No Question ||《Jenyong》

My Love Is: Romanticized

Prologue One

When Jennie was five years old, she walked back to her childhood home in Korea, tears running down her face. Her father, a capable Wizard who wasn't accustomed to being a single parent, hadn't known what to do. "Papa," she wailed, the back of her left hand wiping her tear stricken cheeks, "the kids are being mean."

With a slight frown, her father had picked her up and cradled her in his arms in a nearby chair. "They were being mean? What'd they say, Sweetie?"

"They said my hair is funny because it's white and said they would stop playing with me because I don't have brown hair like them," She sniffled, showing her father her platinum blonde locks in her hands. Her father stared at her guiltily, hugging her close to his chest.

"No, honey. Your hair is beautiful," He told her, kissing her temples and rocking her back and forth, whispering praises and heartfelt apologies into her hair.

It's the most vivid memory she had in Korea; she couldn't remember much else as they moved away shortly afterwards, to a quaint little house in London. Her father is a cursebreaker, and the English Ministry had needed an extra pair of hands. Jennie hadn't wanted to move away, but her Dad convinced her that in London: "There'll be other children with the same hair as you."

Although estatic at the time, she was eight when she figured out her hair wasn't normal; at least for a Korean person. Muggles, as she had learned to call non-magical folk, would stare at her curiously, while her father's magical friends would whisper about her when they thought neither daughter or father were listening.

Jennie resorted to hiding her hair under hats and hoods whenever they needed to go somewhere public. "What are you doing, Jen?" Her father had asked one sunny day, lifting the hood of her jacket to look at her face. It was far too warm to be wearing any sort of jacket and, though his lips quirked up in amusement, his eyes flashed with worry.

"People always stare at me because of my hair. I don't like it."

With a sad smile and a nod of understanding, he sighed, dropping his hand. "I'm sorry."

She tilted her head, wondering why he was apologizing to her. She glanced up at her father's messy, brunette mop of hair and touched the strands. Jennie always knew her hair came from her mother, but she never bothered to ask about her. She briefly wondered why she wasn't more curious.

Determined, she touched her father's cheek. "Papa, what was Mama like?"

His eyes widened, moving back and forth between her eyes. His mouth opened and shut a few times before he swallowed and said, "Your Mama was beautiful and I always told myself that I must be the luckiest man in the world for someone like her to have fallen for little old me." He smiled at his daughter, eyes glassy. She gestured for him to go on and that's when she found out her mother was Veela. Not full, but half. Her Grandmother migrated from Bulgaria to Korea and fell in love with her Grandfather.

Her father explained that Veela could only fall in love once. He cried as he told his daughter about the time her mother told him she could have died of heartbreak if he hadn't loved her back. They were already married then, but he still felt guilty for some reason; as if he should have been with her since the very beginning. He told Jennie that her mother only laughed, and assured him that he was of no fault.

And for hours, Jennie sat and listened to her father's stories, toying with the ends of her platinum blonde hair, silently romanticizing about a future with a boy who'll love her just as much as her father loved her mother.

The year Jennie turned eleven, she managed to convince her father to charm her hair. She had recieved her hogwarts letter a week prior and routinely started to adamantly beg her Dad to change her platinum blonde waves to match his coloring more similarly.

After denying her at every turn for six days straight, he finally broke when she looked at him with tears in her eyes, explaining that she didn't want to stand out too much. Primary School had been living hell for her (though, she sugar coated the bullying for her sweet, old Dad) and she didn't want to see people pointing at her or whispering about her in the hallways. Not anymore. She wanted to step away from the spotlight and live life as a normal Witch (or, at the very least, as normal as Witches can be).

So, he charmed her hair-- a chestnut color, similar to his but slightly lighter, as if to perserve her mother's memory-- teaching her the incantation to both release and redo the spell if she ever needed to do either for any reason.

She looked over herself through a slightly cracked mirror, her father standing behind her with his hands on her shoulders, waiting to see her reaction with a hopeful grin. Small fingers ran through her hair. It was still soft, only slightly tangled and mussed. Wrapping a lock of hair around her finger, she noticed how the strands of her hair looked almost gold by themselves; no doubt, a personal touch from her father.

The unshed tears prickled at the corners of her eyes, threatening to spill, as she whispered 'thank you' to her dad over and over again. It dawned on Jennie, at that moment, that she hadn't shed a tear in front of him since she first came crying to him at five years old.