If Only You Knew || Hierarchy

Prologue: Early Expiration

Kang Inha is dead.

He lays motionlessly on the frost-coated ground, his skin pale, tinged with blue, and splotched with crimson. A sea of red floods from underneath him, the color infesting the pure bed of snow he rests on. One of his legs is bent at an unnatural angle, the other nearly completely removed. His face, usually painted with a soft smile, would now permanently be contorted into a look of pure terror.

She mimics his prone form, minus the blood. Her eyes are peeled back, wide and glossy, but not a single tear escapes. Shame burns her from within, because, even if she were to fall to her knees weeping, those tears would not be for the poor deceased, but rather for her muddled future.

Guilt comes shortly after, but it is misplaced, she knows. So, she takes the pricks to her heart as a chance to flee. She tightens her grip on her backpack, gives the dead boy one last glance, one brimming with pity but lacking any remorse, and turns her back on the scene that could ruin her carefully planned life, fully intending to pretend nothing had transpired. It will all be fine, she reassures herself. The only other eye-witness, after all, is laying dead on the pavement.

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

She tells no one when she comes home, her lips sealed just as she had practiced on the way back. She gives her fretting mother, who loiters anxiously near the front door, a poorly constructed excuse, 'I was out with Hera and Jae-yi.' (at 1 am?) but her mom takes it with stride. Her dad waits for her deeper in their home, he sits at the dinner table with his laptop in front of him, open to a document she was sure he hadn't even begun to read. He, much like her mother, is easily placated with a kiss on the cheek and the same excuse.

They both give her weary smiles as she climbs up to her room, neither saying anything of the red that rims her skirt and freckles her pristine white shirt.

She comes down half an hour later, after a quick shower and a pep-talk in the mirror. She sits on the couch and turns on the TV, flipping through the channels. Once she lands on the news channel, she throws the remote to the side, and sinks deeper into the couch. Her hands now sit in the middle of her lap, fidgeting anxiously.

That night nothing is said about a scholarship kid found dead in an alleyway.