#not to mention this is all just AFTER he left the yeon household. he had to live there for 6? years i think under the same roof as dongha

[deargravity]

i don’t want hajun to be mysterious, beautiful and elusive. i want him to see his messy, fractured moments. no more bare minimum details. i need to be acquainted with visceral details of his childhood.

give me 13 year old hajun in japan, alone and confused and still convinced that this whole thing is a ruse and his parents will come get him eventually. i need 14 year old hajun still clinging onto the hope that if he’s good enough and proves himself his parents will take him back. i want 15 year old hajun disabused of all his faith in his parents and realising home is nowhere now, and he is fundamentally unwantable unless he learns to wear the right masks and say the right things. little hajun who had to figure everything out by himself, while knowing his existence made no difference to his parents back home anyway. now it’s his life and the only person to whom it matters is himself.

i wonder if he had a phase where his anger was just like dongha’s — wet, guttural, thrashing, amorphous. when exactly did it take shape into the cold, sharp thing it is today? i want him slowly getting sick of breaking his own heart with his own wanting. i want him meeting allen and experiencing the terror of caring for someone for the first time. i want him falling back on the “vengeance on my parents” narrative because he can’t admit to himself that allen and anne appeared in his life at a time when his walls weren’t fully up yet and now they’re here to stay after he’s so carefully built himself up to avoid abandonment by avoiding intimacy altogether. i want to see him growing up and retreating slowly further and further into himself the more he realises he won’t be able to survive losing allen and anne, i want him disgusted by his own wanting and uncomfortable with himself but so distanced from his own feelings that the only way he can process / experience anything close to it is by antagonising others to create congruent reactions within them just so he knows what it’s like to feel something.

i want him alone in his room and suddenly so crushed by emotion but incapable of identifying them because he never grew up with the tools to define his own experience. maybe that’s also why making music with bae matters to him (since their theme revolves around taking charge of your own narrative). he built himself a sense of self from scratch and still he couldn’t outgrow his childhood fear of being unwanted. yeah he’s sadistic and callous and morally dubious, but he wasn’t born that way. i am asking once again i need the visceral detail. the guts of it. but i may be crazy.

[starmist]

Theory: The Real Reason Jin Mu Hid Cho Yeong

This bit of information is never actually explained and it drives me nuts, like it makes zero sense why he would do such a thing. If the point of killing the Cho Family (and in such a cruel way as well) was to “torture” Jang Gang, why didn’t he also just kill Yeong as well? Cho Chung slashed plenty of people that night, it wouldn’t raise any questions if he’d killed her and said he’d found the body wherever. This would also hurt Jang Gang quite a bit, that because of him his best friend and the entirety of that family, including such a young girl (that he probably knew as well) had been killed by her own father.

There is no obvious reason to have kept her alive. I’m also going to dismiss that Jin Mu wanted to use her to kill his enemies/soul shifters. It’s unlikely since Jang Gang had the ice stone and sealed it way after the massacre. Jin Mu was only able to perform the alchemy of souls around ten years later after Jin Bu Yeon found it.

Also, I know Jin Mu is absolutely insane but who looks at a five(ish) year old and go “imma turn her into a killer”. Especially since there seems to have been nothing special about her unlike Jang Uk and Jin Buyeon, I mean he himself states that he had never expected her to become as powerful as she did. I’m not entirely sure he even meant for her to survive.

For the same reasons I don’t think he ever meant to actually use her against the four families either, so why? Why would he go into all that effort to kidnap her, hide her, travel into the mountains to provide (the bare minimum of) supplies along with the resources to become a mage? So much effort and for what? What could he possibly gain from this? What benefit did he see in keeping this girl alive?

The answer is: a lot.

We see that Jang Gang abandons Jang Uk shortly after he’s born, but we also know that Cho family massacre, an event he was present for, happened sometime after that day, though we don’t have an actual timeline. Kim Dojoo also mentions in episode 8 that there was a time (before Jang Uk was conceived) that Jang Gang would hole up at Cheonbugwan for days at a time.

It’s not a stretch to believe he did the same prior to the massacre.

Kim Dojoo also tells Master Lee that the real reason Jang Gang left was in hopes that he could find his best friend’s daughter.

So what am I getting at here? What does this have to do with anything? Well, there was no body that means both that Jang Gang had some semblance of hope that Yeong was alive and was willing to do a lot to find her.

To leave the fortress for years and years, to search almost endlessly for her. Because she was his best friend’s daughter, the daughter of the family died because Jang Gang brought the alchemy of souls back into the world, the one and only person from that family the could maybe, possibly be alive!

She was his one chance at redemption, the one person he could save, make it up in some small way to his friend; a way that he hadn’t destroyed everything.

(It’s also not unreasonable to assume that he had personally known Yeong. I mean, if he left to look for her that means he felt that he would be able to recognize her. We also know that she frequented Cheonbugwan with her father and is even implied to have visited the Jang household as well therefore there were plenty of opportunities for them to meet)

Jin Mu, as Jang Gang’s servant and pupil, would know and understand these things. So he makes her disappear and Jang Gang goes looking for her.

In the mean time, with the Gwanju gone, Jin Mu gained power, became Bu-Gwanju, found the ice stone, even created an entire, insanely loyal secret society and put Shaman Choi on the throne. By the time the show opens, the King is looking for a way to make Jin Mu the Gwanju in full! All because Jang Gang was gone!! He had so so much to gain by hiding her away and sending his master on a wild goose chase with the slightest hope that she might be alive.

Also, lets say by chance, Jang Gang did come back. Well, Jin Mu had bred so much hate into Naksu and she trained to become a mage as well. He could easily have sent her after him, not really expecting her to win but to bait Jang Gang. Have him figure out her identity, have him be tortured by her hate or even by Jang Gang unknowingly hurting/killing her.

There are just so many more was to torture Jang Gang by keeping her alive, so much to gain, how could Jin Mu not? Yeong surviving was an absolute golden opportunity for him.

[raiyakun]

Two Worlds 

━━━━━━━ ☆ ━━━━━━━

As always my brain randomly decides to kick into overdrive when thinking of AUs so it took on a life of its own (ADKJSHDKASD), but this was very fun to think of so please have the rest of it under the cut.

(TW for those who might be prompted to check out W: [mostly minor] character deaths, violence, blood, which get more prevalent in later episodes. The music volume changes quickly at certain points too. My concept so far only covers the early half of the series, but still TW for mentions of violence, blood, and minor character deaths.)

(Also a sidenote because I’ve had comments with other AU concepts (；´∀｀) This won’t be a 1:1 AU. The basic premise stands but I make a bunch of changes especially with character roles like splitting and/or splicing roles.) 

❝Keith Kogane is the hero of the immensely popular action mystery webcomic W. Marco McClain, the series’ artist and writer, has become practically a household name as everyone has gotten addicted to the story of Keith, a young man who once rose to fame as the prodigy who became the youngest Olympic judo gold medalist at 18 under his father’s training but gets embroiled in a series of tragedies and injustices as his father is later found dead in their home and his mother discovered missing, with Keith framed and later imprisoned for the murder and abduction by the ambitious prosecutor Zarkon Daibazaal.

Keith is later proven innocent and released following a year in prison, then disappears from the public eye for years only to reemerge later as the successful co-CEO of Voltron Co., and alongside his mentor and brother figure Takashi Shirogane, co-CEO Allura Altea, and assistant Acxa Marmora, he establishes W, a TV program that aims to solve criminal cases and mysteries and give people the justice that they seek for. But Keith’s ultimate goal is to find his father’s killer and his mother’s whereabouts, a goal which he will stop at nothing to achieve.

Meanwhile, Lance McClain is a new resident in the esteemed cardiovascular and thoracic surgery department of the Garrison University Hospital under the tutelage of Professor Iverson, who doesn’t exactly have the most stellar impression of him. That is, until Iverson learns that Lance is the younger brother of Marco McClain, writer and artist of W. Lance sees this as a chance to get on Iverson’s good side and decides to visit his brother Marco, who in reality has had little contact with his family after dropping out of medical school to pursue being a comic artist, much to the disapproval of his and Lance’s parents. His sister Veronica, herself also a doctor at the same hospital, advises him against the idea, but Lance decides to push through.

At Marco’s studio, though, Lance learns through his friends Hunk and Pidge, both assistants to Marco, that his brother has been missing since the previous night, which is a problem since the deadline for W’s latest chapter was the next day. They have absolutely no idea where he could’ve gone, and in the middle of their conversation, Lance finds out about Marco’s plan to kill off his comic’s main character, much to his disbelief. Hunk brings him into Marco’s room to show the last panel he’d worked on his tablet, showing Keith lying in a pool of blood on a hotel rooftop after getting stabbed by the story’s mysterious killer.

After Hunk leaves him alone in the room to attend to a call from the editor, a bloody hand suddenly shoots out from Marco’s tablet to pull him in, and Lance finds himself on a high rooftop, with nobody but a bloody young man with a mullet at his feet. 

Lance is incredibly confused, but quickly jumps into action and helps out the man, saving him from dying from a collapsed lung by puncturing his chest with a pen, the man’s eyes opening for a split second just as Lance does so. After paramedics arrive to bring the man to the hospital (with Lance feeling quite proud he managed to save someone under pressure. Take that, Iverson!), Lance is thanked by the hospital’s manager, and Lance learns the name of who he’d just saved: Keith Kogane.

Wait. Is it a coincidence? For him to have the same name as Marco’s character? But Lance recalls the bloody hand that pulled him in and realizes how the man was lying exactly like Keith in the drawn panel was. And at the corner of his vision, Lance catches the words To be continued appearing out of thin air just before he finds himself back in Marco’s room. 

And that’s how Lance’s curious experiences with moving between reality and (what should have been) fiction begin. What’s worse is that whatever events that happen while he is in the comic world end up getting reflected in W’s story, to the point that Iverson accuses his of forcing his brother to base a new character on himself.

And Marco is little help to Lance’s predicament. He reappears like nothing happened and refuses to listen to his younger brother talking about what he experienced, instead cryptically proclaiming that he needs Keith to die in the comic, even if it goes against what the readers and his editors (and Hunk and Pidge) are hoping he would do.

Lance manages to save Keith’s life a second time after getting sucked into the W world again, and he discovers that the world follows a weird logic that revolves around its main character, and that Lance would only be able to get back to the real world whenever something shocking to Keith happens. 

As for Keith, meeting the man who saved him on the rooftop that one fateful night leads him to believe that he has the key to his existence, his purpose. But the man seems elusive and....very weird. He has a nameーLance McClainーbut it’s as if he swims in and out of existence, with no one knowing him or him disappearing without a trace. But despite his friends’ doubt, Keith is resolute that Lance McClain holds the answer to the mystery governing his life.

The question is, is that a mystery both him and Lance are prepared to unravel?❞

(end of Part One)

This was getting long so I just decided to bunch the rest of some important details into bullet points (；´∀｀) (there’s a LOT more since a ton of stuff happen in the series so there’s a bunch more to come after this. Some might be confusing if you don’t know what happens in the series but I’ll try to clear them up in later posts ksdjfhksdfj)

Romance isn’t a big point in W, but its readers popularly believe that Marco is building a love triangle with Keith and Allura, with whom Keith shares a hatred for Zarkon and some common ground due to her parents also having been murdered, and Acxa, who used to work for Zarkon but whom Keith convinces of Zarkon’s evil and hires as a personal assistant-slash-bodyguard. Lance believed this too, at first, since when they were younger Marco told him about his plans, although at present Lance isn’t sure if Marco still intends it since he’s only played with the idea in the really early chapters but has not touched upon it again. (Later, when Lance and Keith realize they’re falling for each other and the comic IRL begins to turn into a romantic comedy, Iverson rants at Lance about how the story is getting completely ruined by the “new character Lance” and that Keith should’ve gotten set up with one of the two heroines, only for Lance to yell back at him “Well how are you completely sure Keith is into girls in the first place!”)

Shiro’s role is a combination of Do-yoon’s and Hyun-seok’s from W. He was an athlete also trained by Keith’s father and a close family friend. He took Keith in after his release from prison and became the program manager of W. (No, he does not get Hyun-seok’s fate.)

Hunk and Pidge share Soo-bong’s role, although their reactions to realizing Lance can somehow get into the webcomic world are very different: Hunk is extremely anxious while Pidge gets excited and curious.

Keith’s father was murdered by stabbing, and Zarkon framed Keith as the murderer with the knife that Keith got as a gift from his mother as the murder weapon. It’s what Keith secretly keeps under his pillow (which Lance is aware of, much to Keith’s shock. But Lance only knows it thanks to having a lot of knowledge about the webcomic details from the real world).

Lance gets caught by the police in the comic a similar way that Yeon-joo in the series does, but this isn’t due to any purposeful set up by Allura or Acxa the same way the series did for So-hee. I really don’t like how the writing treated So-hee sdjkfsdkjfksf. Lance genuinely becomes friends with Allura and Acxa, and instead it’s Zarkon, thinking that he can use Lance as the key to send Keith to jail permanently, who’s the reason Lance is caught by the police. Allura and Acxa try to help him out but are prevented by Zarkon until Keith’s return.

Marco used to be very close to both Veronica and Lance when they were younger, since all three used to share a love for comics and Marco had a talent for drawing (and although they don’t remember it at first, both Lance and Veronica contributed ideas to what eventually became W). But their parents wanted them to aim for “real” jobs and pressured Marco into studying medicine. While Marco rebelled and left, becoming a small artist that anyone barely knew until W blew up, Veronica chose to bury her love for comics and pursue medicine, thus becoming a doctor. Lance is caught between the two routes they took (wanting to pursue his own dreams like Marco or persisting in the field with Veronica). Despite looking stern most of the time, Veronica is indeed worried and cares for both her brothers.

Eventually, Veronica gets roped into the mess as well, especially after Marco gets attacked and sent to the hospital and when she finds a hysterical Hunk and Pidge yelling about them and Lance getting chased by a killer only for her to find Lance passed out and so weak he needs to be hospitalized.

Eventually, both Lance and Veronica realize that they are able to influence the W world too, since the comic’s logic recognizes them as “part-creators” due to Marco having taken inspiration from them when he was originally planning the comic. I may or may not have a Veracxa agenda here KJFHKDJFHDKSJFHD. Bottom line is: instead of just Yeon-joo and her dad in the original, the three siblings can get dragged into the comic. Okay I admit there is a Veracxa agenda here.

Aaaaaannnnd more to come because W has like 3-4 arcs and both my sister and I can’t stop watching it because it’s cliffhangers everywhere KJDHKJSHKSDJFHKDF

[moon-yeongjun]

Fathers and Sons || Mu Jun

 Summary: This takes place the Taekwondo weekend! Mu-yeol and Yeong-jun drink together and open up to each other. It’s Very Good i love this thread 

@baenxietydad

tw: mentions of cancer, death, also alcohol 

MARLIN:   Jun made the mistake of conceding when the two of them went back and forth about who was going to pay for the alcohol. Mu-yeol would have let Jun pay if he didn’t already feel like rot about him having to pay for the hotel, and if he actually suspected Jun would buy enough to even get Marlin drunk in the first place. A fairy’s alcohol tolerance was no joke; especially a healing talent fairy.   It was almost like he needed an alcohol IV to get enough into his bloodstream to get him good and proper pissed.   There was no way in hell he’d tell Jun to go out and buy that much alcohol. He’d do it himself and look like he had a drinking problem instead.   When he got back to the room, he waited with a smirk and his back turned to Jun for Jun to insist he had gone too hard at the off-licence. 

  JUN:  Jun was already a bit drunk.   Of course he was at least a little drunk! His little brother had won, dragging all those other kids across the mat and making the Moon family proud. He’d shouted himself nearly hoarse, almost cried when he was hugging Tae, and could not stop smiling whenever he caught sight of the medal that Jun was forcing Tae to wear throughout dinner. So yes, celebratory drinks! Such things were mandatory when you were the hyung of the  T.A.G.B Tae Kwon-Do Cadet English Championship Finalist!    They ate a horrid amount of food, Jun had some fancy cocktail he couldn’t remember the name of, and soju, of course soju, they all, even Tae-yah and Nam-min-ie, had a little soju. Just a little.    Now the boys had gone back to their room to stuff their mouths full of sweet and salty snacks and pass out. Jun, however, just a little drunk, asked his hyung-nim if he would like to keep drinking with him. It was a night of nights, eh? The weather was perfect for drinking.   Now though?   “Yahhhhhhhhh,” Jun exclaimed and then laughed. “What are you doing? Are you trying to drown me? This is enough for Tae-yah’s whole taekwondo team!”

    MARLIN:   Marlin laughed and shook his head. Oh, Jun. You’ll see. Soon enough, you’ll see.   “You won’t be saying that for long.” Mu-yeol said with a devious grin. “You’ve obviously never tried drinking with a fairy before.”   It would take him probably an entire bottle of liquor and some change to feel a buzz, more to be proper drunk, and even more to wake up with a hangover the next morning. He was trying to drink in the proper drunk range, but there’s no telling. Maybe Jun is a surprisingly fun drinking buddy and he’ll lose track of how much he’s drinking.   “I can’t drink in public because I get cut off before I even get drunk.”   JUN:  He rolled his eyes at Mu-yeol, but he reached for a bottle of the soju and beckoned for him to sit down. They did not have a proper table in this hotel room-- just a desk, the one desk chair, their two beds, and a small nightstand between the beds. Thus, Jun had determined the nightstand to be their table of sorts, with both of them using the beds as seats. Jun put the soju glasses down and poured Mu-yeol’s drink.    “Ah, you fairies, eh, must you be better at everything?” he joked as he poured. “Should get ahead of me then, I’ve not been drunk since--” When was the last time? Jun scoffed and laughed, shoulders shaking. “I don’t even remember.” 

  MARLIN:   Marlin chuckled when Jun instinctively poured his soju. Damn, Jun really was Korean. Though he was more surprised that Jun acknowledged the fairy thing with a joke so comfortably.   “Depends on the fairy. Like, my sister and one of my brothers get drunk a little quicker because they aren’t healing fairies. Nemo needs me to heal his nose when he breaks it, but when I drop kegs on my toe at work it heals itself.” He explained with a shrug.    He smiled sadly at Jun. of course it had been a long while since Jun was able to proper drink. He had to become his father so fast.    “May 18th, 2006.”   Three days after So-yeon was murdered. He left Nam-min with his parents for the night while he and his siblings went to human Daegu and they let him get embarrassing, crying, incoherent drunk. He wanted to get completely pissed just once under the watchful eyes of his dongsaengdul. 

  JUN:  “Aish, well that’s longer than me. Can’t believe you remember the date.” Jun said, laughing. 2006! Jun was-- how old? He had moved to Swynlake. Must be 14 or 15? He hadn’t gotten drunk yet. The first time for him had been when his hal-moni died. He huddled alone in his room, having stolen beer from the store. He drank and drank, can after can, eyes wet with tears, until everything spun and Jun passed out. He woke up hours later only to go vomit. Eomma found him and scolded him, though quietly, tears still in her eyes. Because Jun might have lost his hal-moni, but Eomma lost her own eomma. Drinking was selfish.   He got drunk outside of the house then. Not often. When he did drink though, Jun liked to black out and spend the next day in complete misery for his stupidity. The punishment fit the crime.    Tonight though, for once, he drank to celebrate.    He kicked back a shot. 

  MARLIN:   “Yeah, I mean, I still lived in Daegu and my parents were watching the baby.” He said, shrugging a shoulder.    Conveniently, he left out why he got plastered that day.   He knocked back his shot and went ahead and poured himself another, promptly taking that one as well. Believe him, Jun. He needed it. It suddenly occurred to him as he poured himself another shot, and poured on for Jun, that neither of them were talking.   “Have you told Tiffany about Tae’s win yet?”

  JUN:  Jun also went for another shot. The soju burned pleasantly, lingering long enough for the body to crave another. Such was the appeal of soju-- much better than vodka, which seared like gasoline.    He downed it and then peered at the one remaining drop that had clung to the bottom of the glass.    “Eh? Who?” he asked, still staring at that drop. 

  MARLIN:   Who?   That wasn’t what he was expecting when he brought up Jun’s girlfriend. From what Eun-jung said they were made for each other. Not that she said much but what the normal Korean parent would say. Oh, she’s going to be a doctor, she’s so intelligent, and so Korean!   Jun was going to be a doctor too. That hurt him to think about, how Jun had had to give that up to run Moon Market.   “Uh, Tiffany? Your girlfriend? Your mother’s talked about her before. Unless, uh, that was an old girlfriend?”

  JUN:  “Eh?” Jun grunted again, blinking. And then Tiffany snapped into place, firing off the correct neurons. “Oh! Yes, yes, Tiffany. My girlfriend,” Jun confirmed with several more nods as he put the glass down on the table.    He had forgotten to tell Tiffany about Tae’s tournament at all, to be honest. When was the last time they had spoken on the phone? Aish, who cared? It wasn’t like they needed such things. Tiffany was quite busy and they had a very pleasant email correspondence going on…    “No, I-- s’busy day.” He waved a hand. “I’ll tell her tomorrow! She’s still at her clinic right now, I’m sure. And this sort of thing isn’t, not really her thing.” He shrugged. “She’s an only child, you know how it is.”   

MARLIN:   “It sounds…” Marlin trailed off, wondering if he should say it.    He was going to say ‘like she’s not your thing’ but decided against it. That was best kept in his head.   “Boring. Being an only child.” He said, knocking back his fourth shot and pouring another. “Only children in the traditional sense aren’t a thing in fairy culture.”

  JUN:  That didn’t make much sense.    But much of fairy culture did not make sense, the little he heard of it. It sounded-- too nice. Jun could not trust something that was so nice. Fairies themselves were nice too, very very nice, nice to a fault. Of all the Magicks, he supposed he’d like to hang out with a fairy more than anything else, but that didn’t mean he would trust them. There was always a catch to kindness. He just had never figured out what it was when it came to fairies.    Or maybe they were just naive, the poor dears.    “Your son is an only child,” Jun said then bluntly, like Marlin forgot. 

  MARLIN:   He smiled sadly. “Not by choice, of course.” And waved a hand dismissively as if to etch-a-sketch away the sad thing he said.    Marlin cleared his throat to explain. “Typically if a fairy is widowed, we’re expected to, if not find another partner or two, combine households with another widowed fairy and raise your fledglings as siblings. Alternatively, if your Talent is considered rare - like my mother’s - or highly essential, like mine, you are expected or enter into a Promise with another fairy of that same talent and have a child in hopes of it being that Talent. If you don’t go into a love Promise, you should have a strategic one, for the good of the Hollow.”   He took his fifth shot.    “Promise is like our version of marriage. You can have 1, 2, I’ve even seen a fairy have 3 Promise partners. And you can’t have children outside of your Promise. Anyway. I’m a healing Talent, basically a fairy doctor. It’s actually considered incredibly strange that I didn’t either enter into a Promise with another healing Talent and try to have a healing Talent child; or, just combine households with another widowed fairy. Selfish, even.”   Marlin sighed and poured himself another shot. “Nemo and I aren’t very popular in the Hollow as you can imagine.”

  JUN:  It was a very good thing that Jun was about half a bottle of soju in, plus the drinks he had at dinner.    If he were sober, his impulse would be to stop this conversation at once. He had no interest in fairy culture. The less he knew, the better. That was the best thing about fairies, eh? Unlike other magicks, they kept their business to themselves and in their Hollow. They did their thing-- and humans did theirs. Everyone lived in harmony, which was what fairies were all about.   But he was drunk, his curiosity floating to the surface. His face screwed up at how bizarre it all sounded.    “Aish, that’s a headache waiting to happen,” said Jun. “Three partners?!  One is already hard enough, you’re probably better off on your own!” He sucked his teeth. “Ah, but they shouldn’t be so hard on you, being a single parent should be-- it’s like--” he searched for his words. “Being a warrior. You deserve a medal.”   

MARLIN:   “Fairies don’t see it that way. There’s much I love about fairy society, in fact I love everything about it except that. But I have had much more exposure to human society and culture than the fairies in either Hollow I’ve lived in.” Marlin explained. “An acceptance of single parents kind of crept in by osmosis.”   He knocked back his sixth shot, then his seventh right after, and poured the eighth.   “It is almost offensive to many in the Hollow that my son and I live alone. But I worried we’d speak English in the home if I combined households with another widowed fairy. Then Nam-min wouldn’t know any Korean.”   After taking his eighth shot, he clicked his tongue and said. “Still no buzz. Aish.” And poured his ninth.    “In my home Hollow, Promise pairs or sets could produce three children without permission from the Pixie Queen. Here, it’s two, so our homes are made to house four fairies. And it is the height of selfishness ours houses two.”   JUN:  Stupid. All of what Mu-yeol was saying was stupid and Jun honestly didn’t know why they were talking about it. Not because he was uncomfortable, but because tonight, wasn’t it supposed to be a celebration? His brother was a winner! Jun and Tae had not gotten into one single fight all weekend (even if sometimes Jun had wanted to slap the back of his brother’s head). Even Mu-yeol seemed rather happy, eh? He and his son were cute, and Jun knew that they’d been fighting because of that damn vampire.    So why talk about things that could not be changed?    “Well who cares about them,” Jun said. The soju sloshed into his glass. “Don’t pay them any mind. You should get more human friends.” Jun said and pointed the lip of the soju bottle at Mu-yeol. “Not that people aren’t just as annoying but still, none of that 개소리 (gaesori) about being selfish. We humans love being selfish. And you can afford to be selfish sometimes! Eh? Like my eomma, she usually comes to these things. But I’ve been away so long. Over a decade you know, because medical school, aish, so exhausting. Tae hated me for missing his tournaments. And I hated me too! Did he think I was doing it on purpose?! I wanted to come, I tried, I really-- but there was so much work all the time.”   Jun sighed and he shot back the glass. He poured more, forgetting his manners now. Some sloshed over the side of the glass. “So I told Eomma-- my turn. I’ll take him. I’ll close the damn store for a weekend if I have to, no matter what Abeoji says, ohhh, he’s so mad at me for that-- says we never close the store, never. So I upset him. Of course I upset him. But too bad. For once, I do something for me. My little brother…”    Jun was drunker than he thought.    “So-- there you go. Do something for you, hyung. We work hard, eh?”

  MARLIN:   Jun was very drunk. He knew he was very drunk, because he accidentally called him hyung, just plain hyung, and not hyung-nim. Adding -nim still put distance between them. Hyung meant they were actually friends.    “Yeah, fuck-- fuck it.” Marlin said, taking his ninth shot, then drinking the about half-shot worth that was in that bottle straight from it and opening another. Knocking back his tenth shot, he smiled and said. “Ten and a half, I should finally start feeling something. You can imagine how expensive this would be if we drank in public.”   Bottles of liquor in the hotel was the way to go.

  JUN:  Jun laughed, shaking his head. “You better not be lyin’ about this fairy tolerance, ‘m not cleaning up after you.” Jun said, leaning forward a little and pointing at him with a finger.   Though ah, that was a lie. Even drunk, Jun would drag Mu-yeol to the bathroom if he needed to. He’d wipe his chin and force water down his throat and tuck him into bed like a child, if he had to, because Jun did not know how to be anything else.   He wanted to be, though. For one night.   Jun reached for another soju bottle. “You’re an appa, eh?” He cracked open the top. “What’s the secret? Mm? To be a good son? Because I’m really trying.” Jun touched his own chest. 

  MARLIN:   Mu-yeol snorted and shook his head. “Mate,” the single word in English sounded off in the middle of comfortable Korean. “You’ll wish I was bullshitting.”   At what Jun said next though, his heart lurched painfully in his chest. He never understood why human fathers couldn’t just tell their sons they were proud of them. It was four words and they prevented a lot of frustration and heartache. A part of him understood Mr. Moon. They were both immigrants and just wanted to push their children to be able to survive without them one day in this country that would always be foreign to them, that would never quite be their home.   But as fairies, Marlin and Nemo easily could express their feelings toward each other. Nemo hugged him when he wanted to show his affection and occasionally hopped up on his toes to kiss his cheek goodbye as he scurried out the door. Marlin would curl up next to Nemo when he sensed he needed appa snuggles and played with his hair like he’d done since he was a toddler. To fairies it was ‘a little childish’ at worst, and ‘just normal’ in most cases.   “Jun...I’m not in your father’s head, but. You are a very good son. You gave up your life to run the store, and you’re putting yourself through a relationship you aren’t invested in just to please your Korean parents that want a Korean daughter-in-law. You are the dictionary definition of a filial Korean son.” Marlin said. “And your father is the stereotypical Korean immigrant father who loves you but can’t seem to say it.”   Had Yeong-seok said with his own words to him that he loved Jun? No, no but he didn’t have to. As a father himself, he could recognize the older man’s love where his children wouldn’t.   “Korean immigrant human father.” He clarified. “We-” meaning fairies “-tend to be very open about our feelings. It just isn’t in human masculine culture. And that isn’t fair to you, I know. But you are a good son. You love your parents, and your sisters, and your brother, and you’ve sacrificed your own aspirations for them. That is the most selfless--”   He cut himself off and downed his eleventh shot. “I think your father can’t say it because he hates that you had to do it. He wanted you to be a doctor so badly. He never stopped talking about how well you were doing in medical school, but then he got sick, and kept getting sicker, and here you are.”   JUN:  He didn’t believe Mu-yeol about this either.    He could think in the most logical part of his brain that yes, Appa loved him, and yes, Appa was proud. A few years ago, before his cancer, he’d come close to saying similar things to Jun when Jun came home on one of his brief weekends he could spare, and ended up assisting his abeoji with some task. Usually working in the garden. His abeoji loved the family garden more than anything else and would have lived his happiest life if he could go out day after day and simply tend to the rows of greens and vegetables. When Jun worked in the garden with him, there was peace between father and son...a beautiful, clean silence, only broken occasionally by Yeong-seok when he decided he had something to share.    Jun liked the garden too. He liked working with his hands, the cool, wet dirt against his work jeans. It was the opposite of sterile clinic rooms. The smell of pulled roots and fertilizer nothing like disinfectant.    He always thought of his abeoji when he gardened now. His appa spent many mornings out, sitting in his garden, but no longer had the strength or energy to even weed.    And so now there were no more opportunities for his abeoji to say anything kind. Instead, there was a neverending list of everything that Jun did wrong. Abeoji mad at him for coming home too early, Abeoji mad at him for partnering with a different, cheaper distributor, Abeoji angry about hiring Eric (he had called Jun lazy-- could Jun disagree with him?)    Jun knew that the man he’d never truly known, as hard as he tried to, would die disappointed in him.    He drank his soju.    He shook his head. “Abeoji and I…it’s different. I don’t think I was ever his son.” He squinted, looking past Mu-yeol’s shoulder. “How can you feel those things eh, for a boy you don’t know? He was a stranger to me too. The first year I lived in Swynlake with him, aish, I kept wanting to call him Ahjussi. Abeoji kept catching on my tongue, like saying this was disrespectful to the man who took my eomma and me in.” Jun chuckled, though this wasn’t funny. “As if my parents weren’t married!”    “I have to work much harder for him to call me his son, I think. He got to see Tae-yah and my sisters grow up, so it’s easier to love them. I’m not complaining,” Jun added quickly. He blinked, and his eyes were wet. Because he was tired, that’s all, he wasn’t sad. “He would have liked to know me as a boy. He sacrificed that for me and Eomma, so ‘m not mad. It’s simply how it is. Maybe if I had a son of my own, it’d be a second chance.” He blinked again, his chest burning and tight, and his voice wobbled as he said, “It’s too late though, isn’t it? He’ll never know my son.” 

  MARLIN:   “Jun.” Marlin said, eschewing all the rules of human masculinity and reaching to grab one of Jun’s hands in his. “You were always his son. He wouldn’t have left to lay a foundation for you and Eun-- your eomma if you weren’t his son. I can promise you, as a father myself, that it tore him apart inside to not get to raise you himself. And fathers, we...kind of suck at dealing with our own pain. Especially when its related to our children.”   He laughed bitterly to himself, thinking about how he’s absolutely fucked Nam-min up for life.   “He’s probably hard on you because he just wants to know you’ll turn out all right despite him not having been there for you. And I know it isn’t fair to you, and I know from where you’re standing you don’t feel his love for you, but Jun. Yeong-seok loves you.”   And it was unfair that Jun would never get the chance to actually know that.   Because Jun was right. It was much too late. For months now Mu-yeol had physically felt Death on the patriarch of the Moon family. It clung to him like dried wood glue that stuck to your skin no matter how much you tried to rub it off. The treatments only ever made the intensity of the weight of Death fluctuate but never come close to leaving him.   “Oh, Junnie.” Marlin cooed, going from his bed to Jun’s and impulsively cradling him in his arms. “Jun, I know. I know it's not fair.”

  JUN:  The room was swimming. Jun blinked slowly, his eyes coming to focus on Mu-yeol’s hand on his, though he did not really feel it. He was just aware of its warmth, but it could have been anything.  His eyes closed briefly, only half of his hyung-nim’s words reaching him through this own stupid alcohol blanket.    How could he explain? There was so much distance in Jun’s life between himself and the people that he cared about, his abeoji most of all. He’d grown up talking to Abeoji on the phone and that’s how it had felt now, even when they were in the same room. They did not really look at each other; they could not exactly see. There was a flaw in their timing as was always the case with phone conversation, Jun and Yeong-seok trying to talk at the same time, stopping, and then falling into a hesitated silence.    Jun might have started rambling about phone conversations and maybe if Facetime had been invented when he was a small boy then it’d be all different, oh the joys of modern technology-- but then Mu-yeol’s weight fell on the other side of him.   And he was being held.    What the hell? Jun wanted to pull away, but instead he leaned into Mu-yeol’s grip, his face twisted and his eyes closing even tighter than they had before. “This is stupid,” he croaked but still didn’t pull away. And he wanted to say other things--   That cancer was stupid.   That it was hilarious and cruel that he could be a doctor, in a relationship with an oncologist, and still be unable to help his abeoji.    And despite how sad he was, there was a part of him that was relieved. Relieved to be home. Relieved to be back in the Moon Market, where he spent his adolescence. And it was this part of him that he hated most of all, that he was certain his parents saw and were ashamed.    Instead, he remained in Mu-yeol’s arms and he said in his voice still thick with tears, “Hyung...hyung, can I call you hyung?” He already was, of course, but he was much too drunk to register.   

MARLIN:   Mu-yeol shook his head and pat Jun’s back. “No it’s not. Having feelings and being hurt isn’t ridiculous. It isn’t fair to you to always be the one to keep it together for your family.”   He could stand to take a page from Jun’s book, however.    “Yeah, that’s okay.” He said, biting back an awkward chuckle at Jun remembering his politeness even now.    He kind of wished he were Olaf because then at least hugging Jun would have provided some amount of genuine comfort.    JUN:  Was he crying? Jun could not tell. How embarrassing if he was, and he grimaced at himself and pulled away from Mu-yeol’s arms, though they still sat side by side, close enough for their shoulders to brush. He hoped that he was drunk enough to forget this. It was fine, as long as he forgot the whole thing, even if Mu-yeol didn’t.  He tried not to think about how much it meant to him, to have a hyung of his own. He should thank Mu-yeol for his pity, ha.    “Bah, enough of me. I’m sick of me. Talk about yourself.” Jun instructed and he drank from his soju bottle, the alcohol burning quite pleasantly. 

  MARLIN:   Mu-yeol chuckled low in his throat and grabbed another bottle of soju and drank straight from it. Talk about himself? He was never good at that.    “Well, what should I say, huh?” He laughed. “What could distract you for a night?”  

JUN:  “Anything,” said Jun at once. He groaned a little, lifted a hand to his forehead to rub with two fingers. This was why he didn’t cry, eh? Crying was painful, he hated it so much.    “Tell me-- tell me about Daegu, eh? I never visited. I never went anywhere though, eh, just stayed in Boseong and South Jeolla,” rambled Jun. “We went to a few...surrounding towns and things, to put my eomma’s pottery in cafes. She is a talented potter, you know.” Mu-yeol did; he’d known Eun-jung for years after all. Even now, Eun-jung had some of her ceramics displayed in Hatter’s, [name redacted], and there was a shelf in the store. She did not sell many things, but what she did sell, she was proud of. 

  MARLIN:   “She’s very talented. Your mother always seemed like an artist, even before I knew.” Mu-yeol said. “Have you ever been to Seoul? I lived there for a while too. Daegu is more beautiful, and feels more like home, but Seoul was...until the end, Seoul was good to me.”   “Daegu is surrounded by mountains, it sometimes feels like you’re straight out of a fairytale. Like the modern Korean city was plucked out of the works and placed in a storybook setting. I miss Seoul. I miss Daegu more, even if Seoul was where I lived with Nam-min’s mother. Daegu is where I fell in love with her.”   He sighed and smiled sadly before he drank straight from a bottle of soju. That was all so, so long ago now.   He hoped Tiffany made Jun as happy as So-yeon made him. He knew she didn’t.   “I wonder if I would recognize the city if I went back. Or the Hollow that I grew up in.”  

JUN:  Jun hadn’t been to Seoul. When he met other Koreans, whether first or second or third generation, this was a question that came up. Not so much second-generation, but still. He always felt fake when he admitted that he’d never been to his country’s capital...that there was much of his home he never saw. Most of the Korean families he met anyway came from the city areas up north. When he mentioned Boseong, they always nodded before saying anything else. Jun could hear their thoughts: ah, from the country. Ah, he’s not educated.    Such judgments always pushed Jun harder to work on his doctor’s license. That was why Eomma and Abeoji always pushed him, wasn’t it? Their family came from humble means, and South Korea was stratified by class like most of the stupid world. Jun had to prove that he was more than just a boy from the tea fields.   For a while, the ruse had worked, but the world had now beat Jun back into place. He chuckled sadly. A fairy had even been to Seoul. A fairy. And he hadn’t.    “I hope the fields are how I remember them,” Jun commented instead of revealing the depth of his own inadequacy. “So green. And it smelled amazing. I still brew green tea when I miss home, just to smell it.” He sighed and looked at Mu-yeol. “Daegu sounds beautiful.” A beat. “I’m sorry...you lost so much.” 

  MARLIN:   “I’ve never been to Boseong, but I’ve spent time in other parts of the countryside. Country people are the kindest people. Don’t let people who can only speak in a Seoul dialect talk down on your family for being from the country. Or worse - people who can only speak English.”   He smiled almost devilishly and slipped purposely into his own native dialect, curious if Jun could follow Daegu dialect Korean. He’d lived in Korea for ten years, his parents spoke in a regional dialect when they weren’t careful, so Mu-yeol suspected Jun may be able to.   “You know there were probably Hollows, at least one, around Boseong. Hollows usually thrive in the countryside, but my home Hollow in Daegu is as ancient as the Korean Peninsula. The city was born and our Hollow never moved. Ironically, the war breathed a new life into it. Refugees from the North, including my father, flocked from firebombed Hollows, fleeing Soviet, North Korean, and Chinese soldiers killing any fairy they saw. Dictatorships and their soldiers don’t take kindly to magicks of any sort.”   He sipped from his bottle of soju and sighed wistfully. “It was beautiful. And so was-” he almost said ‘she’, but god, that would make this so sad, wouldn’t it?    This wasn’t about him. This weekend was about Tae and Jun. Jun was one whose father was dying. Mu-yeol’s wife had been dead for over a decade. He didn’t get to whine. Then Jun gave him the opportunity and he wondered if he was cleverly using his grief to avoid his own. Well, he wasn’t selfish. He’d not burst into tears and make this a woe is Mu-yeol, the maladjusted widower, the shame of Daegu moment, but he’d give Jun permission to eventually access the full tragic backstory.   That’s what friends do, after all. And Jun had called him hyung.    “Humans measure time in B.C.E. and C.E. My metric is before May 15th, 2006, and after. I should stop whining that I didn’t have So-yeon for longer and just be grateful I got to have her for the ten years I did. Some people get even less time.” Mu-yeol sipped more soju, the pleasant burn made talking about this easier. “But I’m not that big of a person. My anger’s too big.”   He smiled sadly at Jun. “I hope someday you are as happy as I was, before the fifteenth of May. And I hope you get to stay that way for a long time.”