Go Yeongeun thought that it would, or rather, that it should. As she watched her appendages fade away into oblivion, she tried to flex her fingers and— nothing. She couldn’t feel anything. She heard that even those who lost limbs in war or work accidents felt as if they still had everything intact sometimes. There was a name for it.
Yet she felt nothing where her fingers used to be. No phantom limb syndrome, no ache. It was if her fingers had never been there in the first place.
“Deal?” The smiling and mismatched blue-haired woman behind the roulette counter asked chipperly, and elaborated as Go Yeongeun hesitated, “this table is for players only, ma’am. Would you like to deal in?”
It should have hurt.
It wasn’t the first time she lost body parts before. She imagined it definitely hurt when she lost an ear, even if the pain had been numbed by the machines. Even if she got a mechanical replacement immediately after, and there hadn’t been any blood to ruin the collar of her only good work shirt. She had been so frightened then, like a snow rabbit in a blank white field but surrounded by hawks in the sky.
“Ma’am?”
Go Yeongeun stared blankly at the roulette table until her vision swam. She felt light-headed. She felt as if she might suddenly float up into the air like a balloon and not come down again. She didn’t want to think about her situation or her fingers or where she was, or, god forbid, her parents.
She just needed—
She needed—
Food and water. To survive.
Go Yeongeun approached the roulette table and touched the edge of its shiny counter with the skin of her palm (because her fingers were not there anymore). She turned her swimming vision to the familiar looking woman with the wide smile.
“Yes,” her voice didn’t sound like her own. The world didn’t feel real. She should be in pain. “Deal me in.”
Go Yeongeun hadn’t celebrated her birthday in recent years. She got calls from former classmates and colleagues: generic messages of well wishes and happiness, usually a copy-paste slogan written by AI. A pre-scheduled text, programmed to deliver on the day of her birth. Even Daydream, the supposedly magnanimous company that it was, had nothing more than a computer delivered message for the employees who survived to their next birthday.
She supposed that was the magnanimity already. Most places wouldn’t have bothered to acknowledge such dates at all, especially professional workspaces. There were enough people who didn’t want to acknowledge growing older, which felt like a strange thought to her.
Shouldn’t someone be proud of having survived another year?
Perhaps it was her cynicism showing, or the fact that her work revolved around people dying almost on the daily, but Go Yeongeun felt people should take pride in being a year older.
She wanted to take pride in being a year older.
Huddled in her government-assigned room in her goverment-assigned housing, Go Yeongeun carefully lit a candle for herself atop the tiny convenience store cupcake.
The Disaster Management Bureau were much kinder than Daydream was, but they too tried to ignore the topic of birthdays. For many of them, it was another year without having found missing friends and family, and it was rude to bring that up.
Go Yeongeun didn’t mind. She didn’t expect anything different.
It was just…
Another year of regrets, but another year closer to reconciling with her family.
“Happy birthday to me,” she whispered in sing-song as the candle flame danced to her breath, “happy birthday, Go Yeongeun. You made it. You’re alive.”
That is, she nearly ran into Jang Heowoon while rushing to deliver documents and he was on his phone, so technically she hit him chest-first thanks to his height. Or forehead-to-arm. Or, in the most technically correct sense, Go Yeongeun ran face-first into the phone Jang Heowoon held at chest level.
Out of surprise, she instinctively raised her hand to shield her aching nose and dropped all her documents onto the ground.
They both froze as papers fluttered down around them, until Jang Heowoon startled back a step and shouted out, “Sorry! I’m sorry, I should have looked where I was going—”
“No, no,” she quickly rebutted as she sank down onto her knees in order to gather the scattered papers. Next to her, he did the same even as he fumbled to slip his phone back into his pocket. “I shouldn’t have been rushing like that. It’s my fault, too—”
“What if I’d been carrying coffee?” Jang Heowoon fussed as he also helped to gather her scattered papers. Neither of them cared whether the papers were any semblance of order, fuelled only by the mutual embarrassment of such a clumsy moment on their part. “I could have spilled all over those papers— oh no, are they important?”
“You’re fine! They’re just going to the archives room,” Go Yeongeun said with a breathy and embarrassed laugh, “weird, isn’t it? That we even have a paper trail like that when all our reports are submitted digitally, anyway…”
The two of them stopped gathering papers for a moment while on their knees, stared at each other’s flustered countenance, and then Go Yeongeun burst out laughing. It was a nervous, stressed laugh resulting from a morning of being harried along from one task to another, but it was a relieved laugh nevertheless.
Somehow Jang Heowoon’s neat hair, which she always thought looked so nice long, was tangled around his face as if he hadn’t the time to properly comb it that morning. As he handed her papers back to her, she commented, “I should be the one telling you sorry. You look like you’re in hurry, too.”
He gave a wan smile and reached a finger to scratch nervously at the side of his cheek. “…Ahh, I guess I was. But I can’t even remember why it felt so urgent. My Team Leader— uh, the Team Leader here, I mean, the—”
He grimaced over his tripped words, and Go Yeongeun looked around the empty hallway nervously.
“…He’s really nice,” Jang Heowoon concluded quietly. “And doesn’t mind if you’re late.”
…Ahhh. It was the residual Daydream Inc. trauma, Yeongeun sympathised. It was something they couldn’t talk about, though, and couldn’t even pretend to have in common, so she only smiled nervously and pushed herself back to her feet with her files in hand.
Across from her, Jang Heowoon did the same.
“Sorry again about that,” he said, and she shook her head in response.
“Me, too,” she said, and the awkward encounter ended as they both walked past each other without further acknowledgement.
Or at least, that’s how it should have been.
“Oh,” Jang Heowoon’s voice rang out behind her, and Go Yeongeun stopped and turned her head back curiously. Her colleague stood nervously with a hand half-raised, as if caught between wanting to gesture at her and thinking better of it. “…I forgot to say— happy belated birthday. It was yesterday, right?”
Yeongeun spent yesterday on her own. She was surprised he knew of the date, never mind remembered it.
“It was, yes,” she responded.
He smiled, brighter this time and more confident.
“Happy belated birthday, Agent Mint. I hope it was a good one.”
His confidence calmed some of the nervous energy in her as well. Go Yeongeun breathed out deeply and felt the slope of her shoulders drop as she smiled and said, “Thank you. It was.”
There were a row of cherry blossom trees across the street where Go Yeongeun grew up. Superficially, it belonged to the city, as part of an initiative to bring in spring festivals for tourism. There were cherry blossom trees and azalea bushes that ran across the residential areas, bringing in colour and joy in the springtime. All planted to target a specific season.
The rest of the year, it looked rather dead.
Go Yeongeun remembered walking down paths littered with cherry blossoms on her way to and back from school, and how it would clog the streets and stick to the bottom of her shoes. Little pink and white petals everywhere like a wonderland for just one month of the year.
Her mother would collect some of the yet-to-fall petals on the trees (and there were always so many, it didn’t matter if the residents helped themselves to some), wash them, dry them out, and then mix them with other fragrant leaves to make tea out of them. Sometimes she would sprinkle the dried petals onto other drinks to give it a more floral aroma and a sprinkle of colour. Go Yeongeun used to ask for milkshakes with cherry blossoms on top when she was young, because she liked seeing the pink mixed with white.
The rest of the year, the trees looked like any other trees, and the bushes looked like any other bushes. Since she grew up with them, they didn’t feel very special. Not in the way Sekwang City liked to advertise them during the springtime.
Cherry blossoms symbolised spring and new life. It was the start of each new school year, and it always bloomed through Go Yeongeun’s birthday. For that reason, her mother used to embroider little cherry blossom petals onto her clothes, and Yeongeun herself would draw it on her homework and the back of her hand.
“It’s just like our girl,” her mother used to say to her, before Go Yeongeun grew too old to listen to her mother, “so very beautiful.”
It was only when she grew to a teenager did she refute her mother’s words to claim, “Have you seen my classmates or the girls on television? I don’t have the time to try and look that pretty. I’d rather be a common dandelion.”
Besides, flowers were silly and everywhere, and they bloomed for such a short duration that seemed a waste to tend to them. She didn’t understand the appeal of flower festivals, or moon watching. Why waste your time?
Go Yeongeun wanted to grow up and leave the small district of the big city go to go a prestigious school. She wanted her own life and not sweet and safe path plotted out by her mother, nor the ambitious and lofty goals planned by her father.
She wanted—
Returning to Sekwang City was like stepping into the fire and brimstone of hell.
She couldn’t make it on the surface of the city at all and could only hide in the periphery of the subway system. She listened to rumours and at first she tried to buy food but eventually had to resort to stealing whenever she could, just to stay alive.
She forgot all about the flowers where she grew up, because life narrowed down to this: a warm hole to sleep in where she wouldn’t be caught unaware, food and water to get through the day, and counting down how many organs she had left to spare before her situation became critical.
Things such as beauty, newness, fragility, and flower festivals were all pushed to the wayside.
Cherry blossoms could not survive in this cursed city. In fact, she could find no flowers or plants of any kind. It was only in those lonely months that Go Yeongeun understood how horrible a world without flowers could be, and the push to surround yourself with beautiful things.
Yet here, she couldn’t even waste the ink to draw petals onto her hands like she used to do as a child.
She wanted to. Oh, she wanted to.
Without plants, there was little way of telling the passing of seasons other than changes in weather. When she stopped shivering in the middle of the day, she realised it was once again spring. When she asked to see a calendar in the Casino, huddled into her coats, she realised it was once again March.
She was another year older, and this time there were no cherry blossoms wafting down from the sky to congratulate her and cling to her clothes. No taste of flowers in her mouth to accompany sugary drinks.
“My little cherry blossom,” her mother used to say to her, but that Go Yeongeun disappeared long ago. Perhaps when the flowers in Sekwang disappeared.
As Go Yeongeun turned her eyes toward the grey skies of a cursed city, she cursed her past self for taking everything for granted. Even when she worked for Daydream, she had been protected and had never known it. But now… now she was in this hell of her own making.
There was no spring, no renewal, no beauty. Only grey skies and grey streets and grey buildings.
—No, not entirely grey.
A flash of colour strayed into her peripheral vision, and Yeongeun turned her head to look. She shuffled closer to the splash of colour on the ground, sitting in a nearly forgotten corner of the subway station.
It was a tiny thing. But it was something marvellous.
A barely bloomed dandelion had shoved its way through the cracks in cement, thin petals vibrantly yellow against the dark backsplash and grime. It was a small, wispy thing barely a centimetre or two off the ground, and yet—
She reached dirty fingers to touch the silk-like petals, but drew back at the last second. Go Yeongeun held her breath as she took in the sheer miraculousness before her eyes.
It was blooming.
(On her birthday.)
In this place where nothing grew, and everything merely decayed, there was a new life that sprouted within barren walls. Without water, without dirt, without sunlight… it grew and blossomed like an impossibility. A gift, specifically when she needed it the most.
There would never be a festival for dandelions. They weren’t celebrated in the same way other flowers were. Nothing but weeds, some might state. But at that moment, to Go Yeongeun, it was the most beautiful flower in the world.
(Hope. Resilience. Perseverance.)
A common weed.
Her hands shook. She curled up over the precious plant, as if she could protect it from all the horrors of the outside world.
But… it didn’t need that protection, did it? It survived all on its own. It…
Go Yeongeun never felt like a delicate cherry blossom. She used to compare herself to a dandelion instead, feeling average and common. Unremarkable.
But here, in a place where nothing else could survive…
She rubbed at her nose with the back of her hand, and stood back up. Her eyes were misted over with emotion, yet she refused to let it get a hold of her.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Goral Event -- anaesthetic
Go Yeongeun thought that it would, or rather, that it should. As she watched her appendages fade away into oblivion, she tried to flex her fingers and— nothing. She couldn’t feel anything. She heard that even those who lost limbs in war or work accidents felt as if they still had everything intact sometimes. There was a name for it.
Yet she felt nothing where her fingers used to be. No phantom limb syndrome, no ache. It was if her fingers had never been there in the first place.
“Deal?” The smiling and mismatched blue-haired woman behind the roulette counter asked chipperly, and elaborated as Go Yeongeun hesitated, “this table is for players only, ma’am. Would you like to deal in?”
It should have hurt.
It wasn’t the first time she lost body parts before. She imagined it definitely hurt when she lost an ear, even if the pain had been numbed by the machines. Even if she got a mechanical replacement immediately after, and there hadn’t been any blood to ruin the collar of her only good work shirt. She had been so frightened then, like a snow rabbit in a blank white field but surrounded by hawks in the sky.
“Ma’am?”
Go Yeongeun stared blankly at the roulette table until her vision swam. She felt light-headed. She felt as if she might suddenly float up into the air like a balloon and not come down again. She didn’t want to think about her situation or her fingers or where she was, or, god forbid, her parents.
She just needed—
She needed—
Food and water. To survive.
Go Yeongeun approached the roulette table and touched the edge of its shiny counter with the skin of her palm (because her fingers were not there anymore). She turned her swimming vision to the familiar looking woman with the wide smile.
“Yes,” her voice didn’t sound like her own. The world didn’t feel real. She should be in pain. “Deal me in.”
Goral Event - Another Year Older
She supposed that was the magnanimity already. Most places wouldn’t have bothered to acknowledge such dates at all, especially professional workspaces. There were enough people who didn’t want to acknowledge growing older, which felt like a strange thought to her.
Shouldn’t someone be proud of having survived another year?
Perhaps it was her cynicism showing, or the fact that her work revolved around people dying almost on the daily, but Go Yeongeun felt people should take pride in being a year older.
She wanted to take pride in being a year older.
Huddled in her government-assigned room in her goverment-assigned housing, Go Yeongeun carefully lit a candle for herself atop the tiny convenience store cupcake.
The Disaster Management Bureau were much kinder than Daydream was, but they too tried to ignore the topic of birthdays. For many of them, it was another year without having found missing friends and family, and it was rude to bring that up.
Go Yeongeun didn’t mind. She didn’t expect anything different.
It was just…
Another year of regrets, but another year closer to reconciling with her family.
“Happy birthday to me,” she whispered in sing-song as the candle flame danced to her breath, “happy birthday, Go Yeongeun. You made it. You’re alive.”
Goral Event -- Happy Birthday
That is, she nearly ran into Jang Heowoon while rushing to deliver documents and he was on his phone, so technically she hit him chest-first thanks to his height. Or forehead-to-arm. Or, in the most technically correct sense, Go Yeongeun ran face-first into the phone Jang Heowoon held at chest level.
Out of surprise, she instinctively raised her hand to shield her aching nose and dropped all her documents onto the ground.
They both froze as papers fluttered down around them, until Jang Heowoon startled back a step and shouted out, “Sorry! I’m sorry, I should have looked where I was going—”
“No, no,” she quickly rebutted as she sank down onto her knees in order to gather the scattered papers. Next to her, he did the same even as he fumbled to slip his phone back into his pocket. “I shouldn’t have been rushing like that. It’s my fault, too—”
“What if I’d been carrying coffee?” Jang Heowoon fussed as he also helped to gather her scattered papers. Neither of them cared whether the papers were any semblance of order, fuelled only by the mutual embarrassment of such a clumsy moment on their part. “I could have spilled all over those papers— oh no, are they important?”
“You’re fine! They’re just going to the archives room,” Go Yeongeun said with a breathy and embarrassed laugh, “weird, isn’t it? That we even have a paper trail like that when all our reports are submitted digitally, anyway…”
The two of them stopped gathering papers for a moment while on their knees, stared at each other’s flustered countenance, and then Go Yeongeun burst out laughing. It was a nervous, stressed laugh resulting from a morning of being harried along from one task to another, but it was a relieved laugh nevertheless.
Somehow Jang Heowoon’s neat hair, which she always thought looked so nice long, was tangled around his face as if he hadn’t the time to properly comb it that morning. As he handed her papers back to her, she commented, “I should be the one telling you sorry. You look like you’re in hurry, too.”
He gave a wan smile and reached a finger to scratch nervously at the side of his cheek. “…Ahh, I guess I was. But I can’t even remember why it felt so urgent. My Team Leader— uh, the Team Leader here, I mean, the—”
He grimaced over his tripped words, and Go Yeongeun looked around the empty hallway nervously.
“…He’s really nice,” Jang Heowoon concluded quietly. “And doesn’t mind if you’re late.”
…Ahhh. It was the residual Daydream Inc. trauma, Yeongeun sympathised. It was something they couldn’t talk about, though, and couldn’t even pretend to have in common, so she only smiled nervously and pushed herself back to her feet with her files in hand.
Across from her, Jang Heowoon did the same.
“Sorry again about that,” he said, and she shook her head in response.
“Me, too,” she said, and the awkward encounter ended as they both walked past each other without further acknowledgement.
Or at least, that’s how it should have been.
“Oh,” Jang Heowoon’s voice rang out behind her, and Go Yeongeun stopped and turned her head back curiously. Her colleague stood nervously with a hand half-raised, as if caught between wanting to gesture at her and thinking better of it. “…I forgot to say— happy belated birthday. It was yesterday, right?”
Yeongeun spent yesterday on her own. She was surprised he knew of the date, never mind remembered it.
“It was, yes,” she responded.
He smiled, brighter this time and more confident.
“Happy belated birthday, Agent Mint. I hope it was a good one.”
His confidence calmed some of the nervous energy in her as well. Go Yeongeun breathed out deeply and felt the slope of her shoulders drop as she smiled and said, “Thank you. It was.”
Re: Goral Event -- Happy Birthday
Goral Event -- Dandelion
The rest of the year, it looked rather dead.
Go Yeongeun remembered walking down paths littered with cherry blossoms on her way to and back from school, and how it would clog the streets and stick to the bottom of her shoes. Little pink and white petals everywhere like a wonderland for just one month of the year.
Her mother would collect some of the yet-to-fall petals on the trees (and there were always so many, it didn’t matter if the residents helped themselves to some), wash them, dry them out, and then mix them with other fragrant leaves to make tea out of them. Sometimes she would sprinkle the dried petals onto other drinks to give it a more floral aroma and a sprinkle of colour. Go Yeongeun used to ask for milkshakes with cherry blossoms on top when she was young, because she liked seeing the pink mixed with white.
The rest of the year, the trees looked like any other trees, and the bushes looked like any other bushes. Since she grew up with them, they didn’t feel very special. Not in the way Sekwang City liked to advertise them during the springtime.
Cherry blossoms symbolised spring and new life. It was the start of each new school year, and it always bloomed through Go Yeongeun’s birthday. For that reason, her mother used to embroider little cherry blossom petals onto her clothes, and Yeongeun herself would draw it on her homework and the back of her hand.
“It’s just like our girl,” her mother used to say to her, before Go Yeongeun grew too old to listen to her mother, “so very beautiful.”
It was only when she grew to a teenager did she refute her mother’s words to claim, “Have you seen my classmates or the girls on television? I don’t have the time to try and look that pretty. I’d rather be a common dandelion.”
Besides, flowers were silly and everywhere, and they bloomed for such a short duration that seemed a waste to tend to them. She didn’t understand the appeal of flower festivals, or moon watching. Why waste your time?
Go Yeongeun wanted to grow up and leave the small district of the big city go to go a prestigious school. She wanted her own life and not sweet and safe path plotted out by her mother, nor the ambitious and lofty goals planned by her father.
She wanted—
Returning to Sekwang City was like stepping into the fire and brimstone of hell.
She couldn’t make it on the surface of the city at all and could only hide in the periphery of the subway system. She listened to rumours and at first she tried to buy food but eventually had to resort to stealing whenever she could, just to stay alive.
She forgot all about the flowers where she grew up, because life narrowed down to this: a warm hole to sleep in where she wouldn’t be caught unaware, food and water to get through the day, and counting down how many organs she had left to spare before her situation became critical.
Things such as beauty, newness, fragility, and flower festivals were all pushed to the wayside.
Cherry blossoms could not survive in this cursed city. In fact, she could find no flowers or plants of any kind. It was only in those lonely months that Go Yeongeun understood how horrible a world without flowers could be, and the push to surround yourself with beautiful things.
Yet here, she couldn’t even waste the ink to draw petals onto her hands like she used to do as a child.
She wanted to. Oh, she wanted to.
Without plants, there was little way of telling the passing of seasons other than changes in weather. When she stopped shivering in the middle of the day, she realised it was once again spring. When she asked to see a calendar in the Casino, huddled into her coats, she realised it was once again March.
She was another year older, and this time there were no cherry blossoms wafting down from the sky to congratulate her and cling to her clothes. No taste of flowers in her mouth to accompany sugary drinks.
“My little cherry blossom,” her mother used to say to her, but that Go Yeongeun disappeared long ago. Perhaps when the flowers in Sekwang disappeared.
As Go Yeongeun turned her eyes toward the grey skies of a cursed city, she cursed her past self for taking everything for granted. Even when she worked for Daydream, she had been protected and had never known it. But now… now she was in this hell of her own making.
There was no spring, no renewal, no beauty. Only grey skies and grey streets and grey buildings.
—No, not entirely grey.
A flash of colour strayed into her peripheral vision, and Yeongeun turned her head to look. She shuffled closer to the splash of colour on the ground, sitting in a nearly forgotten corner of the subway station.
It was a tiny thing. But it was something marvellous.
A barely bloomed dandelion had shoved its way through the cracks in cement, thin petals vibrantly yellow against the dark backsplash and grime. It was a small, wispy thing barely a centimetre or two off the ground, and yet—
She reached dirty fingers to touch the silk-like petals, but drew back at the last second. Go Yeongeun held her breath as she took in the sheer miraculousness before her eyes.
It was blooming.
(On her birthday.)
In this place where nothing grew, and everything merely decayed, there was a new life that sprouted within barren walls. Without water, without dirt, without sunlight… it grew and blossomed like an impossibility. A gift, specifically when she needed it the most.
There would never be a festival for dandelions. They weren’t celebrated in the same way other flowers were. Nothing but weeds, some might state. But at that moment, to Go Yeongeun, it was the most beautiful flower in the world.
(Hope. Resilience. Perseverance.)
A common weed.
Her hands shook. She curled up over the precious plant, as if she could protect it from all the horrors of the outside world.
But… it didn’t need that protection, did it? It survived all on its own. It…
Go Yeongeun never felt like a delicate cherry blossom. She used to compare herself to a dandelion instead, feeling average and common. Unremarkable.
But here, in a place where nothing else could survive…
She rubbed at her nose with the back of her hand, and stood back up. Her eyes were misted over with emotion, yet she refused to let it get a hold of her.
Here, she could still survive.
Mina's Art!!!