@shuteyed - Tumblr Blog

TURNSTILES — @shuteyed

It's late. Super late. The night sky is a dark, inky indigo with a dusting of stars. Jiyeon can hear laughing and singing, even from outside. They're celebrating her great uncle, a man closer to death than whatever life he was still clinging onto. Aunts, uncles, and cousins have all come together to celebrate what might be the man's last birthday. Jiyeon can imagine that after a certain age, you start to just wish for it. She likes to think that she'd live to see mid-50s at most, or rather she just hopes.

There's really no telling how much longer the party will go on for. Jiyeon sighs, and starts heading back inside.

They're a rambunctious bunch, to put it lightly. She squeezes past close and distant cousins, narrowly escapes the troupe of aunties desperately trying to set her up with someone (anyone, you're not getting any younger Jiyeon!), and incoherent uncles. It's a skill, honestly. Luckily, she makes it back to her seat in one piece. Jiyeon eyes Seongmin wearily, and sighs again.

"I mean, why even bother going all out? The old man was put to bed hours ago." She picks up her drink, which had gone warm and flat some time ago. "But I guess they've been looking for any old excuse to all get together, huh?"

Her relationship with Seongmin was ... tepid at best, apathetic at worst. Everything was so much easier when they were kids. Maybe that was just how adulthood worked. Still, Seongmin is her favorite distantly-related cousin. That surely had to mean something. "Well, how's Ilwoo? No doubt spreading good and joy to the world."

shuteyed

seongmin has always liked this part of parties the most, when the sun has long dipped below the horizon and the conversations shift from small talk to the truly riveting stuff they can come up with instead, like the newest season of the dating show all the cousins have watched or the juiciest bit of neighbourhood gossip.

they're a big clan, the hans. it's a natural consequence of the land; there had been many of them, or seongmin's been told, when the town was thriving, and none of them left. in a small town like onyang, children of the truly local families can bump into their peers and are likely to find some relation if they bother to dig far enough back. and somehow, for some reason, seongmin's so-called uncle has invited all of them.

jiyeon squeezes in next to him during a lull of the conversation, which had started around a card- turned drinking game and then devolved into storytelling, tales all of them have heard often enough before that they bore seongmin to tears. he shuffles his chair around to face her, putting his back to the group of younger cousins too deep into their cups, and slips his phone back into his pocket.

"any excuse to party is good enough," he snorts, surely imparting wise advice. they're words he's lived by all his life. "why, jiyeon, not having fun?"

they don't know each other that well, not anymore. or, rather: at these things they talk plenty, and when they bump into each other in the street. jiyeon gets invites to backyard parties seongmin and ilwoo host. but they don't hang out the way they used to as kids, the natural consequence of growing up and the loss shared between them.

"ilwoo's doing great. we've been thinking about redoing the kitchen. pull out that backsplash, the works." or rather, seongmin has been thinking about it and they've talked about it twice, each time noncommittal while distracted by a show on tv. it's one of those projects you put on an endless list and never intend on getting to, not really.

#file: jiyeon #jiyeon: turnstiles

@theantlergod / YOU HEAR YOUR SIBLING’S VOICE CALLING FROM THE TREES—

which doesn’t make sense, because your sibling’s been gone for a while now. but you hear it clear as day as you’re walking near the treeline, their voice calling your name; young and warbling like the birds singing behind it. it doesn’t make sense, but you follow it anyway. you crash too fast through the underbrush and chase the voice that sounds like it’s running from you, like it’s luring you. by the time it halts, echoes around you in a laugh, you’re panting and tired. the back of your throat is dry, even if the sun can’t reach you between the thick blanket of leaves overhead. at your feet is a briar patch. it’s sprawling and overgrown for as far as you can see. the thorns of it are thick, curved, waiting like fish hooks in a pond. and in the middle, sitting like bait, is the bracelet you gave to your sibling on their very last birthday, woven from colorful string, now desaturated after so many years exposed. they were here and now, so are you.

DO YOU…

>leave the bracelet be and return home. >reach into the briars and take it.

the woods are dark and deep, and when seongmin steps into them it always feels like he's been swallowed by something greater than himself; like he's a mouse in a trap, a fish about to be gulped down by a predator. the trees stand imposing and large, the melody of the birdsong seems distorted and unreal. his breath comes shorter here, like it's being stolen out of his lungs. every time he turns, he expects to see some shadowed hand reaching out for him from the underbrush, seeking to drag him down into the earth.

seongmin knows the forest well, even if he never really enters it anymore. it comes to him in his dreams, and those weird disjointed visions. he knows how to orient himself beneath the canopies, because he's wandered the moss-covered ground for endless hours, his body still but his eyes seeing. he knows when what flowers start blooming, and when it's worth hunting for mushrooms. he's seen all sorts of wildlife, though some of it comes to him dead, or with missing limbs.

he's seen plenty of the forest. but he's never heard it. and when seonghee's voice echoes in the green, there is nothing he can do but follow it. his steps pick up speed, and then he's running, like there might be a way for him to reach and find her alive, waiting for him breathing and real and not like the dead girl that haunts his dreams.

it's madness, he thinks, that out of sort feeling when he finally stops. madness has driven him to this point, and now he must gather himself and try to find his way home, even if it seems like an impossibility. for two decades now he's been chasing after a twin who no longer exists. he'll always be stuck in the past that way. one half of him will forever be lying on that snow-covered ground twenty-one years ago, eyes turned towards the sky and seeing nothing at all.

the bracelet is weathered and old, old enough that seongmin had no recollection of it until now. but it comes back to him within moments; the two of them kneeling at their crafts table at their last shared birthday party. all their friends had walked out with their knotted friendship bracelets, adorned with plastic beads and cheap charms, but seonghee and seongmin had remained there for longer, even after the guests had left. they'd exchanged the fruits of their labour with great pride. seongmin had lost his a month or two later, one day on the playground. he hadn't even noticed it was gone until they got home.

and seonghee's is here now, a reminder of her existence.

there's no other choice. seongmin reaches into the briars.

#antlergod:submit #s1ep1:forest

segamascott

#/ something entirely undignified has happened to me: i caught a cold in the middle of summer #i WILL be back to dms near you for plotting asap. i'm so sorry for the slowness but i do not believe you want to hear my feverish ramblings

ech0h

ESCAPE / two days ago, driving outside of town with @shuteyed ilwoo has one hand curled loose around the steering wheel. his other arm is hanging long outside the window in the way that driving instructors tell you never to do, because that’s a good way to lose it in an accident. but ilwoo doesn’t care, and he was never taught under a driving instructor anyway. just his uncle in a rusted up beater that ilwoo later ran into a tree.

he always has mixed feelings about driving out of town. it should just be enjoyable, it’s not a great town. sometimes it feels like living inside of a something gutted and dying, just waiting for it to rot away into nothing. to rot him along with it. what pulls him back is always the forest, which shouldn’t even factor in. there are plenty of forests in plenty of places. better forests even, in better places. but they don’t feel the same. ilwoo knows because he’s driven out to them white-knuckling the steering wheel and stubborn about it. but they feel wrong. whatever the opposite of home is. so that’s what he feels like as he eases his foot down a little too heavy on the gas pedal, enough that the engine lets out its guttural whine. if it were any other car, he’d be questioning it. but it’s his, and so he knows what kinds of broken he can ignore. “what’d you need to get, anyway?” ilwoo’s entirely sure seongmin’s already told him, but sometimes it’s hard to make the words stick when it’s not stressed that they’re the important sort he needs to hang his attention on. he’d picked up on the key details anyway; they needed to drive a town over, seongmin had something to do. an excuse to leave and that had been about the time ilwoo had stopped processing everything he was listening to, apparently. underneath his voice, the music cracks and pops with static. there’s an aux chord, one end of it plugged into a phone old enough that it still has something to plug into. the phone’s cracked, and ilwoo keeps it in the car like a backup album reel. it’s not too far of a drive, not with the way ilwoo keeps leaning his weight down against that pedal. but he feels it at his back, onyang. like something meat-hooked through a shoulder, trying to pull him home. he does his best to ignore it.

shuteyed

you can leave onyang, but not really. it sits in your bones and fills your lungs, even when you're breathing in the air of a far-away city. when the car passes the road signs of the next village over, seongmin, without putting any thought into it, watches their home disappear in the rearview mirror, swallowed by the scenery.

it isn't something he dwells on. once they've made that turn in the road, seongmin busies himself by scrolling through the makeshift jukebox until he finds an album they both like and used to listen to back in school, a lifetime ago. "we promised my mum to pick up those prints," he reminds ilwoo, for the third time now. it's a little infuriating that he feels fond rather than irritated when he does. ilwoo had, after all, not bothered asking questions when seongmin had caught him after his shift, and he'd easily agreed to drive without even knowing what they were heading out for.

it's what makes it so easy to be together. seongmin tips his head back until it hits the headrest, watches ilwoo's expression out of the corner of his eye. like this - driving the car, tinkering in the garage - he's in his element. his whole life spent growing into himself, and seongmin has been with him every step of the way. ilwoo's like an anchor; steadying, not dragging him down. a man to return to, again and again.

"maybe we get groceries too. i think we're, uh, almost out of beer?" the foodstuff seongmin will happily buy from his parents, from whom they get the family discount, but he'd learnt at a very young age that they'll start hounding him if they pick up more alcohol or snacks than deemed reasonable; it's why he likes to stock up elsewhere, like a teen still hiding the soju his brother had bought him under the bed.

sometimes, in onyang, it feels like he'll never be able to fully grow up. there's just too many of their parent's generation that see them as children, even if they'll gossip with seongmin the same way they would with his mother. everyone just knows too much about each other, maybe, and seongmin's even more of an unwilling voyeur in-between. or maybe that's his own problem, something he's imagining as some sort of fucked-up excuse for the weird way it makes him feel to be home.

#file: ilwoo #ilwoo: escape

hello and happy opening 🥳i'm wren (s/h), here with my boy seongmin. all info is under the cut, leave a like and i'll come talk to you! or add me on discord - my @ is under the cut.

han seongmin / 31 / freelance accountant / elk

stats page / background

tw: death of a twin born in february 1994 as one half as a set. seonghee was just a couple of minutes younger, and seongmin made sure she wouldn't forget it. they were attached at the hip not insofar as they didn't have seperate interests, but with onyang being, well, tiny, they shared the same friends and would come as a package deal through early childhood and elementary school. in january 2004, right before their birthday, seonghee wanders into the woods and doesn't come back out. while the adults are out searching, seongmin's big brother seongyeob is told to watch seongmin and stay home. neither of them are very enthusiastic about this plan, and so they slip out and start covering ground of their own. seongmin doesn't remember whether it was the pair of them who found her; his memories of the day are muddled, overlayed with nightmares and visions he's had since. he does remember prying the antler shard out of seonghee's cold hand, slipping it into his pocket without any adult noticing. after that, he starts experiencing the visions seonghee would sometimes speak about, but they come out unclear, scattered; seongmin has a hard time making sense of half of them and doesn't trust the ones he thinks he understands. he starts developing chronic headaches to go with them. seongmin never mentions the visions to his parents, and the town doctor says that the headaches are probably psychosomatic. they ferry him around different medical professional's offices over the years to try and find treatments that helps, but nothing ever seems to do the job, and so seongmin's diagnosed with chronic migraines and learns to live with his condition. he turns into a bit of a problem child. generally, sentiments are sympathetic; he's a grieving pre-teen whom nobody seems to be able to get through, or so the adults say anyway. over the years, seongmin will miss school somewhat regularly - be that because of a very real headache or because he's skipping - and as a teen seongyeob will get him cheap booze to share with friends. seongmin steals his brother's car a couple of times, but he's never caught for it, and when seongyeob notices he lets him be. he can be very fun to be around at this stage! ...if you can handle him skipping out on commitments fairly regularly. seongmin does his public service right out of school, and after that he goes off to uni for business. he's in town to visit at least every month or so, but he returns for good after around five years. ever since then he's been working as a freelance accountant, both remote and for the handful of local businesses that could use the help.

a bit about seonghee

i'm very receptive to plots around seongmin's twin, so here's a little rundown of her personality in case you're wondering where she might've fit into the social web back when they were kids! seonghee was more of a leader than a follower; she could be very brash at times, used to making her opinions known. her being more social, seongmin coasted by for a long time by being seonghee's twin; she made the friends, he was part of the group. seonghee liked playing dolls, murder mysteries, and was very athletic. as per her canon, she was drawn to the woods - the twins would often play beneath the trees - and experienced hallucinatory visions that she only spoke of to her closest friends.

personality

imagine a chill guy put through the horrors ™️. seongmin's pretty cool, calm, collected, until he's not - when he gets one of those visions, when his headaches get bad enough that he gets testy. seongmin can take a joke and is pretty sociable, but he prefers staying out of any spotlights there might be. you can still tell that he was a troublemaker as a teen; he used to be the guy to go to if you wanted to drink cheap beer, and he still is that guy, but he prefers wine now. probably has gotten away with more than most of the townsfolk, because people make excuses for him - he's never going to be over seonghee's death, not in the ways that count, and it was tragic enough that the association is there. seongmin's slow to trust and open up, but since he's known all of your muses since they were in diapers, this probably won't need much consideration.

misc things that might be useful for plotting!

his parents own a grocery store in the middle of town and live above it. back in the days, seongmin often helped out behind the register - now he shoulders some of the bookkeeping. hangs out anywhere with a half decent internet connection, because most of his work is freelance and online. lives with his boyfriend (ilwoo) in a little house on the outskirts of town. it's very, very likely that your muse 1) knows of and 2) has been invited to a party hosted by those two. he gets visions! maybe about your muse, too? he wouldn't bring up anything outright, but they might be able to tell that he knows more than he should... we can figure it out.

aaand that's all i can think of for now... let's talk : )

#elk: intro