・𓂃 ₊ 𝖘𝖜𝖆𝖓 𝖖𝖚𝖊𝖊𝖓 !・🦢

⁀  ➷・( 🦢 )  ╱  𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐒𝐖𝐀𝐍 𝐐𝐔𝐄𝐄𝐍 ; 𝐀 𝐋𝐈𝐁𝐑𝐄𝐓𝐓𝐎

gwyneira eunha jeon is born on christmas eve 1999, in the city of swansea in wales where her family migrated to four years before she was born. this was the day before her mother tragically passes away due to birth complications and eira herself was born with some medical issues that effected her heart, having been born severely premature. she was to undergo surgery for it until she seemed miraculously cured on christmas day and since there was no medical explanation behind it ( the doctors weren’t too sure what happened. one day she was barely making it and the next she was perfectly fine ). it caused a bit of a stir to her quite religious family and her grandparents believe it was some prodigious act of god. her father, meanwhile, puts his faith in it being her mother’s sacrifice.

her mother, jeon ceri, was a famous korean ballerina who retired early in her outstanding career to become an artistic director for the swansea ballet after marrying jeon seokwon, the ceo of jeon industries, a multinational biomedical and pharmaceutical conglomerate. as a jeon, eira is part of one of south korea’s most influential families. her father’s side has, for many generations, held a stake in south korea’s medical industry and many private clinics and biomed companies are under their name. they were quite affluent, but in all honesty very immoral, caring more about business than the welfare of others. her father is obviously a rather ruthless businessman, but had a particular soft spot for her mother that transferred to eira after her mother’s death. this is part of the reason why eira grew up so protected and sheltered which only goes to harm her more than help her now that she’s more exposed to the world.

a few years after her mother’s death, after her father has tied up all the family’s loose ends in wales, she and her two brothers are relocated back to seoul. it is here that she first begins her journey into the world of dance, now being unable to escape her mother’s legacy. her father enrols her into dance classes as soon as she could properly walk, before she could even speak for herself. but freewill didn’t really matter the minute it was found that she was a natural at it, advancing quickly as she grew older and surpassing many of her peers.

usually, as a jeon she would have been expected to study well and take over some part of the family business but her exception lay in the fact that she was as brilliant and as passionate about dancing as her mother was and she was always her father’s favourite, being allowed to live life as she wanted as long as it was under his watchful eye (because of course, to him she is still the nearly dying baby who can’t do anything on her own or she might break).

all her life she’s been very protected from things, such as the truth of her family’s own malpractice scandals and such. it’s like she’s lived with a blindfold over her eyes and she naively did not even mind it one bit. her life revolved around nothing but dance and living luxuriously and she had no qualms with it whatsoever.

a few years after moving back to seoul, her family makes their way to switzerland to expand her father’s evergrowing business. it was here where she really became more deeply ingrained into the life of dance and her obsession with ballet took root. when she returns to seoul many years later to complete highschool, she’s already found herself trapped in a bubble that consisted only of ballet and not much else. 

dance becomes the very essence of her life and she begins to lose sleep over it, her relationship and friendships over it until she loses control. not even eighteen and she’s allowed this dedication to her craft to consume her. but she doesn’t stop, doesn’t really know how it and so she just lets it take over her. after highschool she goes on to attend a specialised and prestigious dance academy to foster her incredibly talents. at this place, she is pushed to her limit in order to be perfect for the stage but she begins to struggle a lot more with her own mental and physical health. ballet being her sole driving force was sucking the life out of her and the compulsive need to dance consumes her days and then her nights until it all grows into stifling paranoia, insomnia and hallucinations from lack of sleep and she became detached from both reality and the people around her entirely. 

during her final year of the academy, her situation took its toll on her considerably and she was not dealing with it in a very healthy way at all. the world of ballet was incredibly competitive and eira had been moulded to fit right in there but it didn’t feel right to her anymore, despite how much she knows her father wants this for her and her mother would be proud of her for it. by the time she leaves the academy, a ticket straight into the korean national ballet in her hands, she lets her childhood dreams go in favour of a new career. a friend of hers, rumoured to be the daughter of ceo yoo, urges her to try out for an entertainment company and she does with successful result. she lets her father know of her decision to change her career but upon not receiving a response, she continues to distance herself from her family like she had been doing lately anyway.

she trains for less than a year in angelfish entertainment, honing in skills she didn’t know she even had because she hadn’t had much time to venture outside of ballet and contemporary dance. now, she’s fallen in love with the idea of becoming an idol, seeing it to be much more artistically freeing than trapping herself to the strict and never changing routines of ballet. she was born for the stage, that much was true, but she is coming to realise that the ballet stage might not be the one for her as much as an idol stage is.

she becomes a select trainee when the opportunity arises and though she has spent the year trying to forget much of her past, doing so quite well by diving headfirst into training so that she doesn’t  have to think about it, the competitive nature of the show allows certain memories to resurface. now that select has ended and she has succeeded in making into a group, she finds herself at a very interesting point in life, unsure of whether this all is right for her and now dealing with the belated guilt and fear of disappointing her family and whether she made the right choice. her inner demons that she hid so well, buried so deep that she thought they disappeared are all coming back to haunt her and we’ll just have to wait and see how she plans on reigning them in, controlling them before they end up controlling her again.  ( 🦢 )  ╱  𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐄𝐍𝐃. 𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐓 𝐎𝐅 𝐒𝐎𝐌𝐄𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐆 . . .

WANTED PLOTS

i don’t have a plots page going at the moment because... i’m incompetent. but! there will be one eventually, hopefully.

for now though i’d love to brainstorm anything and everything in terms of connections so please feel free to hit me up with your ideas, i’m very excited to get something going for eira. personally i’d love to get her some sibling-like relationships especially. due to her upbringing she is naturally drawn towards people who would take care of her so i can see her having many older sister / older brother type relationships!! 

despite her very troubling mindset she’s a very loveable, innocent little creature with a very trusting heart. she’s a bit naive and quite manipulable but she loves very easily too. i can also see her having a lot of unrequited crushes because she tends to over-inflate emotions and mistake platonic affection for love sometimes. not that she love-starved or anything, tbh she’s kind of smothered by it but she loves love so pls give me some angsty one-sided connections. 🤷‍♀️

also looking for anyone who can help guide her along the way in this daunting idol life! she’s got one foot out the door with this whole career, teetering on the edge of whether this is right for her or not so she may be in need of someone who helps her find her place here or at least reassure her.

and finally any fellow dancers!! dance is eira’s #1, always has been and always will be so she’d be likely to befriend anyone who shows an interest in that also. she might be in need of someone to dance with, teach her new dance styles or someone who is looking to get some help with dance or something like that.

the sun had only just dipped below the horizon, a golden afterglow illuminating the party and casting floral shadows upon the walls when eira stepped out onto the patio. by now, some idols were making their leave whilst others migrated to the open area to enjoy more casual conversations. and as eira follows, the subtle scent of spring floods her senses like a perfumed cloud. the atmosphere outside is aslively and vibrant as it has been at the start, if not even more now as artists and staff alike floated around care-freely with the soft sounds of singing drifting in the air.

spring had descended upon seoul, as eira liked to believe, unexpectedly and with it came the invitation at arcana’s door of a spring party. but no amount of flowers and sunshine seemed to ease the discomfort in eira’s bones in the days following. ever since the announcement was made and her group was tasked with pulling off a performance of phoenix’s 90’s love, the former ballerina had found herself relatively on edge. she doesn’t think she’s slept properly in days, spending most of her hours within the dance studio hoping to do her best in perfecting the lively movements of the other group’s choreography. but, with only a week leading up to the event, eira can’t help shake the feeling that something isn’t quite right in the way she moves. each time she goes through the routine, hitting the beat perfectly and moving her limbs in just the right motions with as much of her performative charisma as she can, it can’t be helped that frustration bleeds through. there’s something that isn’t there just yet and she’s not sure what it is as it eats at her conscience, begging her to find it before someone else can point out the flaw for her. something didn’t feel right and the more she put her mind on it, concentrating on the tiniest of things, the more she felt the pressure of the performance that was meant to be a more vibrant, carefree stage. 

and so gwyneira arrives at the 11:11 building early one morning in hopes of catching an empty studio in which she could practice once again, even before the rest of her group members makes it in. however, she only manages to find herself in the company’s café, that by the looks of it was empty, before she stops. it was almost empty it seemed.

before eira takes the next turn to the elevators she catches sight of one other person in the building this early, the other idol’s face standing out to her in a sea of nothing but air. it’s a split second decision for her between pressing the elevator button or abandoning her bags to make her way to the clover girl. eira and eunbin had barely had another chance to meet up since their respective debut schedules and in the days leading up to their next big performance, whether she realises it or not, eira finds a comfort in knowing that it seems someone else may be in just as much anticipation for it as her, whether negatively or not.    

the party is well underway with all the artist’s main performances finished, and now they float around, weaving in and out of their various social circles — a myriad of famous faces and names that, to eira, merely blur together. arcana’s dancer finds herself idle in a crowd of people and she doesn’t think she’s ever felt so out of place anywhere before but in a sense she doesn’t really mind. she’d left her group’s table only a few moments ago, the one with the pretty display of golden lilies and amaranth roses that she must have stared at for an hour before she was drawn away by one idol chatting with her, leading her out as they exited the venue onto the patio, leaving the girl alone somewhere in between.   

truth be told it was not her favourite of the seasons, but eira sinks into the atmosphere of the spring event with ease. she appreciates the blossoms and the streams of sunlight that kiss at her skin as she makes her way to a less dense area of the hall. there’s something in the air that feels inexplicably nostalgic and though its a sense she can’t quite place, she doesn’t need to do much to figure it out. whether or not she was aware of it, she seemed to be actively seeking someone out. 

gwyneira jeon has loved a million things in her life; places, songs, flowers... people. and it was all in the sense that she truly loved them, inexplicably and inexorably because it is in her nature to fall that deeply so quickly and with such reckless abandon. and it a love that lingers, in perpetuity, no matter at what age it had been acquired. now that spring has arrived and love is in the air, a feeling of nostalgia floods her senses into thinking instantly of all the things she loves and has ever loved. cha rohan just happened to be one of them.   ​

​its a magnetism she believes to be something acquired, an impulse of her usually well-controlled limbs to find her way to him because it is safe and it feels like home. it ties her back to all the good of the days before and the bad that with her naivety, she refuses to acknowledge. eira doesn’t think she’ll ever see him in a poor light or associate him with such, not as her friend and not as what he had been after that. it is the magic of first loves and first losses she supposes. but she knows that he wasn’t really lost to her at all. unmoving and constant, she’d found a best friend in someone she can’t help but love like this season makes her want to. he’ll always be there, someway and somehow. it’s a promise they’d woven into dance all those years ago as children and one she’s sure she reminded him of when she’d last seen him months ago.  

the last time they’d spoken in person had been before the first select season began, their careers forcing a divide between them until now. but its not like she’d forgotten what his presence felt like. rather she always had a knack for picking him out in a crowd and its when no one’s really looking either of their way that she catches sight of him, back turned to hers but she recognises him still. “rohan!”

his name slips from her lips excitedly and without thought, a reflex from all the times she’d called it in the past. before she really knows what she’s doing or saying she’s making her way to him, her eyes alight with something akin to enchantment and a soft, whimsical smile on her face that she reserves only for people she’d known as long as she’d known rohan. eira had always been an eloquent speaker but now it seemed all words were lost to her but at least with rohan, actions always spoke louder than words. and so the follow dancer crashed into him in a way that one could only call graceful because it was her. its an act so characteristically eira, pulling him in a hug before he even realises, that identifies her in an instant.

Eira remembers her audition day like it was a long-lost fever dream, vividly in flashes but never with much certainty as she would like to recall it. It is there, somewhere nestled in the back of her mind in a box labelled, The Beginning, the true turning point of her life. The choice to audition for an entertainment had been half on a whim, a friend of hers from the dance academy having mentioned it to her once around the time she’d felt like her world was caving in on her at all sides. It was a time when she could no longer bare to even look directly in the mirrors lining studio walls for fear that the only thing she’d see in them was a shell of the passionate girl she’d been before. And more greatly, for fear that the only person staring back at her would be herself. It was a time when she’d never felt more alone, in need of something to validate her existence beyond what she could achieve solely in a pair of pointe shoes.

Angelfish Entertainment’s auditions had called to her like a pied piper, entered her palms like a little sliver of grace. So the ballerina shows up at the building on the open call audition day, fully prepared yet entirely hesitant. And she is alone. She hadn’t told anyone she’d be auditioning and that’s what she’d thought would be best if the circumstance arises in which she fails. It’d kill her, she thinks, to see disappointment in someone’s gaze or to be criticised for making what she knows they would think to be a mistake. However standing there amongst a sea of other trainee hopefuls, Eira thinks she should have at least brought a friend. 

 *  *  *

She might not entirely remember the events of the day or what occurred between the moments of entering and auditioning and leaving, but what has stuck to her with utter permanence would be her movements and the dance she’d performed. She’d entered the room in her usual whimsical nature, breezing through the necessary introductions without faltering her words despite what eats at the core of her mind. She thinks it had been nervousness, but in her own way she would always be too proud to admit it. If there was a confidence she had in anything, it would be in dance.

It had not been ballet she had performed but a gaze into her contemporary roots, a world she loved just as much but never had the same pressures as ballet had for her. Each step to the beat is something akin to freedom, the choreography unravelling in perfect clarity somewhere behind a veil in her mind. She remembers falling deep into the sort of delirium that only dance can bring her and she doesn’t even need anything else to captivate her assessors. It was and had been undeniable from the beginning of her time, that Gwyneira Jeon had been born for the stage.

* * *

It was a quick, sharp snapping of china clay somewhere in her figure that draws the tormenting melody to a gradual halt. The ballerina’s movements slow, becoming as rigid and still as the day and the music draws out until there’s only a staggering silence. The cracks, fine dark ridges, crawl up the side of her perfect porcelain face and run down her mid-pirouette figure, reaching the tips of her sculpted pointe shoes, and she shatters. Her kaolin body bursts because she is in such desperate disarray and can no longer hold the broken pieces of herself together. Little porcelain shards sprinkle around her ornate music-box in a slowed down motion that resembles feathers raining from heaven and when they fall they fall harshly, splintering into a million pieces. The air fills with the scent of silk and wilted rose-petals and the burning aftertaste of sulphur as she breaks away. As her cracked skin meets harsh painted ridges and the metal spikes of a key that was her master—not her freedom—her beloved prison crumbles and buries her, digging deep into her fragmented soul…

But the beautiful music box ballerina can no longer feel the pain.