Twelve years later, Donghae was now living in Seoul. Ever since he lost his father eleven and a half years ago to cancer, he had stopped going to funfairs altogether. His father’s last gift to Donghae was the huge plush monkey he’d named Hyukkie, before his father’s health plunged and continued deteriorating until he passed away. Donghae couldn’t bear the thought of going to the Mokpo funfair anymore without his father since turning nine. At age nineteen, Donghae had moved out to Seoul where he seized at the opportunity to work as an apprentice at a confectionary. His dream had always been to work with chocolate and someday own a chocolate business of his own – moving out was the first step towards this large dream of his. His mother was reluctant to let him go at first, because she couldn’t bear to think of living alone without her son, but she realized that there were simply many more opportunities outside of Mokpo, and so she agreed to let him go with a heavy heart.

Donghae lived with his three other housemates: Yesung, a weird fellow that nobody wanted to befriend because there was just a suspicious aura around him – some even say that Yesung wasn’t his real name and that he’s an escaped convict avoiding the police; Kyuhyun, a genius at computer programming who would stay in front of his computer the whole day playing Starcraft; and Sungmin, Kyuhyun’s unboyfriend who was a part time model full time leech – during the days he didn’t have photo shoots, he would be stuck to Kyuhyun at the hip like glue. Donghae always couldn’t help thinking that the two of them shared a much deeper relationship than the platonic one they let the world know.

Donghae loved his job. He was very grateful for landing this job at the confectionary as soon as he arrived in Seoul. His job was simply to make sure the proper ingredients were added into the right containers and ensure the quality of all confectioneries produced were up to standard. Oftentimes he’d even get to bring home deformed candy or chocolate that didn’t set properly and share them with his housemates. Free candy was one of the best parts of his job. Although many of his colleagues have already sworn off chocolate and candy because they were simply sick of them, Donghae never did, and grew to love his sweet tooth more and more. However, being the clumsy person he was, things didn’t always go right for him. Once he accidentally confused the ingredients for white and dark chocolate, so a whole batch of white chocolate turned brown while the dark chocolate just didn’t look right. Another time Donghae tripped over a tray of half-set molten candy and got them all over his new shoes, turning them into a hot, gooey and sticky mess, and wasted a perfectly good batch of candy. There was another incident where he accidentally swapped the salt and sugar supply so the factory ended up with vaultfuls of sweet peanut butter and salty chocolate.

Each time Donghae messed up, his boss would give him a hard time. He would have to personally clean up whatever mess he made and pay for the losses that the company suffered every time a new batch of candy was destroyed