Chapter Text
The first thing people noticed about Park Gunwook was the smile. It was a public works project of a smile, broad, brilliant, and structurally unsound. It was the smile he flashed at the professors during the freshman orientation, the one he used to disarm co-delegates at Model United Nations conferences, the one he offered to anxious classmates before a major presentation. It was a smile that promised competence, approachability, and an unnerving level of perfection. At seventeen, he was ZB University’s newest wunderkind, a freshman in Diplomacy and International Relations who already had a nine-page CV.
His story was a polished stone, smoothed by countless retellings: the boy who studied two years ahead of his cohort, the 4.0 high school GPA, the six campus organizations he was already steering, the three volunteer internships with prestigious think-tanks, the invitations to actual UN summits as a youth representative. "The future Foreign Minister," they called him. "A perfect, promising mind." They saw the crisp blazers, the unwavering handshake, the easy laughter that seemed to echo in boardrooms far beyond his years. They saw the monument, but no one ever looked for the cracks.
The reality was that the monument was built on a foundation of sand and shattered glass.
His days begin at 4:30 AM, not with an alarm, but with the silent, seizing dread that had been his true wake-up call since he was ten. In the sterile quiet of his studio apartment in Gangnam, paid for by his parents and far from his family in Busan, the performance ended. The smile dissolved. In the pre-dawn gloom, he was just a boy, too thin, his body humming with a tiredness that sleep could not touch.
His fingers, running through his hair as he sat on the edge of the bed, came away with a dark, fine nest of strands. He stared at them, numb. The dermatologist had called it telogen effluvium, a severe shock to the system. Gunwook called it the cost of doing business. At twelve, it had been worse, he’d been so underweight and anxious he could barely hold his textbook. At thirteen, he’d written a will, genuinely believing he wouldn’t see fourteen. The memory was a cold stone in his gut.
He swallowed his morning cocktail of pills: the antidepressants, the anti-anxieties, and the one for chronic essential hypertension, a diagnosis usually reserved for men in their fifties, not a seventeen-year-old boy. The ghost of his mother’s voice, sharp and perfumed, echoed in the silence: A C? Good thing you’re handsome, Gunwook-ah. You’ll need to marry well. That was in sixth grade, the last time he’d been average. The comment had been a spark on a petrol-soaked pile of his own insecurities. He had vowed, then and there, that he would never be just "handsome" again. He would be formidable.
He built his perfection one sleepless night at a time, one skipped meal at a time, one forced smile at a time. He traded a childhood for a CV. His father was a ghost in his own home, and his mother… His mother was a curator, and he was her masterpiece. Every award was a reflection of her; every failure, a personal affront.
By 7:00 AM, he was the Gunwook the world knew. Immaculate in a tailored shirt, he moved through the ZB University campus like a young prince. He remembered names, asked about siblings, offered notes, and powered through a 7:30 AM meeting as a deputy of the programs team for the National SDG Summit with a calm authority that belied the tremor in his decaf coffee cup. His few older friends, Hao, a PhD candidate he’d met at a summit, and Matthew, a senior who acted as a mentor, saw the intensity, but they called it "passion." They didn't see the way his vision sometimes tunneled in the library, the days where the simple act of standing up from a chair felt like a Herculean effort, his body screaming in protest from the constant, gnawing pressure.
The midterm results for his Environmental Science and Policy class were posted online at 2:17 PM. It was a core requirement, a nuisance he’d underestimated, a subject of formulas and data sets that resisted his usual method of charismatic assimilation.
Gunwook clicked the link, his heart a dull, hypertensive thud against his ribs.
There, next to his student ID number, was the letter.
D.
He blinked. The world did not shatter; it simply… stopped. The noise of the student lounge faded into a high-pitched whine. A D. He hadn’t seen a grade like that since he’d accidentally mixed up his multiplication tables in elementary school. A cold, void-like emptiness spread from his core, freezing him in place.
Perfect, promising, the youngest, the best—
The words were a taunt. The nine-page CV felt like a lie. The monument, so carefully constructed, had just been hit with a wrecking ball. He could feel the facade begin to groan under the strain, fissures spreading like spiderwebs through marble.
He didn’t cry. He hadn’t been able to cry for years. He just sat there, in the middle of a bustling university, completely and utterly alone, the brilliant, fraudulent smile finally gone from his face. The burnout wasn't coming; it was here. It had been here for years, and it had just been waiting for a single, stupid, devastating letter to pull the trigger. And as the weight of a thousand expectations descended upon his narrow shoulders, Park Gunwook, the perfect prodigy, began, silently, to crumble.