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it is said that the devil is a wretched looking thing. it is an amalgamation of hideous beasts paired with cloven hooves and a snaking tail. if you are unfortunate enough, the devil will come to you in the dark of night for the sale of your soul. it will hand you a knife and instruct you to sign in blood, and it will smack its lips at the sight of it.

park jeongho thinks he saw the devil. he’d caught a glimpse of its horns on the beach, heard the clop of its hooves on the wooden floor of his study. there is an urban legend around these parts, how park jeonghui had met with the devil like a friend, had freely received its blade and cut himself on it. for his bravery and camaraderie, he’d been rewarded generously, had received enough wealth to last him for generations to come. though park jeongho shares his name and his blood—first son of the first son—disappointingly, he doesn’t know if he can stomach the sight of it.

but what of park jeonghun?

second son of the second son. the night he first saw the devil, he had searched jeonghun’s eyes and came up empty. he had called out to him in the dark of night but the latter had meandered off, deaf to his intercession. jeonghun looks fine now. they’re sitting in silence, the park heir watching his cousin from the corner of his eyes as the latter shovels food into his bowl. he gives no indication of having met the devil, no darting eyes and beaded sweat that jeongho had suffered the night prior. still. jeonghun may not be the heir, but he is still a park. he still has jeonghui’s blood.

“where did you head off to? the night before.” he starts off casual, busies himself with peeling meat off the bone and he takes a bite. jeongho glances at him briefly then away to the dishes before them. he scoops another piece into his bowl as he swallows his mouthful. “i saw you walking out in the middle of the night.”

HOLD THE DOOR ( day 3 ) ft. @vitalssigns's park jeonghun

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SUPERCUT / hyein:

( … ) "do you want me to get on my knees and beg forgiveness?" she asks a bit sardonically, a smile threatening to form as she speaks. "it won't solve anything or answer anything, but you know, the sight might make you feel a little better. you can even humiliate me in front of the whole town if you want to get even. i'll take the punishment."

in some ways, he gets what he’s owed. they’re standing shoulder to shoulder and in this dim light, the pillars of the ceremony hall can sometimes feel like two columns of a wedding arch. one on her left, another on his right. hyein’s voice is soft and timid, and she steals anxious glances at him when she thinks he’s not looking. jeongho catches them all. here, at this makeshift altar, she trades wedding vows for strategies. skips the sweet nothings and races towards discussing the politics of this town that they had each bled for in their own way.

hyein would’ve made a fine wife, regardless of whether she’s dressed in black or white.

“you’re right,” he concedes, “the economy will fall.” jeongho can guess this much. the nams cashing out would be catastrophic for a portion of the townsfolk of goero, no doubt. but there comes a time when the population has grown enough that it becomes necessary to consider the sacrifice of a few for the sake of the many. park, yang, nam, choi. goero is overpopulated to the point of suffocation. jeongho balances his cigarette in his left hand, takes a drag and blows. “but goero will exist as long as the parks hold the land. in due time, the economy will rebuild as it inherently does. the old must make way for the new. the fishery has been suffering for years now,” he remarks, points the tip of his cigarette towards her as he catches her stare, “…as has your timber business.”

somewhere is a priest signalling for a groom to turn to his bride. here, jeongho pivots to face her, rests his weight against the pillar beside him. he slips a hand in his pocket and curls the other arm towards him, as if to smoke. on his finger, the gold band gleams. yang hyein hasn’t changed at all, he learns. she’s that same girl he proposed to, the same girl he bedded, frozen in time. “you’re not going to let that happen, are you?” he deduces, lips curling in amusement and he speaks with conviction, “you’ll control the nam girl. snatch her from right under jieum’s hold. indoctrinate her with your… christian beliefs. do some good in this world. and maybe it’ll be enough for your god to forgive you for all the ways you’ve wronged others.” jeongho watches her expression carefully, takes a puff from his cigarette and exhales the smoke into the cold air between them. “i concede. despite the man my father is, i think you’ll win.”

“you’re just missing one thing: what makes you so sure she’ll inherit the land?” yang hyein is the same girl that made the mistake of leaving him at the altar. nine years on and goero has since grown to fill the shape of her. this version of hyein is still there, pacing behind those doors. but jeongho’s not on the stage anymore, waiting for her to walk down the aisle. the world revolves in hyein’s absence. nam chunja will hand her land over to the parks— it’s done. “you think things stay the same when you’ve left them out of your sight. it’s careless.” jeongho drops his cigarette to the ground and crushes it under his shoe. he pulls his weight from the pillar, brushes his shoulder and tugs at the hem of his jacket to straighten his suit. “you don’t need to beg,” there’s a smile on lips that doesn’t quite reach his eyes, “it’s not me you’re seeking forgiveness from.”

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INTO THE WOODS / jiyul:

( … ) “If it’s been closed off for an ongoing investigation, then what are you doing out here?” Jiyul lets his head tip in thought as he watches Jeongho fidget with his jacket and his posture. He doesn’t fit right between the trees. He doesn’t belong out here. Jiyul’s nearly angry about it. “Interning as a cop?” He asks it just to point to the absurdity of the situation. About the concept of Jeongho out here and alone surveying a square of woods. “I’m always loitering around here. He won’t be all that surprised. But hey, then I’d guess you’d let him know that you were out here, too.” This is a simple gamble to gauge whether or not Jeongho thinks he’s supposed to be in the forest or not, and he watches his face with interest to see if it shifts. Almost like a game.

nothing good ever comes from this side of the woods. between the trees, the wind blows cold and damp, and it’s salty from the seawater that the breeze drags in. it leaves the ground perpetually wet, softens the mud so it sticks onto one’s shoe. and there’s all this blood, red and viscous, coating his fingers like a stubborn stain.

jiyul’s right: jeongho doesn’t belong in these woods. he is a man who values order above all else, will hardly forgive a strand of hair falling out of place. now there’s that coat of sweat gathering under his shirt and he grimaces at the feel of it. he hooks his fingers around the knot in his tie, pulls it impatiently down to loosen the collar. the air is so dense, he feels like he could choke.

park jeongho doesn’t belong in these woods. but park jeongho belongs in goero, more than jiyul ever will. and the forest is goero’s before the forest was ever jiyul’s.

“as council chairman, i’m here on a need to know basis,” there is a brief pause sandwiched between his response and jiyul’s spiel and he remains impassive with his reply, knows better than to react to jiyul’s derision. so where does this leave jiyul? the man has a misguided affinity for the forest, but make no mistake: the land will always belong to the parks. and so will the chois, the shins, and eventually, all the people living on it. jeongho takes his suit jacket off, folds it neatly and hangs it over his arm. hands in his pockets, he glances at jiyul from beneath his brow, a suggestive, “but if you’re loitering around here often then i suppose you were here when cho jiyeon went missing in these woods.”

where does this leave jiyul? if not for the forest. if not, too, with the baes who are so unlike him, jihyuk as the subservient buffoon who had so willingly relinquished yang’s hand in marriage at jeongho’s behest. there’s the smirk to betray his apathy, a glimpse of humour flashing across his features. “if i run my testimony to chief inspector choi and you run yours, which do you think he’ll bite?”

locked out. cast aside. if you don’t train a dog, it will bark as it pleases. sooner or later, it’ll drive you mad enough that you’ll be left with no choice but to put it down. jeongho, for one, is tired of bae’s mutt. “i overestimated you, jiyul. disappointment as you are, i had assumed that you would at least know when to pick your battles.” bae jiyul will have nothing, jeongho decides. the park heir will see to it personally. with the decision final, he finds no more use of the conversation and so, continues on his path towards goero, past jiyul. as he crosses the latter, he places a patronising palm on the bae son’s shoulder, “we wouldn’t want the baes to be cut down simply because they failed to discipline their son, now would we?” a pursed smile, a dismissive pat, and he strides off.

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SUPERCUT / hyein:

( … ) "you may just want to stay out of his line of sight for a while," she takes another drag and forces her gaze back out to the lackluster view of the town. "sorry," she says almost like an afterthought.

let him tell you about the deal he made with the devil. how he traded in his soul for the devil’s wit. the devil had come to him in the dark, as he oft does— had offered him the chance for sacrilegious deliverance in exchange for his god ordained free will, and jeongho had taken it. and what use did he have for his soul? park jeongho, for one, had no delusions of making it to heaven’s gate.

though one might consider how he ended up here, in this dark. the sale of one’s soul is a rotten deal, considered only by the most desperate of men. in saying so, park jeongho was a desperate man made so by yang hyein. it had been yang hyein who had made a mockery of him, reduced him from the most eligible of men to nothing more than a pathetic lover jilted at the altar in front of man and god and the devil. yang hyein who had carved him open with a serrated knife, left the tender pieces of him on a plate for his father—no, the devil—to feast.

nine years of plenty and there is not much left of the man now, save the hollow carcass. it is perhaps for this reason that when he walks by her, towards the ceremony hall, it is done so swiftly and without recognition. there are not many who can walk by the woman they had nearly promised their life to without so much as a glance, but park jeongho is barely a man now.

she chooses this moment to stop him from going into the belly of the beast, reaches a halting hand in his direction. is he supposed to thank her? jeongho thinks to laugh. rather, he looks at her hand, the barren finger, and thinks it to scald. by the time his gaze shifts up to her she’s withdrawn, looking away and back to the town. it’s just as well, better that she doesn’t catch the glimpse in his eyes, to gaze into his soul and find it wanting.

jeongho loosens his grip around the pull handle and moves to stand by her, their shoulders a couple of inches apart. he coaxes the pack of cigarettes from his pocket, balances the last one between his lips as he reaches for his lighter. “so…” he takes his time, lights the tip and drags the smoke into his lungs. a couple of seconds and he exhales, holds the cigarette between his fingers, “you chose the foreigner.”

it's not a hard guess. there’d been talks of phasing out nam from the town’s board now that chunja’s passed. it’d been a move that his father had vehemently advocated for, particularly because his father had found no use of chunja in the council, squandering hag that she is— or so jeongwon had put it. it’d be a fool’s gamble to think that having her granddaughter replace her would be any better. goero doesn’t take well to outsiders— jeongho thinks it’s about time hyein learnt as much.

still, he’s surprised, if only because he’d once known her. her, as in yang hyein, the bitch that almost married her dead ex-boyfriend’s cousin before jeongbin’s body turned cold in his grave. yang hyein, the bitch that left him standing by the altar, the blundering fool that jeongwon had known made public for all to see. “didn’t take you to be the compassionate sort,” he jibes, a mocking smirk tugging at the corner of his lip. he hides it with his cigarette. “the outside world has made you soft, hyein.”

jeongho turns to look at her now, just enough that he can catch her in his peripherals, “where was it? seoul? los angeles?” he scoffs, and perhaps it’s here that it becomes obvious what she’d done to him. how he’d suffered at the hands of her childish whims. there is no more flesh to him, only skin and bones. no more soul to him, only the devil’s mutt. jeongho gets no closure, only her eyes in the crowd, staring blatantly at him on his wedding day. he turns away, stares at the town of goero and wonders if she looks at it the way he looks at her. like staring at an old shop that had been broken down and made anew and wondering when it all went to shit. “no matter,” he dismisses, flicks the cigarette with his thumb and voices, somewhat sarcastically, “i’m sure you had your reasons.”

[pateredere]

there comes a time when even the devil must stand before god. when the god is set before you, unravelling the scroll in his hand to recount your list of diatribes and damages that you have inflicted upon others. when the world falls apart, malevolence will catch up to the sinners and non-believers and there will be no time for repentance. in the abrahamic faith, they call this end.

jeongho has this sickening feeling that this is his end. there’s an inexplainable wind against his cheek like they’re dragging him before the god, shoving him onto his knees. and in the dark, on that beach, the swaying trees can sometimes sound like the rustling of paper, or the unravelling of the damning scroll. here, the god recounts his sins and cho jiyeon steps out of the water, hand stretched out towards him.

there is no good without evil. no god without the devil. park jeongho grows into his horns in the spring of 2022 and the god he denies seeks an audience with him. when he fails to answer, the god encroaches into his home. and so it is here, when he’s walking into his study, that he witnesses god’s hand in her. cho jiyeon, woman in white. park jeongho comes face to face with his malevolence and it swears to be the end of him. and end he does, fingers sinking into his left chest as he falls to the floor, eyes widened and mouth agape. the fear that grips him is vicious, places two hands on his throat and forces him to swallow down his scream. the whole sequence is not unlike a cardiac arrest, only death would be too merciful for a man like him. rather, he hits the back of his head against the bookshelf in his fall, hard enough that his vision blurs but not enough to knock him out. when his vision clears, it’s jieum that greets him. jiyeon once again, gone without a trace.

“…jieum?” the last time he’d uttered her name this tenderly was on their wedding day, at the altar. it is said that one is most truthful when they’re faced with death. this is not to say that jeongho cares for her. rather that despite the devil he comes to be, in truth, he is only human. weak, mortal, susceptible to damage. jeongho expels the breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding, curls into himself as he hangs his head in his open palms. a rare, defeated, “i think i’m going insane.”

THE SECOND COMING ( day 2 ) ft. @secondeve's shin jieum

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Hari Alluri, from “Ancestral Memory”, After Kwame Dawes 

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park jeongwon raises an idiot boy for a son. he’s a blundering fool, slow on the uptake and loud despite, so everyone can stand to witness just how much of an idiot he is. he’s unlike the first park sons before him, the mayor insists, takes too much after his pathetic mother.

after all, what kind of park entertains outsiders? cho jiyeon, that pesky land developer that sniffed out the weakness in jeongho like a hungry dog. missing. son youngjae, the smarmy biographer that stuck onto the park heir like wet mud in the tread of his shoe. dead. park jeongho, in the middle of it all.

the thing about idiots is they don’t tie up their loose ends— they fray it.

and here is his end now, frayed to the point of disrepair. so perhaps it’s a good thing if it weren’t so pathetic, how he’s forced to rely on the choi heir to cover up the mistakes that he himself makes. after all, it’s inherent in a man like him to fuck things up all over again.

here is the most strategic option: he runs. away from the scene of the crime. away from the dead body sitting in the wreckage. away so he’s not given a chance to fuck another thing up. except as he’s running through goero’s unmarked forest with a hand cradling the back of his neck from a grade 1 sprain, somehow and even still, he manages to find a witness in jiyul. he’ll say that the night sky and ample trees had obscured his vision of the passer-by, but the fact remains: in a game of poor optics, jiyul succeeds in spotting him. jeongho fails to hide.

no need for any pretence. jeongho slows to a stop, utters an acknowledging, “jiyul,” with an accompanying nod. in his attempts to throw the man off, he pulls on the placket of his coat to straighten it, makes good use of his tall stature, parades the authority that his name holds. all of which were bought by or inherited from the parks. none of which comes from the idiot boy himself. “this part of the forest has been closed off for the ongoing investigation,” jeongho asserts, cocks his head towards the town of goero and his features fold into a subtle grimace, half from the ache in his neck and the other from his want to strangle the boy and be done with it. how much longer before he makes another mistake? tick, tick. “run along now,” the park heir commands, dialogue thick with threat and condescension, “and i won’t tell chief inspector choi that i saw you loitering around here.”

INTO THE WOODS ( spring 2022 ) ft. @conntingency's bae jiyul

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ayo what's poppin it's gemma here ( s/h, 21+ ) & i am so beyond excited for opening day! i'll be writing for the park i canon, park jeongho, the mayor's son & current chairman of the urban construction committee! i've got a ton more info under the cut ( mild tw for abuse ) cause as usual i haven't learnt to shut my trap but if you're at all keen to plot with me please hit that LIKE button! would definitely prefer d*scord but i can do tumblr ims too ( just afraid of the shadowban ya kno )! but yes tysm mwah!

speaking directly to my sisters in the church of astrology he's a scorpio sun ( mysterious n evil coded basically ) / taurus moon ( craves stability ) / cap rising ( hardworking & efficient lil bastard ) so yeah he's a bit mad to say the least

only child of park jeongwon, the current mayor! to understand jeongho you need to understand a little bit about the parks, but essentially every way in which they move comes with a political agenda so it's no surprise that his parents' marriage is fully a political arrangement! the point of the marriage was to sire an heir and once jeongho was born his mom peaced the fuck out of parenting and went on her merry way living as the jobless wife of the wealthiest man in town! she probably had intended to care for jeongho to some degree but she peaced out honestly for survival ( more on that in the next dot point )

that said jeongho was brought up almost entirely by his father and what i mean by that is he was brought up by the help and criticised often by his father. jeongwon in a nutshell is a smart man honestly prodigy level smart ( think one of those kids who don't study and gets 100% on a test cause the answer is just "common sense" ) with zero empathy so what you get is a grating narcissist who thinks they're better than einstein and he expects no less of his son! most of jeongho's childhood was his father asking for jeongho's test scores and when it's not up to par he just gets smacked and berated and called an idiot kid and honestly he's not much nicer to his wife which is why she made herself scarce

that was essentially the entirety of jeongho's childhood and it lends to his ocpd which he developed at a relatively young age! most people mistake it for ocd but it's really not that he just has an extreme obsession with perfectionism, order and control so he gets irrationally upset when things are not absolutely perfect like everything in his wardrobe is colour-coded and organised by attire type and everyone needs to wash their hands before interacting with him and the help must clean the parts of the house that any human walks through so yeah it's honestly pretty bad but in typical ocpd style he sees no issue with this and thinks other people are just lazy and unclean

anyway as per usual after high school he fucks off to the army and serves in the navy! he chose the navy mostly because jeongho had found goero's ocean to be really calming and had spent a lot of his youth swimming there when he needed to escape his dad! it's when he's in the army that he finds out his cousin passes which honestly is a shame because he liked jeongbin but at the end of the day jeongho wasn't really super close to him so it was kind of whatever

...which explains why he decides it's a good idea to scoop the late jeongbin's girlfriend and attempt to marry her!? as i said everything the parks do is politically motivated and there is no better political move frankly than to marry a yang to combine the park and yang assets so like sorry jeongbin but yeah! outside of those positives jeongho also frankly wanted to marry yang to "win" over his father in terms of choosing a spouse cause obviously his father did not marry a yang ( now's a good time to slip in that this father and son duo are constantly in competition ) and this was really his first ever rebel moment against his dad ( which if you think about it is pretty pathetic )

until his fiance jilted his ass at the altar so now he's the laughing stock of the town and his father is the striking image of mother gothel! after this whole bout jeongho finally and painfully admits that he's lost in this competition with his dad and he is most definitely dumber than his dad and so from here on out he just does everything his control freak of a dad says

father says go to uni so he fucks off to get an undergrad polsci degree then his dad tells him to marry one of his lackey's daughters so he can maintain control over jeongho AND his wife so he fucks off and proposes to shin and now with the land developers coming into goero his dad tells him to run for chairman of the urban construction committee so jeongwon can fully wash his hands of this land developer business ( importantly, he wants jeongho to put a stop to it and make sure no one sells ) so off he goes and that's the reason why he's currently chairman of said committee

cho jiyeon. as said, jeongwon is a really grating man who puts a lot of pressure on his son and constantly berates and belittles him whenever he doesn't get things done and what his father simply cannot understand is how the land developers are still in goero and chalks it up to how useless jeongho is. jiyeon continually bothers the parks and reminds jeongwon that she's still here and jeongho gets yelled at like he's fifteen again and at some point while jiyeon's talking her head off and says something mildly condescending to a "country boy" like him he realises that things would be so much easier if she just... disappeared. anger gets the best of him and you know how the rest of that story goes

anyway yeah jeongho is an absolute asshole sure but he's genuinely not a psychopath so what happened with jiyeon haunts him heaps but he tries his very best to move past it and live life as though she genuinely skipped town but yeah! few years pass and it becomes easier and now we're all caught up!

ok this was so long like you can stop here if you want below is just a bit about his personality / what to expect in interactions with him! also i don't have any plot ideas mostly because it's a skeleton rp and i feel like his relationship with each canon is unique given the political scene and stuff so generic plot ideas are kinda hard but yeah!

ok so personality-wise i would say that given his dad has drilled into him how useless and stupid he is jeongho is very aware that he is not the sharpest tool in the shed so he honestly is willing to hear people out when they talk to him! don't get me wrong he's definitely proud but he's not proud enough to think that he doesn't need anyone's help because he knows all kings have their advisors and he needs them! no shame in the game! ( also to clarify he's not actually stupid he's probably more just the type of person that gets good grades because he works hard and is organised and does all his assignments before it's due and not the type that gets up the day of the assignment due date and does it within an hour and gets a high distinction for it )

his father is also a really grating man to everyone else because he is smart so he thinks he doesn't need anyone cause everyone's suggestions are always dumb compared to him and his father often burns bridges but! because jeongho is aware of his weaknesses he is not that type of person so while he may feel a certain way about you he definitely is the sort to put on a polite enough facade! one thing he tends to do is the compliment sandwich where he can say something insulting in a not-totally-aggressive way and with a smile then sandwich it between normal conversation to make you think wait... did he just insult me or did i hallucinate it? maybe he just doesn't realise how he's coming across because of his upbringing? yeah

also to tack onto all this he is a very efficient guy and a proud workaholic ( also thanks to his ocpd ) so you'll see in interactions with him that he tends to move rather fast and speak rather direct and just operates at practically 2x speed! very much a say something useful or don't say anything at all type of person and he can be rather dismissive if he feels the conversation is not going to be fruitful within the first few sentences

also re: his ocpd things have to exist in a certain order and he expects a level of perfectionism always and there's a certain set of rules that you may need to learn especially if you're interacting with him frequently ( applies more to people who live and work with him )

all of this is about work but of course jeongho does lighten up from time to time! he has a group of friends who honestly it's questionable if they like him or his status but i imagine jeongho's life is something like the truman show where you have so much power that people are often pandering to you and you just think everyone is like that cause you're great when in reality they want something from you! but point is he does hang out and drink and fuck a lot and he's uhm certainly not loyal to his wife so there's that! will say though that he is very picky about the company he keeps and the people who know the "real" him

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Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud, tr. by A.M. El Messeri, from The Palestinian Wedding: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Resistance Poetry

[Text ID: "I will hold my soul in my palm / And cast it into the abyss of death;"]

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171016 @juanxkui:

#고백부부#정남길 🤓

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8.8.23

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Jang Kiyong for Vogue Korea May 2023. Photographed By Kim Yeong Jun

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shared by Jamie Campbell Bower via his instagram stories

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Louise Glück, from “Stars”, Poems: 1962–2020

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PATER • EDERE

father. to eat. also see: park jeongho.

INTRO / DOSSIER / CONNECTIONS