Role Model | Lee Taeyong

Eighteen ☻

|| NARRATOR ||

Mark is not a bad guy.

That's what he thinks. Every action of his is truly justifiable in the act of law. When he was younger, he wanted to become a lawyer. There was so much bad in the world that little Mark couldn't handle, so of course, his ambitious self was pressured through school top of his class just to get into law school.

And now he was throwing it all away, all for a girl that didn't even like him back. And the worst part is that he's not even aware of what he's doing. Poor boy. The detectives would think as they watch him try harder and harder to catch Narae.

I'm not a poor boy. Mark thinks to himself in response, clenching his fists. I'll show them how capable I am. I'll catch Narae and prove them all wrong. When he says proving them wrong, he mostly just meant Taeyong (and a little bit of Jaemin out of spite).

So this is it. He finally stood in front of the abandoned warehouse in the middle of the cold forest, his body shivering under his cold jacket in the rainy weather. All the sleepless nights and hacking finally led him up to this place. Narae and Jaemin's location, their home base.

To say it was hard to get to this point would be an understatement. In the process of two weeks, Mark had to learn how to hack into devices and accounts, along with IP addresses. He finally wiped away the tiredness from his place, lowly laughing at the excitement.

Taking off his shoes outside to avoid making creeks, he slowly reached to the side of the warehouse where an open window was, letting him crawl inside and falling to the floor in a thud.

Being wary of his noise level, he quickly searches the room for any sights of human life. Nothing much at first, except for a couple of graffiti art and rats that crawled away from him in groups. Nobody here. Mark thinks, which was sort of obvious. What sort of criminal would hide out on the first floor of an abandoned warehouse?

Mark slowly walked through the corridors of the empty building, his footsteps as light as a feather to make sure not a single soul knew he would be there. He soon came upon a flight of stairs which he walked on.

He was full on adrenaline that he never knew he had in him. Mark was a good boy, staying obedient to his mother's words and spending his entire high school experience studying for his exams.

He regretted it all. He never went to a single party, or done something crazy stupid like getting shit-faced drunk with his friends. He missed out on everything, and he hated that he let himself do that.

The chase with Narae wasn't just him trying to stop her, it was him grasping onto his last chance to enjoy his life while he's still young. While he's still a child. While he still has the energy. And it felt like he was levitating every time he managed to find himself doing something spontaneous and dangerous like this. Maybe catching a serial killer doesn't seem fun for a regular person, but for Mark, anything with Narae related to it was amusement for him.

Reaching for the door handle, Mark quietly makes his way through the second floor with his back against the wall and his left hand covering his mouth to muffle his breaths. In his pocket, the camera quietly recorded everything he came across just in case.

As he turned into a new corner, he was ready to pull out a flashlight until a distant voice was heard in the distance. Bingo. He thinks, his heartbeat exhilarating as he runs to hide, finding a spot behind the sofa where he couldn't be seen from the front.

The two voices start to reach closer and closer to him as he was starting to realize this wasn't the smartest idea. His original plan was to find her base and talk to her, try to reason with her. But with the many diverse arrays of weapons on the wall, he was starting to realize this wasn't a smart idea after all.