DEEP TISSUE DAMAGE PROLOGUE | A LOOKISM STORY
Deep Tissue Damage Masterlist
TW | Child Abandonment | Murder | Bullying
NOTE | Welcome to Deep Scar Tissue and it's band of misfits! I hope you enjoy :) feel free to leave any comments discussing the series.
SERIES | Prologue | Part One
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“Daddy, where are we going?” your wide eyes peer up at your fathers, the crease between his brows a familiar constant since your uncle had suddenly passed away a week earlier. His car rumbles to a stop before a foreboding building, its towering form a suffocating, pressing presence against your small mind.
Showers of rain patter against the closed windows, smashing and whirling together in the gale-force wind.
Goosebumps shoot across your skin as your father refuses to meet your eyes, his throat clearing awkwardly as his door pops open. Your heart patters faster and faster against your ribcage as he stalks over to the passenger side, another pop of the door echoing in the quiet night. He crouches to your level as he unclicks your seatbelt, his hands clasping your hips as he pulls you into a tight embrace.
“I love you, sweetheart. Remember that for me, will you?” he murmurs this into your hair before pressing a kiss against your forehead. “I love you too, Daddy,” you say brightly, arms clutching tightly around his middle. “Forever and ever.”
He gives you a watery smile, eyes alight with a pain you’re too young to notice. He places you onto the gravel of the road, had clasping yours as he leads you towards the foreboding building before you. “What’s this place, Daddy?” You ask, head tilting as he leads you toward a woman leaning against the fence blocking entrance to the building.
“You remember Miss Kim, don’t you?” He points toward the cloaked figure, who you instantly recognise after they pull the shadowing hood from their head. “Auntie!” you exclaim, rushing away from your father to hug the only other feminine figure in your life. Your dad had always told you it was just him (your mother had died giving birth to you), so it was a delight to have Miss Kim in your life. She was your role model.
Her exclamation of your name is reserved, almost… sad?
“Daddy, why are we here?” you ask again from Miss Kim’s arms, eyes flashing with confusion. He lets out a bitter sigh as he crouches before you, placing a gentle hand against your hair. “You can’t be with me anymore, sweetheart. I’m sorry. I love you so much, remember that.”
He rushes off after that, ignoring as Miss Kim hisses his name.
Wetness pools at your eyes, dripping fast down your cheeks as wails leave your lips. “Daddy! Where are you going? Daddy!” You scream against Miss Kim’s hold, watching your fathers retreating back, as he… abandons you.
“Daddy! Come back, please! I promise I’ll be good, I won’t steal the chocolate from the fridge anymore, I’ll be good, I promise. Come back! Please!” Sobs wrack your small form as you try to escape Miss Kim’s hold.
You notice as his shoulders quiver beneath the unrelenting rain, but he doesn’t look back, doesn’t acknowledge your pained sobs and enraged screams as he leaves you behind. As he abandons you.
You barely acknowledge as Miss Kim drags you through the gate, ignoring as she pleads with you to understand, that she’s sorry. When the pain becomes too much, your turn to rage, to that boiling, sizzling feeling rising in your stomach. Yet even that isn’t enough to plaster the utter agony ripping through psyche, so you build a towering, unbreakable wall around your emotions, settling it around yourself like a comfortable blanket, even with the cracks and fissures etched into the stone. Hiding your true emotions, settling a mask over your emotions.
Miss Kim sighs and looks at you sadly before pounding her knuckles against the towering arched door of the orphanage. Your very own father had abandoned you at an orphanage. He must have really hated you to have abandoned you here. His love and his lies were nothing to you now.
You steel yourself as Miss Kim hands the orphanage lady a large wad of cash before turning to you and giving you one last, haunted look. The klick of her shoes pattering against the flooding concrete pathway echoes in your mind, the sound dimming with each step she takes away from you until you can no longer hear her at all.
You flinch as Madam Choi circles your arm with her hand and drags you across the grounds for a sad try at a tour. The girls’ room is up the arching stairs towards the left; the room itself large and with a domed ceiling. Springy bunk beds line the two walls, the lumpy forms of sleeping girls peeking through the covers. A large, uncovered window lines the far wall, opposite the doorway, illuminating the room with dim rays of light echoing off the moon.
Madam Choi shoves you to a bottom bunk in the corner of the room, closest to the window, before abruptly leaving. It was then that you realised you’d only had a small pack of underwear and two changes of clothes left from your old life. Your toys, your books, everything… gone.
And so was your family. Despite still being alive, your father had all but become dead to you. You were now an orphan, and you’d act like it.
You unpack the little belongings you have in the small bedside table against the wall and the window before tucking yourself under the covers. You refuse to sob any more than you already have on this day, but you can’t help but let a few stray tears drip down your cheeks as you bury your head against the scratchy, hard pillow on your new bed. The sheets rub uncomfortably against your soft skin, unused to bad-quality sheets.
You feel betrayed, used, like a discarded, useless doll. He had chosen his job over you. You didn’t know exactly what he did, but it kept him away for days at a time, leaving you with that nasty babysitter. You should have know it would have ended like this.
Your father did not love you.
The other orphanage kids don’t like you. They hadn’t liked you since your first day here four years ago. They found you too bitter, your sarcasm too rancid, too mean.
You were a bitter mess of a pre-teen, and you hated everyone on sight. So, unsurprisingly, the orphanage kids loved to exclude you. To ridicule you. To hurt you.
Their parents had died, but yours had abandoned you. They were vicious with this information, drilling into your mind, again and again, that your father was an evil man who paid the Madam hush money to be rid of you.
And who would pay hush money but a gangster.
Your father was a filthy swine of a criminal, and you swore to hate him to your deathbed. Hearing the other children’s taunts and vicious quips about him only harden your resolve on your hatred for him.
You start to fight back, yet you’re still a scrawny little kid with gangly limbs and an increasing sense of anxiety. The girls who hate you just get the boys in the orphanage to attack you if you fight back.
The boy’s hits are always so much more painful, so much more humiliating. So, you learn to hide, to avoid, to run. You were exceedingly fast, faster than all the other girls, even the boys.
Madam Choi keeps drilling you about becoming an athlete one day. “You can go far with that speed,” she says one day, as you’re clutching an icepack to the darkening ring of black against your cheek. Madam Choi may try to help you with your injuries, but she doesn’t stop the injuries root cause. Her other wards.
So, one day, as if your body knew you could no longer sustain the constant injuries, the constant hurting, the constant agony (after one event had gone a bit too far and one of the boys had purposefully broken your arm), you vanished.
You could see the fist coming straight towards you. It was one of the bigger, beefier boys, and you knew it would hurt, that you’d be sleeping in agony for the next few days, your brittle bones too weak to handle yet more pain with your arm already in a sling.
Time seemed to slow to a still, the boys arm stopping, almost as if time had frozen, or twirled into slow-motion. You leap to the side, dodging the angry fist.
The meaty boy falls headfirst into the ground, his forehead smacking against the hard concrete floor. You had done it.
You had successfully escaped. No-one could catch you again, ever.
It feels almost… freeing.
You leave the orphanage for good just after you turn fourteen, running away to central Seoul where you’re forced to survive on the streets for over a month, stealing food and money before you’re able to secure a tiny room for yourself in a back alley, up in the highest floor of an abandoned, forgotten building. You hate the fact that you were acting like a criminal, like your ghastly father, but you keep telling yourself it’s for survival – to make you feel better about yourself. Over the first few months residing there, you make it as cozy and homely as possible, stealing thrown away furniture and ruffling through household rubbish. You find the best things from the rich neighbourhoods, dragging them down the back alleys of Seoul to get them into your home; a springy mattress, hemmed sheets, and even a lumpy pillow.
You find little decorations and accessories to spruce your room here and there, but it’s hard to find anything of worth. Despite this, you’ve only been looking for a few months. You’re sure more things will pop up over the next few years.
You’d even managed to get yourself enrolled into a local elementary school, with luck and a multitude of forged signatures and fake numbers. Unfortunately, you doubt you’d ever be able to get yourself a phone of your own. They were just too expensive, and you never wracked up enough cash to save as it always went on food and water, which made you antsy to grow up more and get a job of your own.
You sigh, raking a hand through your wayward strands as you walk through the dodgy turf of backstreet Seoul. You need to stop stressing about that damn phone, you were almost certain you could survive without one.
A startled gasp escapes your lips as you smack straight into a wall of solid muscle. You fall backwards onto your ass, the fall winding you as you glance up.
Dark, menacing black eyes peer back into yours, terrifying and blank. You feel shivers wrack across your spine, eyes flinty and anxious as he stares you down. Terror rises in your throat, your anxiety shouting and bellowing behind your erected mental walls, warning you of his terrifying spectre hands reaching into your soul to tear it to bits.
He’s a terrifying, massive teenager who wears a sleek leather jacket, his hair slicked back carelessly behind his ears while a large, daunting axe is clutch tightly in his right hand.
“Ah-sorry. I didn’t see you,” you apologise, hand rubbing at the bruise forming against your forehead. You frown. “Damn, what are you made out of, steel?” you mutter as you rise to your feet. You could honestly use being that strong and steady, especially out here, alone and living by yourself in an abandoned dump.
“What are they feeding you?” you demand, coming closer to peer up at him, ignoring the axe still clenched in his hand. The last thing you care about is dying, and you doubt this steel bugger could even hit you anyway.
You know. Other people have tired over these past months, on many occasions. Despite how much you’d tried to avoid the criminal underground of this city, it keeps following behind you, every step of the way. It’s like there’s no escaping that desecrate father of yours. It’s irritating.
A scatter of air escapes his lips, his eyebrow rising in what almost seems like surprise before it’s masked behind blankness. “Meat.” He says it simply, plainly.
“Huh.” You cross your arms across your chest. “No veggies? You should really eat your veggies you know, it could stunt your growth otherwise.” You pause after that, eyes raking up his towering form. You bring a finger to your bottom lip, tapping it against the plumpness as you ponder. “Though it doesn’t look like that applies to you,” you mutter distractedly.
A chuckle escapes his lips, surprising you- surprising himself, it seems like. “What type of meat anyway? How do I get a steel body like that?” You voice is almost demanding now, eyes peering into his. He’s looking at you strangely, as if he’s never before seen someone like you before, not scared of his axe or him.
He’s about to open his mouth, but a dark, menacing look flashes across his dark eyes. His axe hand slams down so suddenly and so quickly, you weren’t sure you could have dodged it even if it was meant for you.
You hear the splatter and gurgle of blood behind you, the slimy, warm liquid dripping into your hair as you swivel away. Another criminal comes at you out of nowhere, twice your size with twice the muscle mass.
His fist comes down with full force, aiming for your head – but you dodge.
That familiar, swirling energy deep in your stomach blurs to life in an inferno, and your feet move quicker than humanly possible.
An axe slams down on the criminal.
You send leather boy a sheepish smile, trying to ignore the wild, intrigued grin he’s shooting you. You’re not sure you like that look. You step back, “Gotta run. See you,” you give him a salute before using your inferno of energy to disappear like a flash into the night.
You don’t meet the strange man again until a few years later.
Along with your band of misfits.
