— Gender/Pronouns: Demiboy, He/They
— Date of Birth: February 20th, 1994
— Place of Birth: Incheon, South Korea
— Current Residence: Downtown
— Occupation: Surgical intern
— Faceclaim: Kim Seokwoo
Trigger Warnings: Terminal Illness, Death
Echoes of sounds bounce off the walls of the chapel, filling the empty aisles and seeping into the crevices, into every corner that they can find. Screams can be heard from somewhere close to the podium, a young woman with more to lose than she ever anticipated. Feeling doesn’t come easily to her, and neither does attachment, but the baby she’s currently bringing into the world still feels like everything to her. Even under these circumstances. Even stranded in the church that she’s forced to come to, with only the help of her baby’s father and the priest who saves souls here.
Henry is born at the altar, crying and cold, and his mother takes him into her arms and holds him to her chest, snuggling him in against any bare part of her skin that she can find.
Time passes. Henry lives in a world of dreams, a whimsical sort of child, curious and imaginative and outspoken. He skips through the hallways of his childhood home, traverses the large gardens and gets lost amongst the flora. His mother calls to him from the patio, sometimes drawing him from his own head into the real world, and he goes to her with smiles and warmth.
Father isn’t around very much. Mother tells him it’s because he’s working hard to help them keep their big house and their gardens and all of their nice things, but Henry doesn’t understand that as well as she thinks that he does. Moreover, he doesn’t see why that means Father can’t be here to tell him goodnight or wish him a good morning, and he finds himself wondering as he grows older whether the man cares about him at all. Aside from birthdays and holidays, it’s a rare occurrence that he gets to spend time with him, and even then it feels brief and estranged.
Henry misses him fiercely.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, USA
Henry is ten years old when they move for Father’s work. He cries about it at first, struggles against it, begs for them to not make him leave his friends, his family behind. He claims he’ll miss Grandmother too much if they leave her in Korea, and Mother tells him that they’re going to take care of her no matter what, and they’ll come back to visit her, too. Henry is forced to accept this, as he is far too young to make these decisions on his own, and somewhere inside of him he knows it, too.
Father starts being gone for longer hours, if that is even possible, and when he comes home, his brow is too often knit with consternation. His shoulders become more and more withdrawn, like they’re being weighted down with something, and Henry begins to worry as well, picking up with the vibes in his household more effectively than he would have if they were words spoken aloud. Mother seems oblivious, or at least she pretends to be — she’s the perfect homemaker, just like she always has been, and that’s something. It’s some sort of stability, especially when he’s entering his preteen years feeling so off-kilter, having to learn a new language and adjusts to a new private school.
Age thirteen is the first year they begin to integrate themselves into the social group that they will spend almost as long as Henry can remember among. Cannes the year after that is the first time he falls in love, or so he thinks.
Boy on the beach, boy in the garden, boy passing him in the halls at night with the cheeky smile and the wild light in his eyes — Henry thinks he’ll never breathe again, all those times that the oxygen gets pushed from his lings, hitched in his throat. Of course, he couldn’t possibly tell him that, if only because it’s far too terrifying, and because he’s too young and naive at this point to understand that he doesn’t stand a chance. That he never stood a chance when most of these families had already been coming here since long before his was even thought of, and perhaps they’re more on the outs than he had originally anticipated.
Father works now more than ever, not coming home sometimes until the early hours of the morning. Mother and Henry pretend to not see the weariness that he displays, though most of the worry has long since hardened into determined resolve. His company has blossomed, flourished in the international economy. They want for nothing in their mansion, at least three times as large as their old home, and mother starts staying in her room more when they hire housekeepers, cooks.
Henry goes to her every day after school. Sometimes she even rolls over to look at him.
Henry is fifteen when father’s business evolves with yet another expansion. They purchase a third home, this time in London, and Henry is thrust into a whole new environment with a whole new dialect to learn. Mother still takes to her room just like she has for the last couple of years, and he still goes to her, watching her deteriorating health. Now it’s broken up by expensive doctor’s visits that he isn’t allowed to attend with her, though he tries his damnedest to do just that, and father begins frowning more again.
At sixteen, he finds out why father is so stressed all the time, and then he finds out that there’s more to it than he ever imagined. The darkest side of the business that he’s in becomes apparent one night when he overhears a hushed conversation on the phone, stood outside of Father’s office with the intention of demanding answers from him regarding Mother’s health, only he gets different answers than he’d ever imagined. Shady dealings going on behind the scenes between his father and other men of power could be the death of anybody who were to find out, and when he’s caught listening in, he finds for the first time in his life that he’s actually afraid of the man who has raised him.
I do this for all of us, Father tells him fiercely, and Henry nods like he understands, like it all makes sense to him, and tries to ignore the way Father nervously runs his hands through his hair and casts his gaze towards his and Mother’s bedroom.
On Henry’s seventeenth birthday, when Mother is going about making the same cake that she’s made for him every year for as long as he can remember, she collapses. Henry calls 999 without a second thought, and he holds her head in his lap and kisses her forehead until the paramedics show up and take her away in the ambulance. He races through the streets of London, calling Father over and over again, and when he makes it to the hospital, he’s forced to sit in the waiting room alone for hours before the man shows up to be with him.
This is the day that Henry learns Mother is going to die.
Taking care of Mother becomes more his choice than his lot in life. He makes sure to spend every moment with her that he can, and as per her request, they even move back to their home in Korea to make her most comfortable during the last months of her life. As time passes, Henry becomes more and more withdrawn, quieter and less bright, less curious, less imaginative. Father works just as much as ever, and he begins to resent him to a degree that he hadn’t though was possible until it began to happen.
This is when he begins to become a social media presence, throwing himself into the digital world as a form of escapism. He gains followers so quickly he practically doesn’t even understand the significance of it all, and he updates his Instagram and Twitter feeds with pretty pictures of a pretty life that almost doesn’t belong to him, ignoring his trials and tribulations and all of his hurts in favor of living in a fantasy.
Henry is seventeen when his mother passes away. This is, by far, the hardest year of his life. Father is somehow around even less in the aftermath, traveling between London and LA and leaving Henry to study. He doesn’t forgive him for it, just like he doesn’t forgive him for anything else; he practically blames him, in fact, for all of the stress that caused Mother to deteriorate further in those early days.
Early admission into a university in Maine is as difficult a thing as it seems, and Henry manages it not based entirely on money, but on academic capability as well. He knows that his mother would be proud of him, if she were around to see it, and on top of that, it presents an opportunity to be away from Father, which he’s only all too willing to jump at.
Studying pre-med is one of the only things that he’s ever dreamt about and known he was going to for sure do, and the fact he’s managed it all but on his own only gives him more satisfaction, making it easy for him to continue building that resentment towards Father when he knows that he doesn’t really need him in the long run.
Years pass, and he earns a degree, only deciding to stay in Maywood for that time because of connections that he’s made and people that he’s come to know. When Henry finishes school, he has a long trail of personal messiness strewn out behind him, and he tries not to look back because that’s always gotten him into trouble in the past.
What ends up continuing to keep him there, however, is something else entirely.
A baby is born. His baby. It comes as a shock, like being dunked suddenly into a pool of cold water, and just as suddenly as he’s holding her in his arms, he becomes a father.
From this point forward, Henry vows to never make his child feel the way that he felt, vows to always be there for birthdays, for holidays, for anything and for everything. Even when he starts his new job as surgical intern and becomes busier than ever, he still makes time for his child and he never stays away from her for than a day’s work at a time.
HYUNTAE CHOI is currently played by Hazel.
discoholicmusic
jacobvanloon
andulkaphoto
vaporwave
annaxmalina