Chapter Text
Hey y’all! An explorative work that’s been LONG in the making. To any that have not THOROUGHLY READ AND HEADED THE TAGS before clicking this fic, your complaints in the comments will be swiftly acknowledged and promptly ignored. They will update as more chapters are progressively added (relationships too), so keep on top of it all and take care of yourselves :)
None of the behaviors depicted in this fic are condoned by me personally, and the BTS members are nothing but name/face claims for the characters. The story will feature and depict some pretty fucked up aspects of society, and none of the characters are inertly good people. Most of them have pretty vulgar mouths too, so be aware if you're sensitive. I have no intention of romanticizing the relationships in this story as anything but toxic, manipulative and exploitative.
To any veteran fanfic readers in the vmin/jikook scene, I must relay that this work draws heavy inspiration from the (now gracefully retired) Vmintie’s story, “Fatal Compulsion” as well as “Jewel of Busan” Her works were a big part of what drew me into writing, so I must give credit where credit is due :) Without her, this fanfic would not exist.
Again I urge you to HEED THE WARNINGS BEFORE READING THIS FIC. Don't like, please click off and leave. The first chapter is relatively tame, but we'll really get into it after the initial set up has allowed for everyone to get nasty with one another.
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The little fucker had robbed Jimin of his last 100₩ and still had the gall to ask for more money.
Park Jimin stood in front of the machine, staring through the cloudy glass at his clothes. They were lying there in a wet, boneless heap, sloshed together like drowned animals.
The cycle had stopped just short of adding detergent.
PLEASE INSERT THE REQUESTED AMOUNT, the little display screen said. It may as well have sneered it.
500₩, the greasy little coin slot added. Open-mouthed. Like the outstretched hand of a loan shark, fanning open and closed. Pay up now, pay up.
Jimin stared at it for a long moment. Before coming here, he had stopped by a convenience store and spent 4,500₩ on cigarettes, which had been a stupid thing to do. He knew it had been stupid at the time, but his brain had done that thing where it built a case for the defense. He had told himself they were necessary because the morning had been bad and because his father had been drinking before noon and because his mother had left the apartment without a lunch wrapped in foil, which meant she was skipping a proper meal again.
So, naturally, Jimin had decided he deserved something. He had moped over how fucking miserable the day had been, would be, and thought to himself: surely, I deserve something to make it a little better.
NOPE!
HA HA HA! The universe fell flat on its ass, laughing as it pointed fingers at him. Naive little fucker! Who did Park Jimin think he was? The sort of person who could indulge in splurging his disposable income? There wasn’t a single disposable won to his person!
The laundromat was one of those cheapskate little twenty-four-hour coin laundries wedged between a closed gimbap shop and a phone-repair place with yellowing advertisements taped to the window. Near the back walls stood a short-statured ahjumma in a padded vest, folding children’s clothes, but aside from that, the place was empty. The owner had taped pieces of paper to the machines and written in black sharpie: PLEASE DO NOT KICK THE MACHINES.
Jimin kicked the machine, hard.
“No better than all those suits,” he muttered. “Is it fun? Bleeding the poor dry? You feel big and strong? You feel like a fucking chaebol?”
The ahjumma near the back shook out a tiny pair of Pororo underwear and glared at him over the rims of her glasses. “Aiyah,” she chided, “Can’t you read, son? It says don’t kick the machines. You young people, no sense of manners left in you, not one lick.”
Jimin did not reply. It was best not to answer old women when he was already in this kind of mood. One wrong word and suddenly he was defending himself like a criminal in court. His mouth was like that.
The charming thing about being poor was that it made you insane and mean over very small amounts of money.
People liked to talk about poverty as if it were a noble period of character development. They made documentaries on the subject with slow piano music and interviewed old men and women selling banchan under red plastic awnings. Everyone watching at home got to feel sad for about forty-five minutes before ordering fried chicken through an app owned by some company that was probably a subsidiary for Kim Mun. The British had a word for it- poverty porn.
All poverty had given Park Jimin was a nasty temper. It had made him petty. Petty enough to want to kick the machine one more time.
Jimin kicked the machine one more time.
“Yah, student!” The old woman scolded.
“I’m not a student,” Jimin said.
That much was true, though his parents didn’t know it. He was 23 and already supposed to be well on his way to graduating university. Jimin's mother still believed him a diligent business major attending Dong-eui university. His father still believed tuition bills were the reason there was never any money in the house, which was funny, because tuition bills were just about the only expense Jimin had successfully removed from his life.
Well. To an extent. The bills were gone, but the lie had rent-free tenancy in his mouth.
Class was fine, eomma.
Professors were hard, eomma.
Group project, eomma.
Library, eomma.
Sure.
BEEP BEEP. PLEASE INSERT 500₩. The machine was growing impatient with him.
“Fuck.” Jimin grunted, too tired to really want to deal with it. But his clothes were sopping wet and they’d run out of dish soap at home, and his father had shut off their heater to pinch the extra pennies for Soju. If he didn’t find a solution to this problem, Jimin would end up going to work in underwear smelling like sweaty balls.
PLEASE INSERT 500₩.
“You’re extorting me now? You think I’m hiding it from you? You think I came here with secret laundry money tucked under my balls?”
PLEASE INSERT 500₩.
Five hundred won was nothing. It was gum money. It was vending-machine money.
Jimin glanced at the old woman. For a moment, he considered asking her for it, but the idea was rejected immediately, ramming hard against some unexplainable moral threshold.
He wasn’t so lowly a piece of societal scum that he’d resort to extorting the elderly for money. He had morals. There was only so much that poverty could excuse.
The bell over the laundromat door gave a sad little jingle as Jimin stepped outside. Dong-gu was a neighbourhood province that sat on one of those slopes people loved to photograph if they were tourists and hated to climb if they actually lived there. Busan loved a hill, rich people loved the view, poor people suffered the climb.
Jimin stood under the faded blue sign reading 24-hour coin-laundromat, tearing into the pack of cigarettes he had bought. Busan rattled on below. Dong-gu was a hilly neighbourhood rammed full of narrow little streets and short-statured little brick squares with yellowing signs. The position offered vantage over all the properly developed parts of the city; Haeundae's striking skyline framed in the horizon. By contrast, this dingy neighbourhood was a stain on the postcard photographs. Underdeveloped, was the proper term politicians used when referring to it in the media.
Stuffing out his cigarette beneath a shrivelled sole, Jimin kicked off in search of a solution to the laundry conundrum.
He didn’t have to look for long.
A high schooler stood by the vending machine outside a nearby convenience store, digging through a plastic bag stuffed with snacks. His uniform was navy and neat, the sort that belonged to private academies with glossy pamphlets and well-paying parents. Teenage acne speckled the lining of his cheeks, which were plumped, no doubt by the hand of a mother who fussed as she fed him. He’d grow handsomely out of the baby fat in a year or two, no doubt.
Jimin stood there for two seconds, three, four, letting his last remaining sense of shame make a pathetic argument in court. Your Honor, the defendant is tired. Your Honor, the defendant has wet laundry. Your Honor, the defendant has a convenience store shift in three hours and cannot show up stinking like shit.
The boy looked rich. Not Gangnam brat or Haeundae strip rich, but rich enough. His Nike air forces were still pearly white. That was plenty telling. No one with actual problems kept white shoes that clean.
Surely, the could kid spare 500₩.
“Yah!” Jimin called.
The boy glanced back, saw Jimin coming toward him, and immediately turned like a well-raised Busan child who had been taught not to engage with street problems.
Fair.
Park Jimin knew what he looked like. His hair was bleached with cheap box dye, patchy at the roots and jagged at the ends from where he’d cut it with kitchen scissors. He had started piercing himself when he was an angry teenager because cigarettes had been harder to get back then; five studs in each ear, one in his lip, one in his eyebrow. His fingers were callused from how much he smoked, and his clothes were worn thin at hems.
Mothers took one look at him and tightened their grip on their children. Study hard, their eyes said. Or you’ll end up like that.
From head to toe, everything about Park Jimin screamed trouble.
South Korea could boast about being a high-trust society all it wanted. Every basket had a rotten apple.
Park Jimin had soured nicely.
And so he hooked two fingers into the back of the boy’s collar and dragged him sideways into the mouth of an alley.
The kid yelped. His snacks hit the ground first- banana milk, triangle kimbap, honey-butter chips. Then his back hit the brick, hard enough to knock the breath out of him. Jimin was quick to clap a hand over his mouth.
Up close, the kid looked fifteen.
Maybe sixteen.
Fuck.
Jimin reached out and plucked one earbud from the boy’s ear. He made a panicked noise into Jimin’s palm. “Do not bite me. I swear to god. I’m gonna remove my hand, but you gotta stay quiet, yeah?”
The kid’s eyes were huge, and he nodded fearfully. Jimin eased his hand away, and the boy sucked in air to shout.
Jimin shoved him lightly back into the wall. “There there. Don’t scream or run now,” he shushed him, “Hyungie just wants to talk with you.”
The boy flinched, then grappled for the stolen airpod.
“Give that back,” he demanded, plump little cheeks sinking into a pout. An adorable pair of bunny teeth prodded out.
“Sure.” Jimin held the earbud between two fingers. “How much cash do you have?”
The boy’s shoulders dropped as realized his own predicament.
Oh. This is a robbery.
“Please,” his voice fell suddenly into a submissive register, “I don’t want any trouble.”
“Then we’re on the same page,” Jimin reaffirmed, picking up a stray brick from where the alley’s wall had been left half-caulked. He threw it up and down playfully, suggestively. Extortion was always a bit of a gamble in such a public place, but the real danger lay in the specific words used to cash in. Anything too vulgar or threatening might return to you more serious charges, should the authorities get the chance to take a statement.
”You’re a good boy, I’m sure, with real good parents who treat you well. Pay you well. You go to Kyungnam?” Jimin asked, though he did not really care which school.
“No.”
“Dong-sung?”
“No.”
Jimin caught the brick at once with a firm grip. “Then why are you walking around my neighbourhood with that stupid rich face?”
The boy flinched. He was afraid of him. “I- I really don’t have that much-”
“Well, you have enough to splurge on snacks before heading to hagwon. I need money. Pay up.”
People liked to say bullying was stupid. A coward’s way of projecting insecurities, an underhanded means of getting one’s way. Maybe it was.
But it sure as hell was an effective way, and Jimin was very good at it.
In middle school, the older boys had gone for him because he was small and pretty and very obviously closeted. He always barked at their provocations, never one to shut up and take an insult quietly. They reveled in it. Later down the line, when Jimin’s family had fallen on hard times, the bullies had taken to stealing his valuable lunches from him, soiling his clothes, ripping apart his school supplies. They’d taught him a lot about how to effectively prey on another person’s insecurities and weaknesses, and that’d been the most valuable thing school ever taught him.
When Jimin had later gone to high school, he’d learned to point the barrel the opposite way and reveled in how much easier it was to be the preyer than the preyed. He’d blackmailed his classmates for favors, extorted money from his juniors, cornered studious little boys in the bathrooms until they cried. Not the most honorable venture, to be certain, but financial desperation and dignity hardly went hand in hand.
Case and point; stealing laundry money from a child.
Jimin chucked the brick up in the air once more, laying his satoori on thick.“Tick-tock now. Wallet time.”
“H-hyung-” The teenager’s mouth tightened. He was getting close to crying, but wasn’t quite there yet. Jimin could tell. Good. That meant he was close to breaking him.
Usually he’d have pushed harder here, sealing the deal with a little display of force. But something about those big, glossy eyes made Jimin pause. Trembling, like Jimin’s actions might screw over his entire life. Fucking puppy dog eyes.
“....Relax,” Jimin sighed, stepping closer. That was the rhythm to the game of getting your way. Fear by itself was a wonderful tool “I’m not going to kill you, don’t make that face, you’ll hurt my feelings. All I need’s 500 won.”
The boy blinked.
“....You’re robbing me for five hundred won?”
Jimin knew how ridiculous it sounded. Had he asked for fifty thousand, the kid might have wet himself and handed over his wallet with both hands, trembling with teary eyes. But 500 won could be salvaged from the city streets, if you were lucky enough. It wasn’t even enough to pay for a coffee.
The boy stared at him, frightened but no longer properly frightened, which irritated Jimin. And so he grabbed the pretentious little fuck by the blazer and pushed him back against the wall.
“Listen to me,” he said, his voice dropping. “I am having a very bad day, and I know you probably think your day is bad because some bastard pulled you into an alley and is demanding money, but I promise you, right now, between the two of us, I’m the one with less to lose, so stop pissing around and give me your wallet.”
The boy pulled out his wallet.
He opened it with shaking fingers, and Jimin saw notes inside, ten-thousands folded neatly beside a transit card and a photo sticker of some girl with rabbit ears drawn on her cheeks.
Hot damn. Kid had it all, didn’t he?
“Cute girlfriend,” Jimin snickered, and fished out a newly minted banknote worth 10.000₩. The boy’s eyes widened.
“That’s for my dinner!”
Jimin eyed the bag of groceries. “You’ve got food.”
The boy clearly wanted to protest at that, but didn’t dare while Jimin was holding the brick. Tears pricked the corners of his eyes. “Hyung, you’re so mean.”
“The world’s a mean place, kid. Tough shit.”
It was a horrible thing to say to a highschooler who hadn’t really done anything wrong. The poor kid looked on the verge of a breakdown. “My dad will-”
“Be real happy his son skipped school, I’m sure. Skeddadle now. Unless you want to get beaten to a bloody fucking pulp?”
The boy skedaddled, stumbling a little at the alley mouth before breaking into a run. Jimin remained for a moment longer, waiting until the high schooler’s white shoes vanished down the slope. The boy ran fast. Good for him.
Jimin hoped today would inspire the kid to live honestly. Teach him a good life lesson. Wasn’t that nice of him? Being so very pedagogical.
The laundromat had emptied out by the time Jimin came back. Thank fuck. The ahjumma was gone, and all the machines except his had been emptied, doors hanging open like dead mouths. Only his own washer still blinked at him.
PLEASE INSERT 500₩.
“Yes, yes,” Jimin muttered, fishing the stolen bill from his pocket, “I heard you the first sixteen fucking times.”
He went to the change machine, fed the stolen money into its slot, and waited while coins spat into the tray. Ten thousand won turned suddenly into a small fortune when he had only needed five hundred, and for one stupid second he stood there with the coins cupped in his palm and wondered whether he should go hunt down the kid again and return the change.
He didn’t, obviously. Jimin was absolutely not proud of mugging a high schooler for laundry money, but he just wasn’t sorry enough to return it.
He was not a goodhearted citizen today. Maybe the empathetic mood would strike him next Thursday when he got paid, but today was not Thursday.
CLINK, CLINK, CLINK. The machine gave a cheerful beep and resumed the cycle as Jimin fed it the money. A loud rush of water filled the drum and his clothes began sloshing around again.
Round and round.
Drowning quietly.
Jimin pocketed the rest of the coins, kept one out to roll between his fingers, and dropped onto the nearest plastic bench. He lit a cigarette under the NO SMOKING sign.
There was a tiny television mounted in the corner above the dryers. The sound was too low to catch properly, but the subtitles were on. Some screaming afternoon advertisement gave way to the news.
The anchor’s lipstick was pale pink. Her blazer was pink. Jimin hated her immediately. Hiss. Foul Dolores Umbridge with a broadcasting license, begone!
“Kim Mun Group held a press briefing this afternoon regarding the next phase of its Busan Renewal Partnership, a long-term redevelopment project expected to affect several older residential districts.”
Jimin paused with a coin pinched to the quick of his fingers. “Oh, shut up.” The machine beside him churned his clothes around with a wet, smug glug-glug-glug.
“Company representatives stated that the project will focus on infrastructure improvement, housing safety, public spaces, and stronger economic opportunities for local residents. Vice Director Kim Taehyung also stated that local residents will be central to the future of the redevelopment plan—”
The screen cut to a press room. Onscreen, Kim Taehyung stood behind a podium, company logo strung up on symmetrical banners behind him. The laundromat television flattened him somewhat, dragging a grey line through one cheek, but it did nothing to vandalize his appearance. Taehyung still looked expensive, still maddenly handsome even with a green-ish-grayish-tint to him and a face displayed in 380p.
Korea’s prince, they called him. Youngest son of Kim Mun; the chaebol family clan that had rooted itself so deep into the country’s bones that the conglomerate now raked in a fifth of Korea’s annual GDP.
You could hardly wipe your own ass these days without Kim Mun intervening somewhere in the production process. Shipping, construction, steel, logistics, insurance, retail, hospitals, media, electronics, finance, hotels, foundations; if there was profit to be made off a person breathing, buying, borrowing, healing, commuting, studying or dying, Kim Mun had a subsidiary, affiliate, or investment vehicle waiting at the other end of it.
People liked to say that Kim Mun had built modern Korea. The family business had risen hard and fast under the development dictatorships, swallowing state contracts, military procurement deals, port work, heavy industry, and cheap labor while the country was too busy industrializing to ask who was getting rich from it. By the time democracy came, they were too large to pry apart: a family-controlled web of flagship companies, shell firms, affiliate boards, political favors, and inherited stock. By now they were less a family run business group than a private government with better branding.
At the center of all, currently figureheading the company’s global image in spite of not even being its president, was Kim Taehyung. His good looks and impeccable manners were just the kind of camera bait that made both the media and the public weak in the knees.
The newsanchor rattled on with those infuriatingly pink lips.
“Vice Director Kim Taehyung has drawn particular attention from younger audiences. Many have praised his sincerity, refined manner, and dedication to social responsibility. He’s become an unexpected cultural figure across social media.”
Jimin scoffed.
‘Cultural figure’ - how very corporate of them. The truth was not fit for broadcast, which was that half the younger female population had taken to Twitter to embarrass themselves sexually over a chaebol son. Comments from social media popped onto the screen in bright bubbles beside the video footage of Taehyung holding a speech.
OUR PRINCE ♡
He’s so gentle.
Can a chaebol son be this perfect?
RAW.
That one had slipped through. Bless the poor intern asleep at the moderation desk.
Barf.
Jimin dragged hard on his cigarette and blew smoke toward the television. Part of him hoped Taehyung would slip on the way offstage. Maybe break his nose. Chip the otherwise perfectly marble-carved exterior.
Kim Taehyung was handsome and charismatic. Infuriatingly so- though Jimin would sooner be tortured to death than admit it out loud. He was heading all of Kim Mun’s philanthropic efforts- donating large amounts of money to various charities, issuing public statements on behalf of the company, and most recently, had become the spokesperson for the ongoing redevelopment efforts of Dong-gu.
Jimin’s Dong-gu.
The washing machine let out a string of happy chirps, I’m done I’m done, I’ve done a good job, daddy, come look! Jimin sauntered over, hauling out his pile of sogging clothes before giving the machine another well deserved kick. “Be grateful I don’t unplug you permanently,” he threatened. That shut the washer up.
He moved the wet clothes to a dryer, fed in more coins from the high schooler’s generous fund, and repeated the wait process anew. By the time the clothes were dry and Jimin stuffed them into a thin, fraying laundry bag, the pink anchorwoman had moved on to weather, then stocks, then some celebrity getting divorced. Tragic. Korea trembled.
Outside, the afternoon had gone gray over the narrow street, and the glass door shivered every time a scooter passed. Busan had moods like that, ugly and bipolar.
On the wall beside the laundromat entrance was a Kim Mun redevelopment poster.
BUSAN RENEWAL PARTNERSHIP
A NEW FUTURE FOR DONG-GU
SAFE HOMES. STRONG COMMUNITIES. SHARED TOMORROW.
Kim Taehyung’s face took up the right half.
Jimin was stopped promptly in his tracks. “Jesus Christ." The bastard had even followed him outside. Was he a stalker or what? Sweet little psychopath under all the baby-kissing, scholarship-giving, hospital-inaugurating nonsense?
The thought made Jimin laugh. Like the little darling prince even had the spine to hurt his own pillow. The rich and powerful never got handsy with their dirty work. All of that was left to the footsoldiers- the arrestable, disposable assets. Like any of them had the gall to put their own hides on the line.
The rich gave the orders while the poor worked with blood under their nails. Dirty work rolled downhill, and Dong-gu sat at the very bottom.
Poster-Taehyung stared into the wet street with the same calm expression as TV-Taehyung, but he’d been vandalized. Someone had drawn devil horns on him in black marker, exaggerated the eyebrows and given him a cartoonishly evil smirk. EAT THE RICH was scribbled angrily across his mouth. A third person had drawn a dick on his cheek.
Jimin felt, for once in his life, genuine civic pride.
A hand clamped suddenly around the back of his neck.
“Don’t scream.”
Jimin shut his eyes. His mood, already somewhere near hell, took the elevator down.
“Baekdu-hyung,” he said, turning around to address the man. “What an honour. Did someone die or was your face already this ugly?”
Baek Daeho, informally Baekdu, smiled without humour. He was a large man with a face that had been sacked to permanent asymmetry in a street scuffle long ago. The two men behind him- formally Mandeuk and Seongcheol- informally idiot goon 1# and idiot-er goon 2#, were none the prettier.
Busan had plenty of criminal men, but not all of them were the same kind of criminal. There were levels to it. There were drunk uncles who pocketed from the till, there were scammy landlords, there were men who sold fake designer bags in back alleys. There were street thugs partaking in extortion, street violence, intimidation- kkangpae, in daily speech. And then there were the sophisticated criminals- politicians and Kim Mun affiliates. True, distinguished career-criminals- the jopok.
These three were kkangpae of the scummiest kind. They ran loan money, transport, private security, favors, intimidation- the sort of local protection that got called community order by the men profiting off it. If somebody wanted a door kicked in, a landlord persuaded, a drunk husband shut up, or a developer made to rethink a survey route, there was always a man available for the task.
Though they liked to act tough, the lot of them were nothing but cogs in a bigger, more sophisticated system- Magul-Jopok; the Hellden Syndicate. It was a name a middle schooler might have thought of, though none dared to utter it in jest if they valued their hides. That was the larger machine; a jopok in the proper sense being run from the front of a legitimate business. Their corporate influence was exceeded only by Kim Mun.
Jimin had been running odd jobs for Magul-pa since he was fifteen.
After his father’s accident and the lawsuit and the bills and the total eradication of any chance at a normal, functioning childhood, the decision had seemed perfectly logical. Twenty thousand won for delivering a package across three subway stops without asking what was inside. Then thirty thousand for watching a door. Then fifty for following a man home. Moral purity was an expensive hobby, and Jimin had never been rich enough for it.
The line even a scummy guy like him refused to cross, however, was selling out.
Issue with that being: Jimin was no longer fifteen, in crippling debt, and trying very desperately to turn over a new leaf. (HA HA HA WHO ARE YOU KIDDING, PARK JIMIN, YOU ROBBED A CHILD IN BROAD DAYLIGHT.)
Issue two being; no other work Jimin could secure without a degree paid half as well as running jobs for the mob.
Baekdu grabbed him by the front of his hoodie and shoved him up against the wall. Jimin’s shoulder hit the Kim Mun poster. He could feel Kim Taehyung’s printed face about to watch him get his ass handed to him, smirking behind his back. Voyeristic little fucker.
Beakdu shook him once more. “You’ve been hard to get hold of lately.”
Jimin refused to meet his eyes. “I’ve been busy.”
“You haven’t been answering your phone.”
“Oh sorry, yeobu, didn’t know we were in a committed fucking relationship now. Relative poverty is a demanding lifestyle.”
Baekdu ignored him and reached out to frisk him, snatching up the cigarette pack in Jimin’s jacket pocket. He glanced at the brand, took a joint for himself, lit it, threw the box to Manduek, and gave him a skeptical look.
“You’ve got money for these, but Hyungnim says you’ve been dodging work.”
Jimin shoved himself free of the grip, grappling to get his 4.500₩ back. Though he was shorter than all of them, he wasn’t weak. “I had money for these once. Had. Past tense. Don’t be classist.”
“Don’t act cute with me.”
“Then stop flirting.”
Mandeuk barked a laugh, stuffing the cigarettes into his own pocket. He was big and round, which was why Jimin called him Mandu when he was in a provocative mood.
Seongcheol didn’t laugh. The man rarely did anything that suggested he enjoyed being alive. That had always unsettled Jimin. There was something wrong with men who took no pleasure in the world at all. Even serial killers were known to have hobbies they enjoyed.
Baekdu took a step forward, hand coming to rest on Jimin’s shoulder again. “Listen carefully. We’ve let you float for weeks, Park Jimin. Hyungnim’s been very generous with you.”
“Hyungnim can suck my dick then, if he wants to be generous.”
That snarky remark earned him a knuckle to the stomach. Jimin folded neatly in half. He made a small, ugly gagging noise, drool spilling out his mouth.
See, the funny thing about Park Jimin was this: he could never keep his fucking mouth shut when it mattered. Call it a faulty wiring in the defense mechanisms his brain had coded into him as a child- call it a temper, a trauma response, a masochistic tendency. The more scared or angry he got, the more words came out.
Usually, the wrong ones.
Baekdu grabbed Jimin under the arm and hauled him up until his feet no longer touched the ground. “Any other man in your position would’ve been floating face-down loooooong ago. You’re lucky Hyungnim pities you. He’s been wanting to talk with you for a while, but you’ve been an elusive little fucker.”
Jimin’s stomach sank a little. “Tell him I died.”
The snark earned him a knee to the stomach. He was thankful he hadn’t had the money for lunch today. Bile punched the back of Jimin’s throat and he coughed, gagging on his own throatly fluids. Yum.
“You should be grateful to us,” Baekdu said, humour gone from his voice now. “For keeping trouble off your doorstep.”
The gang liked to use that line whenever they needed a favour: you should be grateful. We’re the only thing between you and people even worse than us.
It wasn’t entirely a lie, which made it even more irritating.
Kim Mun’s plans to develop Dong-gu had made headlines partially because the district was such a huge pain in the ass to get ahold of. The territory had fallen under Magul-jopok’s reign, and the local kkangpae had decided that if Kim Mun wanted Dong-gu, Kim Mun would pay dearly for every inch. If you ignored the loan sharking, the beatings, the gambling rooms, the backroom collections, and the fact that Magul-Jopok was about as charitable as a septic tank, one might harken them proper coked-up guardian angels of the district.
“Listen to me carefully,” Beakdu snickered, “You live on this hill. Your parents live on this hill. That old plot your father keeps refusing to sell sits on this hill. The minute we stop making noise, Kim Mun’s dogs will topple it.” He smiled without mirth. “You should be on your knees thanking us.“
Jimin snorted. “Yes, every day I wake up and kiss the pavement in gratitude that organised crime has graciously decided to squat in my district before developers could.”
Beakdu slapped him consequently. Metal flooded Jimin’s mouth, but he only smiled, spurred on by the fight, the struggle, the opposition. Jimin could never hold himself back when the first blood was spilled. It turned him on, though he’d sooner die than admit it.
Baekdu slapped him again.
“Don’t make that creepy face, you little freak. You know how this works. Your old man got crushed, your mother started killing herself at work, and our Hyungnim made sure nobody came knocking too hard while you all got your shit together.” He clicked his tongue. “You never did, but still. Courtesy was shown.”
“And the touching devotion you people have to your own public service would be admirable if you weren’t all such complete cunts.”
Seongcheol lunged like he meant to hit him again, but Beakdu lifted a hand.
“You want to go at it, we can start keeping a ledger, Park Jimin. But we didn’t hunt you down just to beat your ass. We’ve got work for you. A job.”
“No.”
Baekdu nodded at Seongcheol.
The hit cracked his teeth together.
Jimin’s face slammed into the poster, right into poster-Taehyung’s printed mouth. Strangely, even with blood flooding his mouth and pain ringing in his ears, all Jimin could think was: Ew! I didn’t consent to this!
The red smeared across the poster, and suddenly it looked like someone had been vigorously making out with Kim Taehyung.
Seongcheol’s boot came down on the back of Jimin’s calf and kicked his leg out from under him. Jimin hit the pavement on one knee, palms scraping rough against the wet concrete. His laundry bag took the impact with him. A T-shirt half-slid out, clean and damp and instantly filthy.
That stung more than the blood in his mouth, actually.
Baekdu crouched in front of him, cigarette hanging lazily between two fingers. “You finished?”
Jimin spat blood onto the pavement. “With what?”
“Being difficult.”
“What’re you gonna do, daddy? Spank me for being a brat?”
Baekdu crouched and grabbed Jimin by the hair, yanking his head back. “What I’m gonna do is beat your sorry ass for insubordination if you don’t do your fucking work.”
“I have work. Proper work.”
“No,” Baekdu said. “You had work.”
Jimin went very still.
Baekdu smiled again, wounded pride finally restored a bit. Hah. Jimin’s reign of the situation came to a glorious close. “Your manager got a call. Heard you’d been stealing from the register.”
Whatever blood had remained in Jimin’s face, drained instantly. “I haven’t!”
Baekdu grimaced, a victorious smirk crowning the tips of his cheeks. “Who knows?” Behind him, Mandeuk was giddy and giggly.
“I know!”
“You can tell the unemployment office.”
Jimin stared at him.
The convenience store job was awful. The manager was a creep and hated Jimin for not allowing him to hit on the high school girls that came by after school. One drunk regular kept calling him pretty boy and flaunted how he always needed to buy extra large condoms.
Still, it had been legal money. A negligible little moral voucher for Jimin when he needed to excuse some of his more questionable decisions. A way to tell himself: At least I can be an honest citizen. At least I am not a criminal. At least, I am better than the people I work for.
And now he’d lost that too.
Baekdu took another drag from the stolen cigarette. “Job’s tonight, at nine-thirty. You go to the old karaoke place behind Jagalchi, the one with the red stairs. Kim Mun dog with connections to the main family is showing up there tonight- Hyungnim needs someone who can get his lips nice and loose and ass nice and distracted.”
Jimin ached to flay him across the smug face. But the situation was already against him, and he’d burned through enough bullshitting reserves for one conversation.
“He likes pretty boys.”
“Gross.”
Daeho’s hand left his shoulder. “Eight-thirty at Haejin Beer Hall. Clean yourself up first. You look like street runoff.”
Jimin glared at him as if to admonish: and whose fault is that?
“Fine,” Jimin huffed, getting hauled to his feet. The sudden shift made him stagger slightly. He had to catch himself against the smiling Kim Taehyung’s shoulder to remain standing. “Nine-thirty.”
Baekdu finally relented his hold on him, patted Jimin’s cheeks and let him go. “Good boy.”
Jimin jerked away. “Do that again and I’ll bite your hand off.”
Baekdu only laughed at the empty threat. Shoved him once more for good measure. Then the three of them turned and started down the slope. Halfway down, Baekdu called back over one shoulder, “Put ice on your face when you get home!”
Jimin lifted his middle finger. “Put your dick in a blender!”
Baekdu lifted his own in return without turning around.
Neighbourhood solidarity. How touching.
Jimin stood there until they were out of sight, then bent slightly and held his sore ribs. “Fucking psychos.” He mumbled, dragging himself upright, shouldering his laundry bag, and began the climb home.
Jimin’s house sat halfway up one of Dong-gu’s mean little slopes. The roof had been patched so many times that none of the materials matched anymore. Each summer was a fight to not boil to death and each winter a struggle not to freeze.
The land underneath it was worth more than the structure itself. That was the conundrum.
The house was shit, but the plot sat in one of those irritating little stretches developers wanted to stitch together into a bigger redevelopment zone.
South Korea, land of the future everybody.
Jimin climbed the stairs slowly and shouldered the front door open.
Home sweet fucking home.
His father was in the usual place on the mildew-y floor mattress near the heater they rarely turned on anymore. Beside him sat two empty beer cans, one half-empty bottle of soju, and a plastic organiser full of pills with three compartments already open.
Once, Park Hyangmin had been a proud shipwright- a respectable working class citizen. Then a load-bearing cable on a poorly maintained assembly gantry at a Kim Mun subsidiary dock yard where he worked had snapped during a shift change. A steel
section swung loose and pinned him against the hull frame before anyone could shut the movement down. Park Hyangmin’s pelvis had fractured as a result, his femur shattered- nerves in the lumbal region severed indefinitely.
Jimin’s father had never walked properly after the incident. It’d caused a bit of a stir in the media- such carelessness with the working conditions had put Kim Mun in a bad light. A team of lawyers had met with their family to discuss settlement- but Park Hyangman had been too stubborn to settle for the offered amount- refused to keep quiet about the incident to the media. And so the case went public, then to court.
Between the lawyers of a mega corporation and an average working class citizen, the victor should come as little surprise. Jimin’s family had lost a provider, been publicly humiliated, and subsequently left to wither into poverty.
Jimin’s father had never quite been the same since the accident. The loving part of him had suffocated beneath those heavy steel beams. On bad days, he soured into a drunken fool and drugged himself on prescription painkillers.
Today was apparently one of those days. Jimin had navigated around his father’s sour moods enough as a child to recognize them from a distance. The TV stood in the corner with one permanent pale line cutting through the screen. His father claimed that had happened because the manufacturer used cheap internal wiring. Then he claimed cheap internal wiring was the inevitable result of conglomerate monopoly.
So, naturally, Kim Mun had broken their television.
Everything in this house eventually circled back to Kim Mun. Bad water pressure? Kim Mun. A leaking pipe? Kim Mun. Burnt rice? Kim Mun. A lousy television signal? Somehow also Kim Mun. If a pigeon shat on the windowsill, the birds were government controlled drones sent out by Kim Mun to spite him.
To be clear, Kim Mun did deserve a significant amount of blame for their current state of living. A catastrophic amount, even. But Park Hyangmin had developed the irritating habit of blaming them for the bad parts of life he was responsible for, too.
All the alcohol certainly wasn’t making it any easier.
It wasn’t like Kim Mun held his credit card hostage and forced the drinks into his cart. But to Park Hyangmin, they might as well be.
Jimin observed his father’s miserable form silhouetted against the TV. They were re-running the same news segment Jimin had watched from the laundromat earlier.
No need to prod the foul beast further. He waltzed straight past.
“Eomma?” Jimin called. Pots clinked in the kitchen. That meant she wasn’t working tonight.
Park Mijung appeared around the corner with a dish towel twisted between her hands. She worked at a restaurant near Choryang during lunch service, cleaned an office building three nights a week, and picked up shifts at a factory on the weekends.
Mijung’s eyes went straight to her son’s mouth the moment she spotted him, then his cheek, then the way he was holding his ribs. She dropped the dish towel by the sink and reached for his chin, checking if his nose were sitting crookedly, if Jimin still had all his teeth.
Jimin tried to dodge the fuss, but his mother had spent twenty-three years raising him and never once stopped tending to her son when he was hurt.
“Aigo,” she said softly. “Jimin-ah. What happened this time?”
“Nothing serious, eomma. I’m fine.”
It was the piss-poorest lie Jimin had ever tried to tell, but the truth would simply hurt his mother more than knowing she was being lied to. The excuse was a sweet old song having been sung many times. It was hardly the first time Jimin had returned home in such a state, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last.
His mother smiled sadly and went to fetch the first aid supplies they kept stocked inside a dusty old cookie tin.
Though Mijung no doubt suspected, she was never quite brave enough to ask her son: Are you doing dangerous things for dangerous men?
Instead, she asked, “Did you eat?”
Jimin dropped the laundry bag near the door and kicked off his shoes. “Yeah,” he lied.
His mother brought the antiseptic wipe to Jimin’s lip, and he flinched as it made contact.
“Aigo,” Mijung murmured, as if he were still small enough to sit in her lap. “Stay still.” The skin around her nails had split from detergent, cold water, hot pans, cheap rubber gloves. They were hands that had cleaned other people’s messes all day and still came home to clean his blood.
Jimin despised the sight of what loving him had done to his mother. He wanted to say sorry.
The word sat in his throat like a fishbone.
Sorry for coming home like this. Sorry for lying. Sorry for making you worry. Sorry for being another thing in this house that costs so much money.
He’d lost the ability to say it sometime as a teenager. The word was a bandaid that could never staunch the gaping wound of trouble Jimin always reaped. And so he’d stopped saying it- stopping trying to pretend he wouldn’t bleed.
From the mattress in the living room, his father laughed. It was a joyless, unpleasant sound.
“Yah, would you look at that,” Hyangmin muttered, eyes on the TV, on Kim Taehyung. His perfect face appeared between cuts of redevelopment footage and some smiling official in a suit pointing at a digital model of neighborhoods like theirs wiped clean and rebuilt shiny. “Golden son of a bitch. Smiling like he doesn’t know what his family does.”
Mijung stood quietly and began packing the first aid supplies back into the Danish butter-cookie tin. “....Don’t start, please.”
“Don’t start what?”
“You know what.”
“I’m watching television in my own house.”
On the screen, Taehyung bowed to a row of elderly residents during some staged charity visit. The caption praised Kim Mun Foundation’s renewed commitment to community-centered urban regeneration.
His father reached for the soju bottle.
Mijung turned sharply, her breath hitching. “You took your pain medicine already, dear.”
“So?”
“So don’t drink more.”
“Are you a doctor now?”
“I have to clean your vomit if you mix them, yeobo.”
Hyangmin slammed the bottle down hard enough to make both Mijung and the jagged little coffee table flinch.
“Maybe if the compensation from Kim Mun had come through, I wouldn’t need this much medicine!”
The room went very, very still.
Jimin stared at the table. There was a crack down the middle of it, dark with old spilled jiggae. One leg was being held together with tape, just like their ricecooker lid, their bathroom tap, their smoke-alarm with dead batteries. Everything in their house was like that, everything in their lives was like that; barely held together.
Everyone in the house knew where the slope they were headed down would lead, and somehow they walked down it every night anyway.
Park Hyangmin pointed to the TV, where Taehyung was still smiling sweetly.
“That family ruined me. It’s their fault I’m like this- miserable and trapped in my own body. Kim Mun is ruining this country- running it into a dictatorship like the North, but no one will see sense! Kim Mun has the entire Korean Republic in its claws! They’re all too brainwashed by Kim Taehyung to see it!”
“We know,” Mijung said, trying to calm her husband down.
He didn’t. “No, you don’t know. You don’t know anything! You just bow your head and scrub floors and thank people for throwing coins at you. Yes, sajangnim, this, yes, sajangnim that- all you do in kowtow before those same bastards that took everything from me!”
Jimin watched his mother’s shoulders sink by one miserable centimeter. Not enough for anyone else to notice, maybe. But he noticed. He always noticed when his mother made herself smaller. It was her special talent. Folding and folding and folding until there was almost nothing left of her.
“Appa,” Jimin warned.
Hyangmin’s eyes slid to him. They were bloodshot- drunk and mean.
“What?”
“Don’t talk to eomma like that.”
Hyangmin scoffed, regarding his son critically. “You’re one to talk, with your face all messed up, Jimin-ah. You’re causing her just as much trouble.”
Jimin’s fists tightened. He didn’t want to admit it, but his father was right. Which was the worst thing an awful man could be, really.
He did cause his mother trouble. He caused her trouble when school called years ago and asked why her son hadn’t attended class in eight days, when they called to inform him he was getting into fights with the other children. He caused her trouble when he came home late, came home bloodied, came home limping. He caused her trouble now with university bills that didn’t exist- money she so diligently scrounged up for him by working herself sick.
Hyangmin pointed at him with two alcohol-jittery fingers. “If it weren’t for your university fees, we’d be able to afford it all! When you graduate and get a good job, you’ll be paying your father every single penny you owe back.”
Jimin had not been to university in months. Matter of fact, he’d dropped out during his first year.
The money his parents kept supplying him, the money they thought was going to tuition, was all being pocketed by a criminal syndicate. The money his mother was breaking her back over was being redistributed to men spending it on drugs and weapons.
That was the dead, rotting, maggot-swarmed lie having festered in their house like a corpse beneath the floorboards for years now. Jimin’s tongue pressed against the cut inside his mouth.
Mijung noticed, and whispered, “Jimin-ah.”
It was an unworded plea- your father is in one of his moods- let the matter blow over and we’ll have dinner together and pretend none of this was ever said.
But Jimin was tired. Tired of being poor. Tired from getting his face punched for money that disappeared the second it touched his hand. Tired from hearing Kim Mun’s name in every room, every street, every fucking screen in the country. The fight was already heating in him, stupid and bright and begging to burn something down.
Hyangmin rambled on: “You think I wanted this? You think I wanted to lie here counting pills while that family builds towers on men’s broken backs? Kim Mun did this. Kim Mun put me here. Kim Mun trapped us in this shitbox house. Kim Mun took my legs, my work, my name—”
“Your liver?” Jimin asked.
His father’s voice went low. “Watch your mouth.”
“Why? You don’t.”
“Jimin-ah, stop it.”
Jimin should have stopped there.
Ha. As if he could. There was a point where anger stopped being anger and crossed into momentum. Jimin could feel himself passing it. Could feel the brakes cut- saw the death-drop up ahead and still slammed his foot down on the gas..
“You want to talk about this place?” Jimin snapped, throwing one arm out toward the walls. “Sell it!”
His father went very still.
“There! I said it! Sell the shitty plot! Developers keep sniffing around anyway. Take the money before the roof caves in and kills us all.”
“Park Jimin.”
“No, really, what’s the strategy? Die here? Is that it? You want to talk about why we’re poor? Why we’re so fucking miserable? Sure, Kim Mun screwed us over a considerable amount- congratulations, you drunk bastard, you were fucked over by a megacorporation! Capitalism is the root of all evil, eat the rich, our family is in a tough fucking spot! But the one who keeps us here because he refused to settle, is a miserable drunk, and a terrible fucking father is YOU!”
The slap split the room open.
Mijung made a broken sound. “Hyangmin!”
Jimin touched his cheek. He felt it beat like a red-hot, sweltering heart. His fingers came away wet with blood and antiseptic. New blood? Old blood? who could tell anymore. Park Jimin’s face was apparently a communal project today.
His mother moved toward him. “Jimin-ah—”
“Don’t.”
She stopped like he’d slapped her too. His father’s hand hung in the air for a moment longer before lowering to his lap. Some part of him seemed to realize what he had done. For just a moment, Jimin recognized his father behind the alcohol-clouded eyes again. The father who once carried him up this hill when Jimin had been little and fallen and scraped his knees. The father having taught him how to ride a bike, slipping 100₩ coins into his pocket to splurge on sodapops after school. The father he had looked up to who could lift heavy things, fix broken things, laugh loud enough to fill a room.
The image rotted away as quickly as it had blossomed.
Jimin sneered at him. “Feeling better, appa?”
Hyangmin’s face twisted. Gone was any semblance of paternal guilt. He roused at a provocation just as quick as his son. “Get out.”
“Gladly.”
“Jimin, wait—” his mother scrambled for him.
Jimin wanted, desperately, to sit back down and let his mother finish cleaning his face. He wanted to loll his head against her shoulder like he had when he was small and feverish. Before his father had ever picked up a bottle of Soju. He wanted to be someone else’s son for a while. Someone easier. Someone who came home with schoolbooks instead of bruises. Someone like that highschool kid he’d robbed earlier today- a boy with a good life and a good family.
But Park Jimin was not that kind of man with that kind of privilege. He was poor. They couldn’t afford that anymore. And so he did what he did best in order to survive- he ran his mouth, then ran away.
Hyangmin’s voice followed him as Jimin grabbed his jacket from the hook by the door. “Where are you going?”
“Away. Like you fucking asked.”
“With that face?”
“You made this face, asshole.” Jimin shoved his feet back into his shoes.
Behind him, Hyangmin muttered, “Ungrateful brat,” but resigned himself to his alcohol and his television.
His mother stood helplessly behind him with split hands and tired eyes and all that terrible love. The expression almost made Jimin burst into tears and spill his guts.
I’m not in school.
I lost the convenience store job.
I robbed a kid today.
Bad men are expecting me at eight-thirty.
I’m scared.
Eomma, I’m so fucking scared.
Instead, he said, “I’ll be back later.”, then slammed the door as he left.
Home, sweet fucking home.
The soles of Jimin’s shoes had come unattached, rainwater saturating through his socks. Squelch, squelsh. The sound of used pussy, he thought ludicrously.
A half-empty bus coughed past him as he walked, its windows fogged from the inside. Two middle school boys in padded jackets shared an umbrella and shoved each other off the curb, laughing loudly about something on their phones.
Children.
For one sour second, Jimin thought of the highschooler from earlier. The kid had probably gone home crying. Maybe his parents had already called the police, maybe Jimin had ended up in some local report: degenerate adult male assaults minor for 10,000 won near convenience store.
He had robbed a child today. Jimin couldn’t for the life of him fathom why he was feeling so bothered by it. He’d only shaken the kid up good- hadn’t even hurt him in any meaningful way. It was hardly the worst atrocity he’d committed in the name of financial desperation.
Still.
Hyung, you’re so mean.
His mind refused to unclench around the image of that wounded little face.
Conscience. Ew.
The blood in Jimin's cheek was still running hot from where his father had hit him. That had been- he checked his phone- an hour and twelve minutes ago. Since then he’d done a few laps around Dong-gu, cut through a market street that was closing up, and hopped on a train to get out of shitty Dong-gu with its shitty circumstances and shitty people.
He hadn’t cooled down one bit. Not a single fucking degree- celsius, fahrenheit or Kelvin.
It felt like Jimin was always walking on eggshells these days. Always fighting to stay afloat, chasing the next paycheck, the next source of income, the next chance to claw his way to the surface of the debt ocean and inhale one single mouthful of air before some new bastard pushed his head under again. The city kept asking for money, and people kept taking it from him.
PLEASE INSERT 500 WON.
Why the fuck was he thinking about the washing machine?
Of all people.
Jimin got off the train the moment a ticket inspector started making their rounds.
Perching himself beneath the awning of a closed shop, he pulled out his phone. He could really do with a smoke, but those kkangpae fuckers hadn’t given back the ones they’d stolen earlier. Jimin tried to soothe the restless need for a hit of dopamine by scrolling through his notifications. There were a few missed calls from unknown numbers, one message from his (old) manager, and three from his mother.
He opened the manager’s message first.
Don’t come in tonight. We need to talk before your next shift.
Jimin typed back, I didn’t steal from the register, stared at it, then deleted it. Instead he typed, Tell your mother I loved her in bed, stared at it, then rammed his thumb onto the send button.
FUCK CAPITALISM. Jimin was so damn tired of being a work-whore. Tired of pretending legal poverty was morally superior to illegal poverty. Both left him just as hungry.
Part of his soul rejoiced from no longer being signed to a hellish corporate contract. No more slaving away behind a counter while his feet hurt and the hours wasted away.
Then the practical part of him coughed politely: you needed the money.
There was another message reading simply be there tonight. It was from Baekdu, obviously. Jimin simply hadn’t bothered to save the number. Cursing and turning off his phone fully, he left his mother’s messages unread. He could guess their contents without needing to check.
Come home, Jimin-ah.
Did you eat?
I’m sorry.
Part of him wished she would slap him outright. Those wounds hurt less, healed quicker- and were much more superficial than all this sentimental nonsense. Mothers. Absolutely deranged species; loving their sons even for their unlovable qualities.
Jimin pushed off the storefront and kept walking. Haejin beer hall was further downtown- if he wanted to make it there on time, he’d need to get going soon. A man with debts, enemies, and enough common sense to fill a spoon would go.
Jimin had recently become unemployed, however. This had put him in the mood to disappoint an employer.
FUCK CAPITALISM. If everyone wanted Park Jimin to be a rotten apple, who was he to disappoint the agricultural sector?
An hour from Dong-gu’s tired edge sat Haeundae strip; Busan’s vainglamorous trophy wife.
Busan’s biggest chaebol families kept houses here. Naturally. One couldn’t have the fifth-generation bloodsuckers sleeping in hotels like peasants. The homes sat behind high walls with trimmed pines, black gates, cameras, private guards, and driveways longer than the perimeter of Jimin’s entire house.
The Kim Mun family had a house here too.
Jimin stopped at the border between both worlds. It wasn’t exactly that there was some barbed-iron fence separating the two neighbourhoods with signs capped in bold, red letters: POOR PEOPLE, KEEP OUT, and yet, Jimin stood there with his fraying laundry bag and swollen cheek, feeling like a street mutt wandering into a showroom. Any second now, someone might shoo him away with a broom.
He stared at the black wall surrounding the Kim property.
Fucking Kim Mun.
Jimin knew, rationally, that all of the misfortunes having befallen him today weren’t directly caused by that smug bastard Kim Taehyung, but anger was a lot easier to direct at something individual over something institutional, and so he wanted nothing more in the moment than to fuck the posh cunt over.
An awful, awful idea came to him then.
“Would it kill me to be sensible for once?” Jimin muttered.
Probably, yes. But he’d messed things up to this extent already today- what could a little more irrevocable life-fuckery hurt?
And so off he went to vandalize a prince.
Rattle, rattle, rattle.
The little metal bead inside the spray can bounced happily up and down as Jimin shook it. He’d nicked it from an empty construction site just down the road. A gift from God to one of His least employable sons.
Kim Mun’s conglomerate empire was not going to collapse because Park Jimin spray-painted something onto a wall.
But ants in the kitchen were an annoyance too, and people still lost their fucking minds over them. Tonight, Jimin wanted to be an ant. For one hundredth of one percent of the pain in the ass Kim Mun had been to him, he wanted to be a pain in the ass back.
Spraying something on the outer wall would be equivalent to spitting on the lawn. He had to get inside Kim Taehyung’s home to insult the fucker directly.
Breaking into a chaebol’s house was, objectively speaking, an insane thing to do. Plain, textbook, dick-for-brains insanity.
Park Jimin, however, had never been the brightest student in class.
The front gate was naturally way too risky, and so Jimin circled around the back. The wall there was made of lacquered stone carved in overlapping decorative ridges. The sort of needlessly expensive architectural flourish that existed purely because rich people got bored of flat surfaces. On any other day, Jimin would have sneered at it. Tonight he could have kissed the mason responsible.
Jimin ran his hand over the grooves, tested one foothold, then another.
What do you think you’re doing?
Jimin snuffed the reasonable thought to death the moment both his feet started scaling.
He peeped the top of his head above the fence to get a sense of the land. It looked empty, exquisitely manicured, but in the dark it was hard to properly make out any dangers. If there were dogs running about, they’d alert to Jimin’s presence the second he entered.
Jimin whistled lowly, then chucked a stick over the fence. No bark. Good, then.
Jimin swung one leg over the fence’s edge, then dropped into the garden. His ankle twinged on landing, but not badly enough to hurt worse than the other injuries he was already sporting. He crouched behind a trimmed bush and waited.
Park Jimin, you are being an idiot. A bigger idiot than usual, I might add. The idiot-est of idiots to ever be deemed an idiot. Getting caught here will-
“Shush. If you talk so loudly, we’re gonna get caught,” Jimin reprimanded his common sense. Little fucker wouldn’t quiet down.
Usually, when Jimin did something reckless, the universe reacted instantly and with enthusiasm, eager to spite his bad karma. Cause, meet effect. Jimin waited for the ball to drop and an alarm to sound- anything to make him go back on this idea. A sweet little nudge nudge from the universe to remind him of his place, a rational voice in his ear screaming PARK JIMIN ARE YOU FUCKING INSANE, but nothing sounded. No floodlights or laserpointers or fucking sniperdrones.
Nothing happened as Jimin moved, save for a motion-detecting light that turned on automatically. It bloomed softly along the path, as if welcoming him home, showing him the way forward, encouraging the bad idea.
Jimin looked around again, baffled. That was all? This was Kim Mun state-of-the-art security? Entire newspapers had written puff pieces about the advanced private protection systems guarding these people, and Park Jimin had just dropped into the backyard like he was coming over for tea.
Well.
Don’t mind if I fucking do.
Jimin crept along the wall, holding the spray can against his chest. He spotted a tiny black dome tucked under the eaves, blinking red to indicate it was recording, then lifted one hand and gave a jaunty little wave.
Again, nothing happened.
Then he flipped it off.
“Cunt.”
Jimin crept toward the house and spotted a sliding terrace door overlooking a lagoon in the back garden. He tried the handle with two fingers, expecting resistance, but the door slid open easily.
Jimin stared dumbly into the dark room beyond.
“You people deserve to get robbed,” he said, scandalized. Whoever lived here was an idiot.
He nearly took off his shoes by habit before catching himself halfway bent over. What kind of trespassing criminal cared about manners? He wasn’t a housetrained dog, for gods sake. And so he lugged his muddy converse over the pristine marble flooring.
At first Jimin moved carefully, peeking around corners, listening for voices, keeping one hand around the spray can in his pocket like it was a weapon and not, in fact, red graffiti paint. But nothing creaked or moved or lit up. The house was dead quiet, and nothing was triggering as Jimin skulked about.
That helped settle the last nervous kick in his chest. Whoever lived here obviously wasn’t home. Seemed the chaebol bastard had forgotten to turn on the security system before flying back to Seoul.
Jimin’s lips split into a wide grin. “Scoooore.”
He forgot, briefly, that he was trespassing. If he got caught here, he was dead. Maybe not literally dead—though honestly, given the family in question, who knew—but certainly fucked in some life-ruining way.
Maybe the security system had scanned him upon entry, assessed him as too broke to be a meaningful threat. Maybe somewhere in Seoul a man in a suit was currently watching grainy CCTV footage of Park Jimin muddying expensive tile and thinking, fascinating. The lower classes really do just walk in. Like rats.
Jimin was a happy little rat.
“Helloooooo?” he stage-whispered into the empty dark, “Any princes home?”
No reply.
GLEE!
Jimin braved on, now openly grinning, the thrill of the break-in snowballing into something almost manic. He ran around the first floor like a feral child let loose in Lotte World after hours. The thrill of doing something he was not supposed to be doing and getting away with it rose up under his ribs until he felt tipsy-drunk.
Kim Mun was rich- there’d never been any doubt to that, but moving about a space they owned really hammed in just how fucking rich Korea’s top chaebol family really was.
Kim Taehyung’s house looked like Jimin might imagine a psychopath’s Pinterest board to look like..
One room bled into another, the design open-aired and spacious. To the left stretched a living area sunk half a level down, sectional sofas and low tables and art books too large to comfortably read. Beyond that was a dining room with a table long enough to seat twelve hostile relatives in formal silence. The kitchen was so sleek Jimin couldn’t immediately tell where the fridge was. A staircase floated up one side of the house, white oak steps fixed into the wall.
No clutter was littered about to indicate anyone lived in the space. It smelt clean, like a hospital, almost. Bleach-y.
Jimin jogged through the first floor grinning like a little freak, touching things he had no business touching.
The house had several smaller rooms branching off the main spaces. A study with built-in shelves and a massive desk positioned to face a view over the ocean. A lounge with low leather chairs and a bar tucked discreetly into the wall. A reading room, maybe- Jimin didn’t exactly know what a reading room required- a media room with a screen larger than Jimin’s bedroom wall. There was even a gym off one corridor and a poolhouse out by the backgarden.
“This is what people masturbate to in economics textbooks.”
Jimin found a smart-home panel in the wall. Tentatively, he turned a digital vial marked LIVING ROOM AMB. The ambient lighting in the dining room toggled until it shifted from warm gold to cool white.
“Oh my god,” Jimin breathed, delighted, “I am GOD.”
He spent an embarrassingly long time stressing the capabilities of Taehyung’s built-in amenities. Curtains were raised and lowered, raised and lowered, lowered and then raised again. Jimin changed the temperature of the room and was shocked to find how quickly he was getting toasty. From the kitchen, he could access the fireplace in the living room- from the living room, he could access the fridge’s internal camera and see what was inside.
The house had more functions that Jimin’s fucking smartphone. He’d have scoffed and made some meaningful commentary about class divide, but he was having way too much fun to be pessimistic.
After playing around with the smart features, Jimin continued his grand tour. He was having the time of his life. He had gone from this is an unspeakably bad idea to WHEEEE! in under ten minutes.
Further exploration drew him into a grand foyer.
Mounted above a sweeping staircase under a pool of recessed light, hung a giant portrait of Kim Taehyung. The portrait had captured him exactly as the public liked him: handsome enough to make people forgive capitalism on sight, hands folded politely in front of him, eyes gazing off into the distance.
Jimin stopped. Now that was prime fucking real estate to leave a message.
He took the spray can out of his pocket and shook it again.
Rattle, rattle, rattle.
A revolutionary ought to be thoughtful with his words. They should inspire the people; chant some great, moral cause, lighting hope in the hearts of millions. A slogan, perhaps. Something sharp and politically fueled. KIM MUN FEEDS ON BLOOD. YOUR FATHER BUILT THIS HOUSE WITH OTHER PEOPLE’S BONES. EAT SHIT, OLIGARCH
Jimin uncapped the spray can and wrote KIM TAEHYUNG HAS A TINY DICK. Then he took a step back and immediately erupted into a terrible, terrible giggle-fit.
“Oh my fucking god,” Jimin gasped. “That’s so bad.”
It was the kind of joke a twelve-year-old boy would carve into a school desk, and Jimin was proud of it with his entire chest. He added a little arrow downward for clarity’s sake.
A manifesto. Still grinning like an idiot, he wandered deeper into the house. He was starting to feel cocky, drunk on power. That was the dangerous part of joy, really. Especially cheap joy. Sudden joy. That was how people died, probably- or at least it was usually how they died in horror movies.
Sniff.
The clean smell he had noticed earlier seemed stronger now that he wasn’t cackling through it. The smell of a hospital corridor, of harsh chemicals used to sterilize large surfaces. Jimin’s brow furrowed. Perhaps the neat little prince was a bit of a clean freak? The lack of dust on any surface would certainly seem to indicate so.
The interior doors had locks, Jimin noted as well. Slim black panels beside each door, each with a fingerprint reader and a small lens. Some rooms had green lights, some had red.
Who locked half the rooms inside his own house where they lived alone?
Someone with dirty, dirty secrets, surely.
“Jeez. This really is like a psychopath’s house.” The joke came easily enough, but something in Jimin’s mood had begun to drop. A chill had settled over the house.
He turned back toward the entryway, and then a loud scream sounded from deeper within the estate. The sound cut through the house and vanished almost instantly, like someone had put a hand over it.
Jimin’s whole body went rigid.
One second he was a gleeful raccoon in a jewellery store, the next every stupid decision of the past hour lined up neatly in his brain and began pointing and shrieking.
You’re not alone, Jimin. Get out.
GET OUT.
“It’s a sex thing,” Jimin wheezed, backing himself up towards the front hall. His hands flew up to his ears to cover the sound. “It’s definitely a sex thing. Rich people are freaks, and there’s way too many locked rooms for there to not be a sex dungeon somewhere in here. He’s getting his balls stepped on. It’s a sex thing.”
Another scream, this one more bloodcurdling than the last.
Please be a sex thing.
Jimin moved quickly, no longer bouncing, no longer sightseeing. He reached the front door and strangled the handle, pulling it with all his weight.
Nothing budged.
Jimin stared at it in disbelief. “No, no, no, don’t do this. Don’t start this with me.”
BEEP! A red biometric panel glowed smugly beside the frame.
Locked.
Of course it was locked. Why would the front door work from the inside just because it had worked from the outside?
Jimin’s breath started going thin and hyper. “Open,” he hissed. “Open, you expensive, overengineered son of a bitch.”
A door did slam open, but it came from behind Jimin. Footsteps marched into the foyer.
A man appeared at the far end of the hallway.
Kim Taehyung in the flesh.
Face to face, he was even more beautiful than on screen. Tall and composed and well-contoured in the low light. His shirt sleeves were rolled back and the dark, well-tended locks slightly mussed. His face was so clean-cut and symmetrical it made immediate, furious sense why half the country had collectively dropped their panties for him.
Jimin’s breath caught. Then his eyes dropped.
Taehyung was dragging a man by the hair.
Or, well. Calling him a man would perhaps be optimistic. He’d been beaten so badly it didn’t appear he had many minutes left before turning into a corpse. Funny how it worked, that- from human with pronouns to an ‘it’ in a matter of seconds.
The blood running from his scalp had dripped into the man’s eyes, flooding the eyesockets that had probably already been blinded from swelling. He’d stopped screaming, probably on account of the huge fucking gash slit across the neck.
In the hand not fisted into the man’s hair, Taehyung was brandishing a knife. The cleave was red and sticky- it didn’t take a fucking genius to deduce who’d severed the poor guys vocal chords. The ruined man at his feet let out a small, bubbling noise. Death rattle. Choking on his own blood.
Taehyung stopped short the moment he spotted Jimin standing there like a deer in headlights.
The whole hallway went monstrously still.
Jimin could hear nothing but the blood surging in his own ears.
Their eyes met, and suddenly every survival instinct in his body detonated at once. He was prey and would be slaughtered if he did not outsmart the predator.
RUN.
Jimin fucking bolted.
Comments are much appreciated! We'll get to the good stuff next chapter, nyuhuhuhuhu.