early years

Yonghwa had grown up being more brawn than brains. The days of his youth were spent outside playing with the few children that still remained in Gijang, or effortlessly by himself. Every birthday he was gifted toy guns or model aircrafts, new shiny sneakers or on one special occasion at the age of 10, his first bike. Never a book, not even a journal from a distant relative who hardly knew him - because even a stranger could tell what kind of kid he was. He was the type of child that tanned a deep brown by late summer - as if the memories of long days spent exploring could be stored in pigment alone - the type of child that was restless in the long winter, who would grow big and strong and in love enough with his surroundings to stay in a town that carried more fish and farm than people. Everyone expected him to inherent the business of land or sea, or both even, but never that he'd be lost to a maze of words - especially not those that differed so wildly from theirs.

But what no one had factored in was the imagination that had fueled him for all those years. That had set him aside from his peers and made him the head of every game, of every exploration of a land too small to continue mapping for as many years as the children of Gijang did. His mother had thought he would shed the dreamer stage of his childhood as everyone else did. But an overworking imagination is not a thing that simply stops. Even if he never fed it with books, his curiosity supplied enough plots for stories to develop on its own. And in the moments when outside was dangerous with the seasons, he'd find travels in stories told to him by whatever relative was taking a break from the endless toil of living on a countryside. Word of mouth were his storybooks - fishermen tales and the folklore as old as the sea itself - things he heard so often that they were committed to memory, rewritten through every telling until the lingered unique in a mind constantly shifting them greater.

Everything became a riddle to Yonghwa - a thing that needed a back story, an explanation, in a town like Gijang he learnt that nothing was simply what met the eye. He collected objects from his neighborhood travels - clutter, his mother called it - but treasures to him, artifacts that each had a tale to tell but no one ever asked him what they were. So he kept this second life to himself without even knowing it, staying up late nights in bed thinking of finding other lands if he crossed the right road or ducked behind the right bush. He never thought to write it down, never thought it strange or unique because no one else did.

They had also not factored in that he could fall out of love with the small world he had built in the soil around him. That as childhood spiraled into teenage years he would grow to see that he was the only thing growing in a place that went on so steady it felt stagnant. At 13, a few years into going to school in the city, a teacher had caught a glimpse of the wild thing Yonghwa kept within him. He made a deal with the boy - that if he could capture snap shots of the teeming life inside his head, it would be sufficient extra credit to turn a failing grade in Korean into a passing one. So Yonghwa started to write with a typewriter he had bought with his allowance, to much of his parent's surprise the day he brought it home. The effort of pressing each key turned it into as much of an acitivity as each step taken outside had been. These, however, were steps taken towards a direction that would lead him very far from home.

This deal went on for years and grew over the passing of them. From extra credit to trading his own stories for borrowed copies of books already written. At first Yonghwa only read on the bus to and from the city, still favoring the wide eyed fascination of seeing the world exist around him. But the books had awoken a new hunger in him. One that had him paying more attention in classes, actually trying in hated subjects such as English just to no longer have to wait for a book to be translated. And then - as he got closer to the end of his highschool career - to be able to appreciate the stories as they had first been told. He broke all expectations from family to friends to sport teams when he went on to study to go to University, not even in Busan, but in the distant land of Seoul, with sudden dreams of going abroad, because now he understood that there was so much left for him to see.

Their biggest oversight, however, had been to not factored in that he could fall in love. Not with the city nearby or the city above them or the new worlds he was learning about. But fall in love with someone. Fall so in love, with so much of himself, that it could only change everything dramatically. In his last year of highschool he had met a girl -The Girl - Jiae. Beautiful as she was cold to most but seemingly interested in him. Him! A small town bumpkin who was loud and rowdy and still thought he could stand by her side if he tried hard enough. And try hard he did. They got to know one another, taking a crash course of their lives thus far and their dreams that stretched out as far as their youthful hearts could take them. By the time highschool ended they had taken their lives and woven them together, tied each dream and aspiration that one had to the others. They made sure that there could be no one without the other.

later years

It wasn't him that moved to Seoul with trinkets of his youth but them. Seperate but together in their matching shitty apartments, both of them fitting in and sticking out in their classes in the most opposite of ways. They would come together in one of their beds almost every night and trade stories, hers short and his far too long. They spent a year like this, in what he saw as a perfection that would obviously carry on forever. But as he grew with wonder at all Seoul had to offer, Jiae found disatisfaction where she could. First in her surroundings, far below her expectations, and then in him.

Writing was not a profitable dream. And not a secure one, either. To her, Yonghwa's always growing hoard of friends was something to distrust and all day explorations of the city had become something he was made to do alone instead of their usual walks together. These changes in Jiae's views happened slowly at first, met only occasionally with fights that were more skirmishes than declarations of war, and then constant, like rain intent on drowning everything beneath it. Yonghwa did his best to build a ship that could survive this. A rough patch, he'd say to his friends once he had drunk enough to talk around it, smiling like it was fine because it had to be. They were forever, they were happy ever after, this was simply the scary part in the middle of the book.

Jiae broke up with him half way through his second year. He learnt soon after that she had found someone else immediately, someone who was studying engineering a year above him and was set to start an internship at a company whose logo was on everything he owned. Yonghwa sold every electronic device he owned after that but kept every artifact that contained the story of their love. He applied to study abroad to get away from what he couldn't leave behind any other way and made it out of charm alone and lack of applications from his department. California was another Them place, somewhere they had talked about in Busan when looking at Universities as gateways from where they were to their future. Everything was a Them thing, as if by ripping herself away from him she had done more than tear his view of everything before him into tatters - she had also left ghosts in all the gaps left behind.

A few months before he was due to leave they started to talk again. Their 18 year old selves had done such a good job of intertwining all they were to one another. It was inevitable to find their way to one another, to settle back rightly into each other. Or so he thought. All it took was a few week of messages for him to shed all the tar that coated the insides of his heart, revealing anew the love that existed beneath it. His friends tutted and distrusted at every turn he stumbled back into love for her. A few weeks before he was meant to be leaving - weeks spent on dates and quiet moments that make him think they are doing things right and taking it slow - Yonghwa doesn't ask her to come with him but asks her to wait for him to come back a made man to be proud of. To which she tells him with a perfect air of casualness that she had never left her stable builder of machines.

He leaves for the sunshine still trying to gasp in air after that drowning rain of a heartbreak, carrying so much weight on his shoulders he's almost sure the airplane won't take off with him in it. But he never once blames her for it. It was him who thought wrong, him who believed like always that more existed behind things that simply were. A belief touched once again by the darkness she had reintroduced into his life, their real always. A belief that even when tainted, could not be shook off. He went on believing in California - in the new people he met, in the wonders Los Angeles (and by extension, the rest of the world) had in store for him. Yonghwa started to film snippets of his time there from a camera borrowed from the family he was staying with, finding new layers of magic in the mundane; he documented his trips, first to thrift shops - the fastest way to time travel, to move through different dimensions, to unearth artifacts whose backstories still needed exploring out - then further out still, on road trips with friends and lone trips to abandoned somewheres.

It's in California he learnt to hold darkness by the shoulders and drag it out into the light. The short stories he had written while in Seoul and at the start of his journey were left to one side as he started something new. Every place he had visited, every story he had heard and thought and double lives and abandoned ruins he had witnessed came together bound by one thing and one thing only: belief. A belief that trying hard enough, even when caught in a loop turned spiral downwards, would get you towards where you wanted to go. For the first time Yonghwa had two clear goals: he'd get that belief out there and he'd get himself back to Jiae's side. And he did both, one followed seamlessly by the next.

They had talked during his days abroad - something some would judge as weakeness on his part, and most saw as unavoidable. Jiae's sporadic encouragement and hardly polite interest in his ever growing but never fruitful affair with writing shifted as the summer went from failed manuscripts to a deal with a small printing press. This lead him from a writing internship to a full time job as an assistant writer for Warehouse 13. Yonghwa saw this as simple could be: miracles happened in threes. A friendship maintained, a dream achieved and a new dream born. University was put on hold as the road ahead spiraled on a steady upwards track. Just as quickly and surely as he had moved his whole life to California, he was off to New York and then travelling to Toronto to write on set.

A couple months into his position, every moment not spent writing was spent talking to Jiae. Texts became calls which became video calls that lasted longer than sleep did. As turbulent and sudden as always, her familiar presence was fully back in his life. Decisions were made with an echoing fire of all structures once built when they were both 18. Jiae was moving to his home in New York, she would study fashion there, take up blogging, anything to intertwine her dream with his, her life with his. By the time they were back together Yonghwa had forgotten all about befores, all about every bump and bruise he'd carry after every talk with her. Every day off, every long weekend would be spent travelling to be with her - each moment was bathed in the golden light of ultimately having her arms looped around him. The shine that came from fool's gold would only last for so long. His job required to spend more time in Toronto than not during filming season, it meant partiest and dinners with crowds so vastly different from her own that she would never attend or visit. Every second Yonghwa spent away was a second that the light that came from her dimmed - no, not just dimmed - but shifted.

There was no easy way to confront the rumors of her cheating. There was nowhere his imagination had gone in his life time that could've prepared him for his life splitting cleanly in two. One an eternal glimmering gold and the other rotting outwards a black so dark it was easy to get lost in. Denial lead to confrontation that lead to admittance that lead to blame. A blame that had a backstory now five years in the making, how her life had been wasted at his hands. A blame that battled his belief for many more years to come. Even as their forever love ruptured once more into fragments, they were fragments Yonghwa could never fully sweep away. They hung around like ghostly wind chimes that whispered the worst and haunted the best. All he could've had, all he had lost, what had been done to him?

In the wake of her departure, Yonghwa had one source of light to cling to: writing. As filming for the last season wrapped, Yonghwa approached Netflix for the chance to get his latest story produced. A story about lost love, fated lovers seperated and trying, despite the worst, to find each other once again. Adrift got approved for production and success found him as suddenly and surely as it had once before. The news of the show brought Jiae back to his side - his eternal blessed curse. Their fragments glimmered like enchanting spells under the right light if she wanted them to. It made it easy for her to step back into his life once she had him at his most vulnerable, armed with the language of his old love. It would last months at a time, with months inbetween - long winters, short summers. Everyone saw it as a fact of life: Yonghwa believed to a fault, he'd always fall into shadows and then turn towards light. No one knew which was which with her, because with each story he told of her she could easily be either, hero or villain, or both. The worst of it all was, in his stories, Yonghwa also sounded like both.

When Yonghwa was not with her he would hardly date. He avoided all things serious like he thought love was a spell he had casted badly from the start and it was bound to go on badly forever. But the fear split into rivers even deeper and darker than thoughts like those. They were named guilt, shame, and much darker words, names he could not say despite knowing them to be true. Through all of this he worked - his single salvation. When he wasn't travelling for filming he was living in New York or Seoul, spending all his time distracted from either all she'd take from him or all the weight she'd return to tack on.

The last time they break it off he is a fresh 27. Yonghwa has been all over the world, published another book and his show is renewed for it's third season, and looking at the world that holds more journeys than it seems to hold days to have them. But around her, the world hardly casts a glimmer and Yonghwa knows it has to end, not for now but forever. Not for him but for them. Not just with despair but with a hope that there was better out there for them both. He tells her this, more doubt than belief as he speaks to her, and it ends with man becoming a true monster for giving up. It was the last he saw of her for a long time.

Yonghwa became sure of one thing but plagued by another: he had been right to break their forever, but had she been right about him as well? That ghoulish nightmare revisits him weeks before his 28th year. Jiae shows up sobbing at his front door, wet and once again broken for him. He has to let her in even if her cries of too late regret for all her actions now sound more nail to chalkboard than arrow to heart. He has to be kind despite the anger that licks at his insides, that constant rage for all she had done to him, for each dream and hope she had done more than just shattered. They were tainted. He was tainted. He knew this as her words twisted back into daggers like always, sinking into skin as she pulled out the names of others he had been with since her like they mattered. Like they had weight, like it was him that had drove her to this place of ruin each time - so she had to return the favor, right?

Right? She asked as one blade is traded for the other. You thought I'd let someone else have you after you let me waste my life on you, right? All those years I wasted on you. At first he couldn't tell words apart from action. Jiae wore a kitchen knife in the hand he had once envionsed wearing a simple band of silver. It came down with a different kind of shine - aiming towards his heart as she dug through his chest, making him stagger back with more shock than impact. Please. Please, no. Please. Is all Yonghwa can remember having said or done. He can remember the knife coming down another 13 times, plunging deep into his stomach. Two while he was standing, eleven more as he laid on the ground of a living room that had been theirs so many times over the years.

He can remember trying to grab a hold of her as she kept talking, trying to still beg her to stop while she could. For a moment it felt possible, manicured nails wrapping red over a phone as she called the police with a trembling voice of hysterics. Not for help, not to turn herself in and make things as right as she could after making them as wrong as possible - but to delcare it to the world: if we can't have each other, no one can. The deranged speech finished the only way it could, with her knife lifted from him to her, dragging his blood over her own neck as she traced a sure line there while staring down at him. He can't remember what he said the whole time through, if anything, all that stays is the memory of her body laying over his as they both bled a warm blanket over him.

The police find him barely conscious, rushed to the ambulance as worried whispers assume the worst. He had lost so much, so much had been destroyed. It's in the ride over to the hospital that it begins to happen. The gashes on his skin darken and begin to peel away at the whole of him. Paramedics watch in horror as the pale man bathed in red takes a turn to an unimaginable worse. By the time he is in the hospital the correct people have been called. In a white room he shifts fully for the same time and spends the night screaming with new life.

That's the extent of what he's told when he wakes up in the Safe Haven, ready to believe this another nightmare - another fiction to write as shadow to then bring into the light. But this is real. Her knife had run deeper than either of them had expected. It carved out something from within him, something with yellow eyes and sharp teeth, with claws that was feral and worst of all, had been what kept him alive. Yonghwa was now more a part of the peculiar and the magical than he would've ever expected. But he was not a simple boy that through love and belief found his own grand abilities - no - he was a man that had been given a beast to carry inside. A real beast. One that took him so far in the shadows he wondered if he'd be able to touch light again.