A/N: I'd like to start by apologizing deeply for the ridiculously long delay. After a series of technological failures including a broken charger, a second broken charger, and complete loss of almost everything on my laptop due to a virus one of my "friends" intentionally put on my computer because my test scores this year were higher than hers, I am back and working on the next few chapters of Kkangpae as we speak.
I am also working on a few little tidbits for New Evolution, although inspiration for that is coming a liiittle too fast to keep up with everything.
I promise, updates will not take over six months in the future. Unless some deity really has it out for any technology I touch and something else breaks. In which case, I will go completely mad, and I doubt they'll let me near an internet connection and a word processor in the psych ward. But anyways, here is the fourth chapter of Kkangpae. Enjoy.
Mom was collapsed in a heap on the living room floor, tears streaming from her eyes. Her long black hair was matted and tangled from sleep. She was still in her robe. The wine-covered fabric stood out against the white carpet, and her tears left little dark circles in the fibers as they fell. I guess I wasn't stepping quite as lightly as I thought I had been; her head shot up and whipped around. She looked like a deer in the headlights. "Mommy, you'll hurt your neck like that. Don't turn around so fast."
She hastily wiped her eyes. She never liked it when daddy and I saw her upset. "Go back to your room, Eun-Ji. Go back to bed," she told me, voice cracking halfway through. She had been crying for a while.
I was eleven. I didn't know any better. The first thing I felt when I saw mommy crying was curiosity, not the fear it should have been. I stepped closer, blatantly ignoring what she told me to do. "Why are you crying, mommy?" I looked around and realized, a little later than I should have, that I could only hear mom's crying. "Where is Jongmaru?"
She cried harder.
The view of the woman on the floor faded out as the rose garden faded in. With tears already flowing down her cheeks, Jin-Ye curled into herself with a loud, shaky sob. She saw the world in front of her through a watery curtain of tears, all green leaves, pink stone, and white flowers, blurred so they were only masses of emerald, white, and rose, blending together in the fading sunlight.
She thought of how she must look right now, and immediately found herself disgusted with the picture that her mind conjured. Reduced to a quivering, sobbing heap on a bench in a lonely maze, with no trace of pride, dignity, or grace left; she cursed herself for this. She cursed herself for a lot of things today. She cursed herself for trusting Ami. She cursed herself for ever starting the club. She cursed herself for revealing her and her mother's positions to them (she knew it had to have been her fault somehow).
She cursed herself for waking up this morning.
Why was the world so unmerciful? Why couldn't fate simply allow her to die in her sleep, blissfully unaware of her own death? Why wouldn't it allow her peace, just this once?
She knew she would never know peace or bliss, though. Not after all she had seen and heard in her life. She knew how she was doomed to die: tied to a chair or otherwise restrained, staring into the darkness of a gun barrel. The last sight she would ever see would be the old black eyes of Kim Kangmin. The last sound she would ever heard would be the gunshot. And the same thing most likely applied to her mother, now.
Expect worse.
She flinched as the words were brought to the front of her mind. Jongmaru had died terribly. Those two simple words destroyed her fantasy of a quick death by a gun to her head. Seeing them in the clear, clean handwriting that she had envied for so long, hearing them in the cold voice of the dark-haired girl she'd considered such a close friend... that made it a thousand times worse.
Ami shouldn't have known who she really was. There was no reason for her to think that Hyun Jin-Ye was anyone but Hyun Jin-Ye, daughter of South Korean drug addicts, placed into the foster system after her parents' arrest, adopted by the childless widow of Isobe Ryuuji. She mixed Korean slang into her Japanese 'on accident'. She told people her parents dyed her hair to hide from the police better. She had a Seoul accent that citizens of Seoul believed without so much as a drop of doubt. There was no flaw in her act, no indiscrepancy in her story. For all intents and purposes, she was Hyun Jin-Ye.
But that didn't matter much now. Soon enough, she was sure, she'd be dead. She would be left in a dumpster or dropped in a river or something that would keep the police from believing it was the kkangpae. That wasn't how kkangpae operated. If there were bodies, you didn't find them; no one did. No one would ever suspect Kim Kangmin or the organization that backed him. She was on her own. She knew she was.
Not twenty-four hours ago, she had called Tokyo police and been met with laughter and accusation of lying and attention-seeking. She had called Seoul police next, and the answer was even worse. It was devastating.
"We apologize that we have neglected to inform you until now, miss, but your case has been dropped by the Seoul Police Force."
She had dropped the phone and gone into another attack, right there on the floor of Isobe Setsuka's kitchen, only hours after being released from the hospital for the same thing. The widow knew about her tendency to anxiety attacks, though, and had a private doctor on hand for whenever Jin-Ye had one.
The Korean girl had gone to school, but skipped her classes. She had dragged herself along to the rose maze she had been to a million times before, her favorite place on Ouran's campus, and sat on the bench in the center all day. There were soaked tissues everywhere. It was 5pm now. The fact that she'd sat crying on the bench, surrounded by roses and little scented tissues, for over eight hours now made her hate herself. The fact that she was still alive made her hate herself more.
Footsteps stopped her suicidal train of thought—and her breathing—in its tracks. The tears stopped immediately as her body locked up with panic. She held her breath and closed her eyes, making herself go limp. Maybe thugs were like bears or mountain lions; maybe playing dead would make them go away. God, she hoped it would.
The light footsteps confused her, but that did nothing to make her stop panicking. It could always be a female thug. They were rare, but kkangpae sometimes had them. Whoever they were, they kept moving towards her, as she sat and waited for death.
"Unnie!" an aggravated voice called.
Now she was more confused. What thug sent to murder called their soon-to-be victim unnie? She stayed tense and did not move, on edge even more so than she had been when the steps had started. They were playing mind games. They wanted to torture her before putting a bullet in her.
The voice grew more annoyed. "Damn it, Jin-Ye, I know you're here! I followed the tissue trail!"
Jin-Ye's slow, shallow breathing stopped and her eyes snapped open in time to catch sight of a mass of bleached hair rounding the corner into the clearing. She didn't know if she was disappointed or relieved.
Machi eyed the tissues all over the stone with a slight frown. "Are you going to pick those up?"
"Probably not."
"That's littering."
"I don't care."
"I never said you did." The heiress moved Jin-Ye's feet off the bench and plopped down beside her friend. The Korean glanced at her face, look back at the stone in the ground, and immediately shot into a sitting position when something registered.
The skin beneath the unruly hair was pale. There was no trace of the heavy white eye make up. The mop of hair had been brushed, and it look like some brave soul had even made an attempt at straightening it. She gasped. The face she was staring into was one she hadn't seen for over a year.
"Machi, your make up! Why—"
Her friend cut her off. "I find you sitting in a maze, alone, in the dark, crying, panicking, and littering, and you think the matter in dire need of addressing is the fact that I'm not wearing my make up today? Hyun Jin-Ye, you need to reorganize your priorities." The darker haired of the two couldn't help but smile at that. "And I didn't wear my make up today because... well, let's just say it was a promise I made to a snake."
"What, no apples?"
"Nope. Someone used them all for cake."
Jin-Ye laughed and wiped her face again. "Apple cake sounds disgusting." Machi nodded and grinned at the other girl.
She didn't like that grin. It always seemed to mean disaster for someone, usually the general population of Tokyo. The bright, cheerful tone didn't help. "I did something to make you mad," the blond chirped. Jin-Ye eyed her warily.
"... what is it?"
Machis's grin grew wider, showing more of her sparkling teeth. The look was practically predatory. She snatched up her friend's wrists and started dragging, drawing a high-pitched yelp. "C'mon, I'll show you!"
The tissues were left on the ground, forgotten along with the suicidal thoughts and depressing death scenarios, as the two girls tore off through the halls of Ouran. Heels clicked rapidly against marble floors, doors flew past, and the only other person to be found was Nekozawa, who they rushed by with nothing but a shouted greeting from Machi that made the dark older boy jump.
She couldn't help but find herself reminded of her first day at Ouran. It was almost two years ago now, but she remembered it as one of her dearest memories and the happiest day she could remember since she'd visited Berlin. She had stepped into a classroom in a country she barely knew, separated from all her family and friends, on the verge of tears for various reasons. And almost immediately, she was nearly bowled over by a hyperactive mass of wild black hair and sparkling brown eyes that spoke with a voice somewhere close to dog whistle frequency. She would come to know that bundle of excessive energy as Kentaro Machi, heiress to the Kentaro family fortune, and as one of the only allies this world would seemingly have to offer her.
"HI!" the overly-excited girl squealed. That voice was ear-grating. Even more, what with its owner attached to her chest and apparently unlikely to go anywhere any time soon. The arms wrapped tightly around Jin-Ye's waist seemed to be cutting off circulation.
Was this a punishment from God for some terrible wrong?
"My name is Kentaro Machi, heiress to Kentaro Cosme Cosmetics! I'm your new bestest friend!" the girl exclaimed. Jin-Ye stared in confusion. Did they not teach restraint in Japan? Were they really as barbaric here as so many back in Seoul had claimed?
Just as she prepared to start gnawing off limbs in an attempt at escape, the classroom doors shut loudly, and the sound of expensive dress shoes clicking against the floor sent every student to their seat, Machi included. Jin-Ye was left standing at the front of the class, staring dumbfounded at the space the heiress had occupied just seconds ago. The newcomer cleared his throat, and she glanced up to find her teacher standing over her.
"Er... hello," she managed, her mind still spinning.
"Good day, class," the teacher began, blatantly ignoring her greeting. "This is Hyun Jin-Ye. She is a new student from South Korea. She was recently adopted by Isobe Setsuka. She will be in our class from now on."
The class muttered an unenthusiastic greeting. Many of the students openly glared. It seems tensions between Koreans and Japanese didn't work just one way. She was alone here.
The teacher looked back to Jin-Ye, addressing her for the first time. "Miss Hyun, take your seat." His eyes were cold. An adult, a teacher, glaring unsympathetically at a lost child. The tensions were undoubtedly anything but one-sided.
She trudged to the only open seat in the classroom, which happened to be directly to the right of Kentaro Machi—the only ally she seemed to have, after the looks her peers had given her. Unwilling to be without companionship (overbearing or otherwise) in the country she did not know, she offered her self-proclaimed friend a tentative smile before lowering her eyes to her desk. They remained there.
Now, as the halls of the school she now knew so well blurred around her, she was beginning to question if the girl whose tanned hand was wrapped around her wrist in a vice grip truly was an ally after all. It could've been paranoia, but her sudden appearance in the garden and everything after... it gave her a sinking feeling. As if the end was finally here.
Perhaps Machi had figured out who Jin-Ye was. Perhaps she intended to betray her. Perhaps she was working with Ami.
Perhaps she was working with them.
