#pa.kim jongin

[paranoiakrp]

       CITIZEN FILE RETRIEVED: CHO YURO ...

STATS

name / cho yuro d.o.b. / 09.24.93 age / 25 pronouns / he/him job / library’s archival assistant & hotel gardener societies / monstrous › mediumship groups / n/a

WHATS YOUR WEIRD?

many things are first written off as the innocence and imagination of a child. a reckless streak is chalked up to the terrible twos, and threes. a moodiness is relegated to the sensitivity of a child testing out the world. the odd stories he tells are merely fiction and dreams. the voices he speaks too without response, the one-sided conversations, these must be simple imaginary friends. 

for many years yuro is content to believe those explanations offered to him, because he is young and they have been a constant in his life, and it is easy to believe what you are told when you desperately want to make sense of something. 

and when he is older, his mood swings become temper tantrums, and older still they are described as hormones. his bad dreams and insomnia are of the pressures of school, his sensitivity to sound must be normal enough, just a problem of the ears and senses. his preference for wide, empty spaces out in nature is deemed to be a simple wild heart for a wild boy. 

and then he’s twenty, and it’s getting worse. and it reaches a breaking point, and blood is spilled - his - and finally, finally they think that something must be wrong. 

the problem is that there is no one to tell him these voices are real. the problem is, there is no one who can definitively say to him, you’re not crazy yuro. they’re spirits, they’re ghosts. because no one can know that, even in this strange limbo of a town that is junae. they can hint it or claim it, they can try to explain it with science, but none of the answers will ever feel definite, they never fit right. 

so some days he thinks himself a mad man, and some days he thinks himself a prophet. some days a conduit beyond the veil and some days a tormented soul. and always tired, and always drowning in the white noise around him. 

WHATS YOUR STORY?

perhaps his first real memory takes place in the greenhouse. the air is heavy and thick with mist and the ends of dark hair curl. his mother coaxes a towering plant towards the stint that will help it’s base grow upright. he eyes a pot of flourishing mushrooms, thick grown and strange, in their frills and smoothed edges and odd shapes. 

“smash it,” he hears, a whisper in his ear, and without a thought he complies. 

the ceramic of the pot cuts into his knees when his mother tells him to help her clean it up. she’s frustrated with that, too, but he remembers tender fingers coaxing shards from his skin, bandaging him up. 

she’ll spend many years taking care of him like that. 

the little family lives in the caretakers quarters of the sprawling hotel. it’s a strange and out of place structure on the edges of town, with few residents and fewer guests, but those compelled to the city tend to stay long enough that the family makes ends meet. his father is the manager of the hotel, his mother the garden staff, and yuro grows like a weed between them, taking on odd jobs and doing his homework in the lobby. he checks in guests as soon as he can see over the counter, learns to fix small problems. he screws on door knobs or deftly folds even the most annoying of fitted sheets. little tasks to keep an idle boy busy. 

and sometimes, he gouges at his ears. 

and sometimes, he screams in the gardens, protestations at empty air. 

and sometimes, he kneels, in the quiet corners of the ballroom, hands clasped over his ears and small body shaking with sobs. 

he’s just a little sensitive. 

that’s what his mother says at first. he’s sensitive, imaginative. he’s been tired lately, his grandma died and he’s not handling it well. there are always reasons, always excuses. at school children are understanding, kind even. his teachers do their best with him. they note his intelligence and his sweet disposition, but his comments are always making note of how chatty he is, how he rambles off into stories without prompting, how the games he wants to play are a little strange, how he seems to know more about things than a child ought to know, how he stares at nothing and seems to have a habit of pulling at or stopping up his ears. they find him with wads of tissue stuffed in, or his fingers, or humming loud enough for white noise. 

he doesn’t seem to like the quiet, they say. 

his parents put a white noise machine in his room so that he can sleep. by the time he’s ten years old dark circles seem to be requisite on his features, painted beneath his eyes with a broad stroked brush. he steals away into the woods whenever he can, seeks out remote corners to camp or hike. hides by lakes and streams. he says he likes the quiet out there, and his mother points out that the town itself can hardly be considered noisy, but the wild haired boy just shakes his head. 

his father likes to bring up fairytales. ghost stories. “have you heard of changelings, yuro?” he says, tousling a hand through the boy’s hair as he fiddles with the earplugs pushed in his ears. yuro shakes his head, glances with curious eyes at the man as he continues. “people once thought, in some countries and places, that babies were occasionally switched out. with fae children, you see. they would suddenly become different, and strange. as if they remembered a world that they’d lost. as if they didn’t quite settle correctly into place.” 

the implications are left unstated. but his father means well. he wants to give a lost boy some way to conceptualize himself. that he’s different. that he’s always going to be different, maybe, that he doesn’t quite settle into place the way he should. 

as he gets older it gets worse. 

the voices become louder, impossible to tune out. by the time he’s twenty it’s excruciating. nothing helps. not white noise, not slipping into the forest. nothing. they tell his parents that, in truth, this is the age when major disorders tend to manifest. in the early twenties, the warning signs of schizophrenia and so on are much more likely to appear. 

and so the treatments begin, with hope and fervor. eventually his parents move him to seoul for better care, thinking the inadequate small town facilities were the problem that impeded his restoration. and while in seoul he did fare a bit better. the medicines never sat right but the quiet began to return, as if the whispers were far away, distant and veiled, and yuro found himself once again with hope. he went to school, eventually. got his masters in library sciences, specifically archival studies, and returned to junae with a job offer and with hope. 

he helps his mother tend the gardens at first and so the return isn’t as obvious. the whispers start again slowly. infiltrating once more. he has plans now. pills and mechanisms to survive. he has his own rooms at the hotel and he outfits them with sound blocking materials and a white noise machine he never turns off, takes his pills in a faithful routine. he spends his days in the archives digitizing the oldest records of the city, faithfully scanning and sorting and he finds comfort in that. in pages, in words that he can control, can read line by line and stop or start. 

and if he twitches away from phantom words, or bites at his lip until he draws blood, if he trembles and shakes and looks a bit too pale beneath the dusting of his tan, well, no one says anything about it. 

it’s junae, after all, no one is normal here.