To See The Moon

Dance

     Waking up on a classroom desk in the middle of school was nothing compared to the feeling of waking up on a broken street in the dead of night after being knocked out by an assassin, whose skills were clearly in a league of its own.

     Everything hurt. Hyunjin still felt the world spin around him as he slowly got to his feet. He couldn't have been out for long but the moon in the Alley sky told him that night had fallen.

     Hyunjin put a finger to his cheek and flinched. It was definitely bruised and throbbed like nothing else. Hyunjin knew he'd have to patch himself up to the best of his ability before school started.

     Hyunjin cautiously made his way through the Alley, feeling like he was going to be jumped at every corner. Silence cloaked the air but that only made it more terrifying, as if something or someone was always hiding in wait.

     Hyunjin tried to process what had happened. He had been ambushed by an enemy. A Bulsong enemy. How was he still alive? In fact, the assassin had only removed his knife after seeing Hyunjin's Kalarc tattoo. None of it made sense.

     Those monster eyes, that aura of bloodlust. Hyunjin felt tremors when he thought of who exactly could fix that description. No- he would have been dead for sure if he had been up against who he thought it was.

     But he shouldn't be fretting over it. He was alive. But he had failed on the job. He wouldn't be getting his pay and that was the greatest worry for Hyunjin.

     He made it to his apartment with difficulty. It was an old, one-room compartment in one of the Alley streets but it was the only place Hyunjin could afford when he had... other expenses. Entering the dark room, Hyunjin quickly sought the first aid kit. It wasn't like he was a stranger to injury. Getting hurt was a learning process when it came to working in the Alley. Hyunjin learned to be effective with what he had and was more than capable of fixing his own injuries. Consulting a doctor meant having to think up a good lie, and hardly any lie seemed suitable enough for the safe streets of Nila.

     Hyunjin gritted his teeth against the pain as he used alcohol to clean up the bruising and patched it up with a bandaid. He rubbed some oil on his back to ease its soreness from being slammed against a wall. He also boiled up some water to help with his splitting headache.

     He sat on his bed for a long time, waiting for the pain to ebb. Once the throbbing of his head went away and his bruise only hurt to touch, Hyunjin realized his exhaustion had also slipped away with the pain. He couldn't sleep anymore.

     So he decided to do what he usually did to deal with a hard day.

     The weak lightbulb flickered on in the large vacant space on the bottom floor. It wasn't finished, the floors pure concrete, age-old stains covering the walls, dust particles and rubble mattering the room. Nobody lived here, so Hyunjin had claimed it for his own.

     Hyunjin pulled up a playlist on his phone and set it on the floor. He positioned himself in the middle of the space and then hit play.

     Music filled the room. As the notes swept the room up, Hyunjin felt his body moving along with them.

     For those ten minutes, he forgot the soreness of his body. No limits existed when Hyunjin was moving with the music. He could do anything, he could be anything.

     Sometimes, Hyunjin researched dance moves and choreographies when he got his hands on a laptop and applied them to whatever beat the music had. But most of the time, there were no moves to follow. Hyunjin went with the flow, letting his hands do what they saw fitting, letting his feet navigate themselves across the empty space. It was a small room but Hyunjin felt like he could go anywhere.