everyone around him dies

Part 4

It was tricky being homeless. Especially being a homeless child. Most especially being two homeless children.

It simply wasn't an option to return to their uncle's apartment. If he died from his injury, the law would have a few words to say to Cale. If he survived, he was sure to make sure neither twin could ever threaten his well being again.

It was lucky they'd managed to do a certain amount of preparation for this possibility. In the nearly two years they'd spent with their uncle, they'd scraped and saved and scammed and hidden little nests for them to rest all over town.

Cale had taken notice of the normal haunts for homeless adults and they took great pains to avoid those areas. In an ideal world, Cale could trust in homeless adults to show them the ropes and support them in the early stages of their transition. And there were surely plenty of individuals within that group who would do just that. Most adults had at least some compassion for children.

However even if the vast majority of them were upstanding folks who were merely down on their luck, if there was even one among them who had ill-intentions for the twins it would be game-over. Besides, the compassion of strangers was a limited thing. It was easy to be kind to a child for perhaps a day, maybe two, but most people felt drained from there and behaved accordingly.

In short, Cale's trust in humans as a whole was at an absolute low. He was always a bit cynical by nature but the risky tight-rope that he lived his second life on was thinning into a mere thread.

He definitely didn't want to compete for limited resources with individuals who were bigger and stronger.

But this meant that the twins had to avoid a community who was sure to have resources, reliable information, and areas that were better suited to homeless living.

The situation couldn't last but they were going to make the best of the limited advantages they could grasp hold of. One was that they could sneak into places that could only possibly fit children, so it allowed for a certain amount of peace when they slept at night. Between the two of them, they had a shared sleeping bag that they'd saved up a significant sum to purchase, three sets of clothes, a humble amount in savings, and three dumpsters that they frequented for their meals.

Altogether, their lives hadn't changed as much as they thought. It was actually far more comfortable to sleep in a cramped nook behind a dumpster than it was to sleep next to the terrifying menace their uncle had proved to be.

That peace wasn't to last.

Time was the enemy.

They had run away from home in the final vestiges of summer as autumn gently persuaded the trees to soften their grasp upon leaves that were sure to rain colorfully onto the city below.

They couldn't survive the winter like this. They'd hardly survived even with the crappy heating of their uncle's tiny apartment. Seoul snowed in the winter, going well below zero at night and was bitingly cold even during the day.

They would die.

Cale didn't have a solution for that problem yet though. He didn't have the time. They had to abandon a significant amount of their supplies in the apartment with that monster and so he had his hands full just keeping them warm and fed every day while carefully avoiding being spotted by the authorities and the usual dangers that were presented merely by being Roksu's brother. Cale would definitely need to solve the problems presented by the oncoming winter but that would just have to wait until tomorrow.

Tomorrow stretched on for a few weeks and it wasn't until he glanced at Roksu and spotted the boy shiver that he knew he'd waited too long. Wrapping his arm casually around Roksu's shoulders to share body warmth, Cale searched the street for something affordable and warm. Even just a hotcake from a vendor would be enough.