Dark Matter | JJK

5. An Uncritical Eye

From behind a graffiti-covered brick wall, the man peered at his son running jovially in circles around a transmitter pole looped with a web of black wires. Turning his head, he raised a hand to shield his eyes against the sunlight that caught the glass windows of the towering skyscrapers of downtown Seoul. They leered down at him – tall, gargantuan and unforgiving – as if reminding him mockingly that he would never, ever be able to taste the sky like they could.

Shaking his head, he retrieved a cigarette from the pack in his jeans pocket.

His wife was not going to like this.

They'd fight a lot over this, him and his wife – his seemingly incorrigible addiction to everything even scarcely containing tobacco. Their arguments were not limited to merely flinging verbal abuses shamelessly at each other; he would sometimes even lay a hand on her. Please stop, she would implore at his feet, for our son. For his sake. Please.

But how could he, when this deadly white roll of paper was his only sense of peace in the chaos that was his bankrupt dry-cleaning business and the general misery that came with being poor?

He looked at him, his son Woobin, the little boy who had the misfortune of calling a worthless imbecile of a man like him his father, and lifted the lighter to the cigarette pressed between his teeth.

A sharp slap to his wrist sent the lighter falling to the ground.

He turned towards the perpetrator with flaring nostrils and a sharp retort at the tip of his tongue, sure it was his wife. His jaw dropped at the sight before him.

The person was a foot taller than him, dressed in creased, full-sleeved overalls peppered with patches of dirty red and grey, like the brick wall behind him. Their face was veiled by a similar cloth, except for two slits through which a pair of hideous brown eyes looked back at him. In one of their gloved hands was a black revolver.

The intruder pointed the revolver at the man's forehead.

His son screamed first.

Before he could even think of running or defending himself in any other way, the trigger was pulled with a concise click. Not like a bullet being shot, but like a puzzle slotting into place. A sharp sting sprung at his temples, and he tumbled down the chasm of black.

☯

The first thing he did upon reaching his apartment was flop down on his bed face-first into his pillow. With his bag still strapped to his back, Jungkook clutched the plush cotton of his pillow and screamed. And kept screaming.

He half expected Seokjin hyung to burst into his room and yell at him to stop screaming in a voice louder than his. He didn't have to worry about that, though. The thing about being the youngest in his friends circle was that when everyone was entangled in the vines of their professional lives, he was still paddling through the tempest that was his last three years of university. Their shared apartment was devoid of life even at five in the evening, the rest of his six inmates still busy at their respective workplaces while he sulked within the confines of his room.

Begrudgingly, Jungkook detached himself from his lovable pillow and unstrapped his backpack, retrieving his phone from inside. Without paying much attention to the contacts glaring at him, he pressed a name at random and held the phone to his ear. It rang for a long while before a deep timbre sounded from the other end.

"Hello?"

"Are you busy?"

"Nah," said Taehyung, his words reaching his ears over a loud voice shouting commands in the background. It was common for the officers of the Korean Nation Police's Special Operations Unit to practice regular mock drills. "I'm on my five-minute break. How was first day of grad school?"