𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐆𝐈𝐑𝐋 𝐎𝐅 𝐀 𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐔𝐒𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐄𝐕𝐈𝐋𝐒 // 𝑻𝑾𝑶𝑬 //

| 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐞

· · ─────── ⋞··⋟ ─────── · ·

In the darkness, her parents are still alive. Mom has her sit down at their kitchen table to brush her black hair into pigtails, while Dad stands over the gas stove and cooks breakfast.

Sooyoung is five years old. It's her first day of school and she can't be more excited about it. Her heart swells so big with the joy of anticipation, that it's almost like it'll break through her ribcage at any moment. And it's that feeling...

A sudden pain erupts from her chest—it drags her away from the comforts of darkness—and forces her to see the truth.

She is not five years old anymore.

Her mother never got to be there on her first day of school.

It was her father who ironed out the wrinkles of her school uniform and prepped her boxed meals just the night before. He had to get everything ready and wake her up so early in the morning, it was still dark outside as they made their way over to their neighbor's house.

Sooyoung can still remember feeling so nervous. There was nothing exciting about having to go inside someone else's house, with a family she knew so little of, all because her father couldn't stay. He had a job to get to.

It broke his heart the same way it broke hers not having him be the one to drop her off at school on her first day, and all the following days after, too, for that matter.

But, at least, Mr. Yu Dukhoon and Mrs. Hwang Jinsook were good people. They had three kids of their own, around her age so she didn't feel that deserted at school. It could even be said that their eldest daughter, Euijeong, considered Sooyoung like a little sister. The two had quickly become good friends before the funeral happened—before Sooyoung never saw her, or that family, again.

Sooyoung didn't realize how much she missed them, until she wakes up on a hospital bed.

The sunlight coming through the opened curtains of the large window is way too bright. (Blinding.) Her eyes have a hard time adjusting to it but she's in no state to get up from the bed, much less walk across the room to close the curtains. She has little choice so she bears the light hitting her face just fine a few minutes later.

A tray of food a nurse must've brought for her sits untouched on her blanketed lap. Her stomach growls at the smell of the hot porridge and the strong citrus scent of the peeled orange. An unopened carton pint of nonfat milk set between the two white plates for her to drink.

For the first time in almost a decade, she thinks back on and craves Mrs. Hwang's cooking. Most specifically, her favorite breakfast plate full of kimchi, rolled omelets, and fried rice.

Her nose wrinkles in distaste, staring at the heap of bland oatmeal in the bowl without any intention of dipping her spoon in it, but her appetite's been provoked already.

Food is food, she thinks, as she calms the rumbling of her stomach down with a touch of her hand over it while she dips the spoon into the bowl at last. Wincing with a sudden breath in, her fingers pass over the aftermath of the gunshot wound.

The machine beeping fastens, incessant in alarming everyone who isn't in the room with her to barge inside and check the sudden increase of her heart rate. Sooyoung goes still, quickly gulping down the bite of food in her mouth. She hopes for her heartbeat to settle before the chills starting to run the length of her arms end up spiking her anxiety even worse.

...She almost died.

She really did want that...

She unfreezes, quickly eating more oatmeal while it's still warm, and takes the few wires stuck to her chest off, to silence the machine before any of the nurses come in.