The Restraining Order
She must have based the filing on yesterday's little visit—the one that ended with him being hauled off to the station.
Jiyoon noona had ended up shouldering a considerable amount of trouble over all this, and I couldn't help feeling extra guilty about it.
Dayeon noona seemed to be thinking along the same lines I was. Guilt kept spilling out of her in one worried message after another.
Seeing Jiyoon noona like this—so thoroughly, unshakably professional—I felt like I might fall for her all over again.
Oh... that was a little embarrassing.
She'd clearly only ducked in to let us know about the restraining order. There was no other reason she'd vanish again that quickly.
"We should buy unnie something good to eat, right?"
Dayeon noona, sitting beside me, muttered it under her breath like she had no intention of just letting this go.
"Well, she did say she's going to be slammed for a while. Once that busy stretch is over, I bet she'd love it if we treated her to something nice."
Anything tastes good after a long grind—but if it came from a little sister who'd gone out of her way to show she cared, it would taste even better.
"I should think about where to take her."
She pulled out her phone and plunged into a storm of searching. I watched her for a moment, then stretched until my back popped and got to work myself. Once she latched onto something, she had a habit of sinking into it completely—which meant I was about to lose my conversation partner for a while.
It was about time I got Jiyoon noona's video off the ground. There was also that quest I'd received a while back—the one that told me to hit ten thousand views—and I figured I ought to start closing in on it.
"Hmm..."
The problem was, she'd been so busy lately that she clearly wouldn't have time to film anything in the immediate future. For now, I attached the finished proposal to an email and sent it off, then dropped her a separate text asking her to look it over whenever she had a minute.
"Noona, any more videos that need editing?"
"Hm? A vlog went up midweek, so there's nothing else that really needs to go up."
There was still one video that hadn't been fully polished—but it had originally been slated for this week, then gotten bumped for the vlog, which meant it wouldn't go up until next week at the earliest. No reason to rush the edit now.
"Well. Guess I should at least finish this one, then."
If I had nothing else to do, wrapping this up was the only real option. That said, it was a video with nothing left but the final touches, so it was done in under ten minutes whether I liked it or not.
"...I'm bored."
"You're all done? How about heading home to rest?"
If there was no work left, there was no real reason to stay at the office, so it wasn't a bad suggestion. The catch, though—
"There's nothing to do at home either."
That was the problem. If anything, home had even less to offer. At least here I had Dayeon noona or Eunchae to talk to. Home had nothing. Nothing but my piece-of-junk computer.
"Hmm. Then should we all grab lunch?"
It was drifting toward midday anyway.
"Sure. Noona, you hungry?"
"Yeah, a little. I skipped breakfast today."
If she'd skipped breakfast, she wasn't "a little" hungry—she had to be starving, right? I would never understand skinny women.
"Payday's coming up. Anything you want to do, Dohyun?"
Given that I'd been working part-time at a convenience store until just recently, the paycheck I was about to receive would almost certainly be the biggest of my life. Of course, once Jiyoon noona sent over the five-million-won signing fee, that would take the crown for the largest sum I'd ever received in a single payment.
"Dunno. Nothing in particular."
Even when she asked what I planned to spend my paycheck on, I came up empty. Aside from buying stats, I'd never actually thought about what else I'd do with the money, so I didn't have a decent answer.
"How about meeting up with your friends for the first time in a while? Grab something good to eat, just kill some time together?"
"Friends, huh..."
I'd had a few guys I was close with in high school, and it wasn't like the group chat had disappeared—but I hadn't actually reached out in a long time. Part of me wondered if it was even right to ask them to hang out at this point.
"Maybe I should try messaging them."
They were still chatting in there from time to time, and I hadn't left a group I could have walked away from whenever I wanted. That had to mean some leftover attachment to those friendships was still hanging on. I decided to give it a shot.
"Good thinking. High school friends last a lifetime, you know. Look at me—Eunchae and I even ended up working together."
Well. The Dayeon-and-Eunchae situation was a bit of a special case.
While Dayeon and Dohyun traded idle conversation—
"Aaaagh! Let go! I said let go of me!"
Park Woojin was catching a nap somewhere around the police station, dreaming that zombies were chasing him.
"GRAAAAGH...!!"
"Oh, for—would you keep it down already?!"
Eventually an officer snapped, and the shout jerked him awake. He'd look around, sag with relief, and then the whole cycle would start over again.
"Hhk—officer, please... I was wrong about everything, so please, just do something...!"
Park Woojin kept babbling about the zombie dreams and begging someone to fix it. The officer could only stare.
"What exactly do you expect me to do about something that happens in a dream?"
The sight of a full-grown adult blubbering snot and tears, pleading with someone to do something about his nightmares, was a spectacle unto itself. It would have been a spectacle coming from anyone. Coming from a criminal, it was just repulsive.
I hope he keeps getting tormented until he wastes away to nothing.
The officer kept his face carefully blank, but inwardly he meant every word. He genuinely hoped Park Woojin would go on having those dreams until there was nothing left of him. A criminal the law couldn't quite sink its teeth into, wasting away from his own nightmares—for the victims, that could only be a very good thing.
"Anyway, the request to hold you was denied, so go home. Come back when you get a summons."
Suspecting he was on something, they'd asked to keep him in custody for questioning. The request had been thrown out. A Park Woojin in his right mind would have bolted from the station in delight.
"N-no, please, let me stay here...! If I go somewhere without people I don't think I can take it...!"
The zombies chasing him in the dream had been hideously real. Not movie-real—genuinely rotting, flesh hanging off them in grotesque strips, hundreds of corpses pounding after him. Anyone would have come apart under that.
"I said get out!"
But the officers were busy, and they had no reason to keep looking at a criminal they didn't need to see. They certainly had no intention of feeling sorry for him.
"P-please—please...!"
And so a thoroughly bizarre scene unfolded: a criminal begging to be allowed to stay in a police station, and the police throwing him out of it.
"Aaaagh—aaaaagh...!"
Even outside, the hallucinations wouldn't let go. Park Woojin clapped his hands over his eyes and tore around like a madman, screaming—
"The hell is this lunatic...?!"
"Kyaa! What are you doing?!"
—and with every outburst, the list of things he could be charged with only looked more likely to grow. The trauma had its claws in him so deep he felt like he was losing his mind, and he couldn't find a single way out. His sanity was crumbling by the minute.
"Ghhk—ahh—ukh...!"
He ran and ran like a man possessed, and when Park Woojin finally came back to himself, he was surrounded.
"This crazy bastard hits people and doesn't even apologize?"
A ring of very large, very hyungnim-looking men had closed in around him.
"W-w-what's... what's going on..."
"Well now. How we gonna handle this, huh?"
Tattooed hulks hemming him in on every side. It was every bit as terrifying as the zombies from the dream.
"AAAAAGH! I'm sorry, I'm sorry...! Just let me go...! I-it was the zombies, I—!"
"Zombies? What the hell is this psycho saying."
"You callin' us zombies right now?"
They heard whatever they felt like hearing, and punctuated it by shoving his shoulders.
"I-I'm sorry...! I'm sorry...!"
Park Woojin, a textbook case of preying on the weak and groveling before the strong, dropped to his knees and apologized.
"Heh. You think droppin' those cheap-ass knees of yours fixes everything?"
WHAM!
One of them snickered and simply kicked him.
"Gahhk...!"
"Count yourself lucky. We're goin' easy 'cause we're right in front of the station."
The station being nearby, they clearly had no interest in kicking up a real scene. That didn't mean they were letting him walk. They took turns putting a boot into him, one after another, cackling the whole time.
"Man, kids these days got no manners. No manners at all."
"Let's go, hyungnim."
"Yeah. Better split before the cops show."
"Hey. You know what happens if you go runnin' to the cops, right?"
They finished with the threat, and then they were gone.
"Fuck...! Why—why do I have to... *cough*... take this shit...!"
It never once occurred to him that he had threatened other people the same way. All he could think was how unfair it was that someone had threatened him. He lay on the pavement, tears streaming down his face.
"...What's with that psycho..."
People only looked down at him with open contempt, and walked on by.