METANOIA | TK

Chapter Two

Jeongguk realizes sometimes that he might try a little too hard when it comes to work but that doesn't mean he considers it a bad thing. He does several plans, retouches them if he messes up an angle, he designs buildings that are modern but that are also unique in their own way, he puts too much work into shading his drawings, and the list keeps going. That's what got him a job in the best architecture firm from Seoul after all.

He's not the best, he likes to believe that thinking you're the best means you're just overconfident in your own skills, but he's hardworking and passionate so he thinks those are his most important traits. He's not the best because, in such a large world, no matter how good you are, there will always be someone better than you. You just have to keep working until you're content with yourself so Jeongguk does just that, he works even harder because of his mentality.

His first years of college were pretty basic.

He wasn't special and he wasn't even known by his professors but he was passionate enough to work for months on his final exam. He still has it framed on his office wall since that's the project that caught the eyes of famous, senior, architects. He was hired right after finishing college, but only after 2 years he started getting projects on his own, finally being able to start his own small firm. What made him even more known was his project for a shopping center in Gangnam-gu. He designed the place with an interior garden so he wouldn't have to cut down the trees and mess up nature for their entertainment. Guess people saw that as good potential and more clients reached out to him, telling him that they enjoyed his ideas of merging nature and modern times together.

Jeongguk was actually trying to lessen the destruction of nature, not create a new architectural concept, but he embraced the attention anyway.

Of course, with success came hard times as well. He got a lot of good projects that he couldn't deny so everything became overwhelming in the end, forcing him to stay days and nights awake in order to finish them all. Hard work pays off but Jeongguk still believes that having money and a good career is slightly overrated since a lot of people tend to think that life is just about that. Money and a good political status.

He thinks life is about much more but he was never able to voice out his thoughts or break from the stereotypes because, as soon as someone becomes different and shows other people that they have a different point of view, they get isolated and judged. This is just the world they live in, a place in which people judge each other based on their careers, political status, income and appearances. Deep inside him, Jeongguk hates everything about it, he hates those stereotypes and he despises the attention he gets due to the fact that he's young, talented and, most important to some people, very attractive. He's also openly gay so his female clients mostly leave his firm with frowns on their faces and sad eyes.

However, he cannot say that he's not enjoying it, the life he's living. He has just enough money to provide for himself and invest even further, he's well known in his domain and many people look up to him and he also enjoys passing buildings that were designed by him. So, besides the grudge that is nestled inside his soul for the cruelty of this world, Jeongguk finds the good parts as well.

Just like the concept of yin and yang, he wants to believe that there is good in every bad thing but there is also evil in every good thing. It's called balance and he somehow understands it, just not as much as Namjoon does, the older being a whole encyclopedia about such concepts.

"We'll start this next week since we have to get the materials needed for this. I'm glad you made a list of what we had to buy, not a lot of people do that. You're really young, kiddo, and I thought you were going to give us a hard time, but I actually like you. We could work together in the future."