“There was this mollusk, and he walks up to this sea cucumber. Normally, they don’t talk, sea cucumbers, but in a joke everyone talks. So the sea mollusk says to the cucumber… “
FULL NAME: Bae Mu-yeol
BASED ON: Marlin (Finding Nemo)
FACE CLAIM: Gong Yoo
PRONOUNS: He/him
BIRTHDAY: April 26th, 1981
CURRENT STATUS: Taken
Character Information || cw: gendered violence against a woman, misogyny, murder ||
The relationship between fairies and humans in the Korean Peninsula is an interesting dance between avoidance and intermingling. Fairies and humans in the 1800s had a closer relationship, but with the Japanese Occupation, WWII, and the Korean War rocking the peninsula for the first half of the 20th century, many fairy families hastily walked back on that relationship and retreated to their Hollows for the sake of self-preservation.
One of those was the Bae family of a Hollow located in a smaller city outside of Daegu.
It wasn’t until about 1970 when some fairies of the Bae family began to venture outside of their Hollow again and befriend, or even interact with, humans. It was to one of these fairies, Bae Sung-min, that a healing talent fairy, Bae Mu-yeol was born in 1981.
You mustn’t trust them, Mu-yeol, his mother, Jung Hee-sun would say as she’d card her fingers through his and his sisters’ hair. Not easily, anyway. Humans can be so cruel. In my grandmother’s time… Interacting with humans was an unfortunate, but a necessary part of life according to Mu-yeol’s parents. Humans were untrustworthy at best, and vicious at worse.
The Song family of the same Hollow took a different approach. They did not retreat - at least not as much as the rest. Fairies with the surname Song were active in human affairs around the city of Daegu throughout the 20th century.
In 1979, a fast-flying talent fairy named Song So-yeon was born to the Song line. So-yeon was a shining star in every stage of her life, and a small Mu-yeol couldn’t help but be drawn to “So-yeon noona”, two years his senior, who would always come back to the Hollow from her uncle’s house (did you hear? Her uncle married a human! How scandalous!) singing a new song she learned from a machine she called a ‘record player.’
You should stay away from the Song sisters, his mother warned him and his own siblings. They trust humans too much.
Mu-yeol dared anybody to tell him they were actually able to avoid being enchanted by the absolute comet that was Song So-yeon. Since he could remember, any time the fast-flying talent fairy was in his sight, he had to consciously decide to look somewhere else.
He doesn’t think he was always in love with her exactly, just. Drawn to her. He always thought “So-yeon noona” was the coolest fairy in their Hollow, and never actually expected her to give him the time of day. Even when he was fourteen, and her sixteen and they actually became good friends, Mu-yeol just thought his friend was the greatest, most interesting person he knew.
In true Song So-yeon fashion, she created a stir in their Hollow when at eighteen, she moved to Seoul. For university! Any fairy who went to uni just went somewhere in Daegu. Maybe nearby Busan. But Seoul? Seoul? She really was the coolest, wasn’t she? Mu-yeol expected her to lose touch with him, but he found that wasn’t the case when weeks after she left for Seoul, So-yeon’s uncle came into the chicken restaurant he worked at as a part-timer brandishing a letter from her to him.
The letters continued throughout her first term at uni by way of her uncle, and when she came home for break, Mu-yeol jokingly asked her out for a date after he was tired of hearing her complain about how awful dating was at university. She flaunted being allowed to drink by ordering wine and poked fun at him for not being able to, but she did thank him for the nice time with a kiss on the cheek, so…win? The letters resumed after break, and their friendship went on like that without much change, until shortly before his eighteenth birthday, So-yeon mentioned desperately needing a date for an event a professor had invited her to. He traveled to Seoul to surprise her. So-yeon started calling him her boyfriend after that.
The day he turned eighteen, he left his Hollow and moved to Seoul to live with So-yeon and work a job among humans there. (And you know, what was so bad about humans anyway?) Not even a year later, they were married. After two and a half years of marriage actively avoiding having a baby, and two more years spent actively trying to have a baby, their son was born on October 9th, 2003. Mu-yeol and So-yeon thought his misshapen wing was quite cute, thank you very much. So did the human coworker of So-yeon’s and his wife who the fairy couple considered their best friends.
In May of 2006, everything was perfect, wasn’t it? So-yeon, in her first term of her Ph.D program. Mu-yeol, either at home with little Nam-min or making drinks for Western and Japanese tourists and business people at a fancy hotel restaurant. Nam-min, two and a half years old and attached to his father’s hip (except when his mother came home from work, then he couldn’t run over to her fast enough.) Mu-yeol’s wife and baby boy were his entire world, and he didn’t mind at all how the humans he worked with made fun of not only his pointy ears, but that his wife had the more prestigious job and was the family’s breadwinner. It wasn’t strange for fairies to not adhere to traditional gender roles; fairies’ roles in their society were determined by talent, not gender.
It was the first date night of May. Every other Saturday, they’d get their best friends to watch Nam-min so they could have a couple hours alone together. So-yeon suggested a walk by the Han River after dinner, and with her hand in her husband’s, said she’d decided it was about time Nam-min have a little brother or sister.
“I don’t want to have a newborn while applying for jobs with my brand new Ph.D, so we’ll discuss baby three later. But I think now’s good for Nam-min to be a big brother.” She’d said.
Just over an hour later, So-yeon was dead.
It started out with a catcall that went ignored other than So-yeon rolling her eyes and holding her husband’s hand tighter. A throwaway incident that was just a woman’s lot in life for existing. Except, it didn’t stop there, and the group of men she’d ignored weren’t stopping. And then they noticed the woman’s pointy fairy ears. How dare a disgusting fae reject the advances of a human man kind enough to think something like her was beautiful.
Maybe if they were human, they would both still be alive.
It wasn’t as if Mu-yeol came out of the following altercation unscathed; he was the lucky winner of some stitches that would eventually become scars, most notably one scar from just above his collarbone down to near his sternum. Oh. And his life. He got to keep that. So-yeon didn’t. By the time police sirens cut through the air after a bystander rang emergency services, it was already too late. Mu-yeol had to be pried from his wife long after a paramedic had called time of death.
The hospital had to phone the couple babysitting Nam-min. He could only burst into tears when he tried to speak. It wasn’t until after So-yeon’s coworker helped him wash her blood off of his hands and gave him fresh clothes, and his wife woke little Nam-min and brought him to his father that he found he was able to properly talk again. Even then, he could only whisper that he was sorry, and that he loved his baby boy.
The pitying looks didn’t at all help with the grief. It quickly became too much to have to send off well-meaning neighbors with a ‘I‘ve got my son just fine, thank you.’ He didn’t want humans touching his child anyway. Not after what they did to his wife, not after they proved his grandparents and parents right. They were monsters who would turn on someone not like them at a moment’s notice.
So-Yeon was fool to think otherwise. And so was he. No, humans couldn’t be trusted. Not with fairies in general, and especially not with his precious baby boy, his reason for living, light of his world, and all he had left of his beautiful, brilliant, shining So-yeon.
When he retreated back to the Hollow with Nam-min — who for months cried for his mother before he eventually seemed to forget he ever had one — Mu-yeol only found marginal relief. The human problem went away, but the pitiful looks only got worse. After all, this was So-yeon’s Hollow too. The fairies here knew the couple since infancy. Her slaughter was so much more personal to them, her absence was ten times as palpable.
So he did what he’d just done. He ran away from Seoul back to the Hollow near Daegu, and he ran from his Hollow to the first inn with a vacancy. And after a week making use of an Internet cafe to research safe places for a fairy to hide, he came across Swynlake, England. He fled there with little Nam-min, tucked safely in his arms for most of the journey there, where the local fairies were quick to take pity on the widower and his son and welcome them into their community.
✓ Wisecracking, devoted, determined
✖ Overprotective, judgmental, assumptive
Fairy – can manipulate pixie dust (making things float) and turn into a miniature fairy with wings. Healing talent.
