CHOI

DO-WON

Born: 1974

Last partner: Jeon Ji-eun (missing)

Children: San

Died: 1999 (aged 25)

Warning: I do not condone drug use in any form. If you are struggling with mental illness, please seek help. We are all here for you.

Do-won was born to Choi Hyun-ki, and grew up with his father largely absent from his life. This absence increased when his younger sister, Hye-rin, died, and was propelled by Hyun-ki's unrealistic expectations of him. His father was desperate to have him follow in his footsteps by joining ATEEZ, but Do-won wanted nothing to do with his father nor his business. This rift blew wide open when Do-won's mother passed away in 1994.

Finally exhausted with Hyun-ki's pressure and without his mother's patient, guiding words, he succumbed to his depression. He began using drugs - whatever he could get his hands on - that he bought from KARD sellers (no one from ATEEZ dared to sell him a thing, after Hyun-ki took a syringe full of heroin and stabbed it into the neck of his original supplier; the man didn't survive).

In 1998, he met Ji-eun during one of his drug runs, and they clicked immediately: both of them were suffering under the weight of their family's pressure to perform to an unofficial standard, but together - in each other and in the intoxicating poisons they consumed - they found solace.

For a while, he evaded Hyun-ki, hid the tracks on his arms and tried to remain sober around him. But when Ji-eun fell pregnant, Hyun-ki threatened to kill her and the unborn child if Do-won didn't leave her and join the gang - "clean up his mess".

Do-won, of course, refused. He remained by her side until she gave birth in 1999, to San. However, hidden deep within her was the shame, the disappointment, the discontentment at what her life had become - she had been feeling that way for a while, too afraid to tell her boyfriend. And so, with her son barely a month old, she ran away, leaving Do-won to care for him all alone.

Her departure devastated him. With the stress a newborn child, the love of his life gone, and his father's disappointment suffocating him from every corner, Do-won turned to his drugs, but took too much. Succumbing to the effects of an overdose, he died and Hyun-ki took primary care of his son.