwin’s theory in it’s most excruciating form: if you can’t keep your head above the water, you’re bound to sink. so they’d cradled his head and plunged him under.
(you wanna know how to swim? then first learn how to drown.)
discipline isn’t the key word—depravity is. and for the past four years, in an ironic twist of fate, it’s been his best safety net. it’s what’s kept him from being permanently barred, and has kept him breathing the same air in the way that free men do. so they want blood on his hands? fine.
they’ll have it down to the very last drop.
wonil moves in closer, gun still pointed. up close, minute details: ink-black hair pulled back tight with an elastic, the slow rise of hands held away from the sides. "now that's more like it." it'd be so easy to say he'd been made this way, but who's responsible for the childlike glee in an act of surrender?
forget the judge, the jury, the executioner, they're both at the mercy of two things: the single bullet left in the weston 686 revolver and his finger wrapped around the trigger.
“turn for me, won’t you?” let me have one last look at you.
and it feels like a bullet’s been shot through his own chest.
stunned silence. above, the moon is a cold, bleached glow. the alley grows dimmer, colder. the weapon is still raised, held in such a way that if he’d pulled and let go, the bullet would have torn right through her throat.
it’d be so easy to say he’d been made this way. but no one can make out the ways how fate can be crueler, perhaps the cruelest thing of all.
“you’re not supposed to be here.”