OC Name: Oh Dae-Jun
Character Age: 25
Canon Spot & Family: first son of Deputy Minister Oh of the Ministry of Works
Occupation: Senior Official (5A) of the Ministry of Works
Marital Status: unmarried
Personality Traits: + kind, understanding ; - naïve, self-sacrificing
do not mistake your father’s kindness for love.
when daejun was born, his father raised him like a trophy and declared: you will surpass me one day.
there was nothing but jealousy, fear, hatred in the boy who stole his youth and his wife’s affections by mere existence. he was already threatened by others outside of the home. sanctuary could no longer be found, and this short, stout man – who would not have had a wife at all had it not been for his own mother’s interventions – suddenly found himself letting the babe go in the warmth of his wife’s embrace. there, again, flared the jealousy in him: she had not lain with him for a while, and perhaps even the boy was the child of another.
whore, he thought. dirty pig, opening your cunt to every tall, handsome nobody.
then, the boy wailed, and only then did a younger, more amicable minister oh recognise any sort of similarity between himself and this blood-stained child, all that blood still crusting over on round cheeks. this was no cherub (only perhaps in memory of pregnant fantasies). this was human, to wail in the nothing, and to cry in suffering he did not yet know.
only then did the minister pick him up again, cradled now in cloth by bustling midwives, and held him away from his unconscious wife.
daejun, he said. you will be daejun, and you will surpass me one day.
in this home, goodbyes are arbitrary.
he grows up knowing that his father will die one day.
he is taken to every excursion, made to hide under the floorboards or behind the screen when there are words passed around that he doesn’t understand between men too old to be alive. when his sister is born he mourns for her, for the love his father lacks. the man has nothing in his heart, and nothing is ever enough. there are enemies around the corner, in the shadows; daejun’s nightmares come in the form of sword-armed men crawling through the spaces between their home, in the shadows, slashing his throat and his sister’s and his mother’s. when the sun rises he is once again bright, beaming, too eager to prove himself good and true.
but his father’s tales are only confined in dreams, in the night, in the dark. daejun was never told that it’d be in the sidelong glances of the day, the sleight-of-hand deception that takes him under.
for ten days he is asleep.
in those ten days, his mother is taken from him by her own heart.
she has always been frail, by her kindness and health, always proud of daejun despite his failures. it was love that killed her, they said: her heart couldn’t bear the thought of your death. he missed her funeral, and missed his goodbyes, and it was love that died before pride.
he is the only one you have. this is the only life you know.
in the aftermath years, the consequences ripple relentlessly through time. he finishes his studies and refuses a wife. his hands are stroked with ink and his sleeves constantly being repaired for being worn. the work is non-stop, the work is endless, and the enemies only increase in number. soon there will be no home for him to return to; if they are not persuasive, if they don’t get the power and support they need from the people, all this tyranny will continue into forever, and forever, and forever.
all the weapon he wants to wield is a word he cannot yet find.