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It’s Shin Yoosung that kills Kim Dokja first. He’s standing by the window when she barges in before everyone else, white hospital drapes fluttering around him as he turns. Eyes alert and bright. The impact of Shin Yoosung’s body slamming into his stomach shocks a laugh out of him, and Yoo Joonghyuk sees over Han Sooyoung’s trembling shoulder Kim Dokja bending down, his long, no longer shrunken arms wrapping around his former incarnation’s back.
“Yoosung,” he says, muffling her sobs in her shirt. His face twists up something awful. “You’ve gotten so tall.”
Lee Gilyoung is next, no less forceful as he rams into Kim Dokja. Kim Dokja half-laughs, half-coughs, barely gets a hand atop Lee Gilyoung’s head before Lee Jihye’s piling on, then Jung Heewon, then Lee Hyunsung. Kim Dokja’s knees give out and they sink down with him, covering him, clutching him. Yoo Sangah leans against the wall heavily.
“I hate you,” Han Sooyoung says raggedly. She swipes at her face, then steps forward too.
Yoo Joonghyuk simply stands there, behind them all, watching. The adrenaline from the sprint here fades. The clamor he takes in; the outpouring of relief he takes in; the solid bits of Kim Dokja flailing around he takes in. This room, once overtaken with grey, is now blown through with gold.
And even as the world around them has renewed itself in the decades that passed in their absence, in their desperation, Yoo Joonghyuk feels a crumbling beginning from the center of his throat. He doesn’t know if he hates him. He spent an interminable number of years in space trying to kiss the edges of his fragmented dreams. He doesn’t think he hates him, though he is here and himself and speaking, no longer a tiny, motionless shell, and Yoo Joonghyuk can hate him with his entire being.
Yoo Joonghyuk doesn’t. But he doesn’t step forward, either. Everything has already gone to shit. What, then, now that they’ve crossed countless worldlines, reached far into the depths of their universe only to fold back into themselves, all in search of a fuller life? And now that they’ve written and read and loved Kim Dokja back into that full life, what do they do with the nonexistent rubble, the settling of once-frenzied hearts?
Yoo Joonghyuk doesn’t know. This is an end, Kim Dokja opening his eyes, and all he knows is that he wants to see all the endings that come after. All of them awake.
“Kim Dokja,” he says, hours later, the first words he’s said to him after an eternity, “I thought I lost you.”
Everyone has left, finally—or, they’ve been politely and firmly asked out of the hospital room. Lee Gilyoung and Shin Yoosung wanted to take Kim Dokja home, of course, but there was no reason to hurry, not anymore. The adults had herded the children—no, teenagers, young adults—away, and left just Han Sooyoung and Yoo Joonghyuk behind. Han Sooyoung’s went down to the cafeteria on the ground floor in search of coffee, and now it’s just them two. The once-character and the forever-reader.
“Well.” Kim Dokja glances down at his clasped hands. Night has already set in, the white glow of the lamp accompanied only by the minuscule red and blue lights of the medical equipment. “I didn’t intend it to be that way.”
He doesn’t look like someone that’s been in a coma for years, his flesh and bones and soul stolen away. He’s thin, but only in the way he’s always been, without waste. When he raises a hand to brush the hair out of his eyes, shadow falls over his face and swallows half of his features whole. He lowers his hand, and Yoo Joonghyuk lets a breath out.
“You did. You left us with less than half of you.”
Kim Dokja’s mouth twitches, and his hands tighten. That might as well be a flinch. For all his unreadability—the first thing Yoo Joonghyuk hated about him—a portion of him still leaks through. And after so many chapters, so many years, so many dreams of his long coat and punchable mouth, Yoo Joonghyuk can read that much.
“That was still me,” says Kim Dokja, quietly. “I still remembered you. All of you.”
“Was it?” Yoo Joonghyuk asks mercilessly. “If you only remembered what we liked, and not what you liked, was that still you? If I journeyed away and left the 999th turn in my stead, would you see him the same way you see me?”
Kim Dokja looks at him for an extended moment, like, You actually have thoughts up in that head of yours? Curiously enough, Yoo Joonghyuk hears that thought in a blend of three voices: Kim Dokja’s, Han Sooyoung’s, and his own. He shakes it away and refocuses on Kim Dokja, letting his gaze pry the man apart.
“No,” Kim Dokja says, “I wouldn’t. There is only one you, after all. But I would still—” he blinks suddenly, a candle’s wavering flame “—care for him. The Yoo Joonghyuk you left behind.”
Yoo Joonghyuk’s satisfied and upset at the same time for some unknown reason, but that’s normal when it comes to dealing with Kim Dokja. It doesn’t mean he’s missed it, though. Not his inability to understand his own reactions. He glares. “Then any version of me—”
Kim Dokja huffs. “You know that’s not what I meant.”
“No,” says Yoo Joonghyuk, but it has been long established already. That he is not the Yoo Joonghyuk Kim Dokja met through Ways of Survival, nor the Secretive Plotter. Only the one with his hand around Kim Dokja’s throat that fateful day, wondering who he was, what he had done, what his place was in this 3rd and 1864th turn. He was the Yoo Joonghyuk in opposition; not the one that had provided salvation to Kim Dokja for a decade, sketched in agony through Han Sooyoung’s words, but the one who had received salvation.
“But—” Kim Dokja reaches out, touches a palm to Yoo Joonghyuk’s startled face. “I would want only you here, the one that went through it all with me.” He laughs, but it’s not surprised, or joyful. Only wistful. “I’m sorry. If I knew you were out there, I would have searched for you.”
There’s a hot, uncomfortable pressure building underneath Yoo Joonghyuk’s skin. He bats Kim Dokja’s hand away and stands up, preparing to leave. He’s a little furious, with himself and with Kim Dokja. He hadn’t said what he meant to say: I’ve grown accustomed to losing you. Stop it. Make it so that you can leave my sight without me believing the last I see of you will be your narrow back. Doesn’t Kim Dokja know him like the lines of his own hand? He should’ve been able to tell what Yoo Joonghyuk hadn’t said.
But he has spent all this time learning Kim Dokja, trying, if only in bits and pieces, to collect snapshots of his mind. To know more than a pained smile, a scheming voice. And yet Kim Dokja has only slept, holding up the fabric of this very universe with his slumber.
He meets Han Sooyoung halfway down the cold, empty hallway and gives her a nod.
I am alive because of you. I exist because of you. Are these two things the same? Yoo Joonghyuk doesn’t know, and he doesn’t know if it makes a difference, either, what the answer is. The fact remains: they have consumed so much of one another that for one to die would be to carry a vital part of the other to the grave. In the shattering of Yoo Joonghyuk’s mind, still unreal then, revealed the threads Kim Dokja grasped onto to stay alive. In the repeated destruction of Kim Dokja’s body came Yoo Joonghyuk’s decision to never relive his lonely nightmare of a reality again, to give up regression once and for all—and then, in the fracturing of Kim Dokja’s soul came Yoo Joonghyuk’s ability to once again face the possibility of restarting.
From the sharp corner of the road, where the cover of buildings and trees break apart to let the sunlight crash down in full, Kim Dokja waves at him. He’s dressed like he still works at Mino Soft, light blue button-up tucked into pressed brown pants. He looks so wonderfully normal. Yoo Joonghyuk, in his red cotton shirt and sneakers, looks just as normal. To the outside eye, they are merely two men passing through the streets of Seoul rebuilt.
No longer demon and avenger, human and character, changing fifteen and perpetual twenty-eight. Yoo Joonghyuk walks down the road, all their thousands and thousands of stories singing between them as the distance closes. Kim Dokja smiles up at him as he comes near.
“I haven’t seen you in color,” he remarks. Before Yoo Joonghyuk can say anything, Kim Dokja pinches the red cotton between two fingers and follows it up with, “But it’s not weird. Looks good, actually. Looks right.”
And this—is right. Yoo Joonghyuk never needs to wear plain black combat gear again, and Shin Yoosung never needs to look up into the glittering stars with fear again, and Kim Dokja never needs to lie to slip away again. In this new world, all they must deal with is the sweat sliding down their backs from the heat, the uncountable evils of a closed-off Earth, reading each other but not knowing each other.
Life always finds a way to be difficult. He wants to hold Kim Dokja long and close until they’ve seen every possible color laid against each other’s skin, but his hands operate in terms of life and death, make or break, and he cannot possibly grip Kim Dokja’s wrist like he holds his sword. Yoo Joonghyuk doesn’t respond, and simply walks beside Kim Dokja as they head towards the others, clouds sighing overhead.
Kim Dokja is up to something. It’s obvious, the catlike gleam in his eye, the nervous flash of his arm flipping his phone screen face-down. He isn’t bothering to hide it, or maybe he’s losing his touch. After he woke up, Yoo Joonghyuk found, he’s been looser in a subtle way, limbs relaxed, smiles only devious half the time.
He edges Kim Dokja up against the counter, reaches past him for his phone. Kim Dokja squeaks and tries moving the phone out of reach, but it’s wrested out of his grasp. It’s locked, the homescreen a group picture of their disbanded company squeezed together in front of an oak tree. Yoo Joonghyuk frowns, but Kim Dokja sticks out his tongue and makes another futile swipe.
“What are you plotting? Tell me,” demands Yoo Joonghyuk, holding the phone up above his head.
Kim Dokja jumps, but only succeeds in smashing his nose into Yoo Joonghyuk’s cheek. “Secret,” he says, and leaps again. “Everyone has their secrets!” he protests. “And it won’t even stay for long. You’ll know soon.”
There’s still a terrible purity in him for all his trickery. Like a bird flitting about, Yoo Joonghyuk thinks, readying itself for its solitary migration, catching the best, most arduous winds. But there’s nowhere to fly, anymore, or to run. Only to walk, slow.
“Will it take you away?” asks Yoo Joonghyuk. Like too many of your other secrets, will this one take you away from us? From me.
Something flashes across Kim Dokja’s face—guilt, perhaps, but not only that—and he stops reaching. Lets his hand fall to Yoo Joonghyuk’s shoulder, instead. His thumb presses into his collarbone.
“Joonghyuk-ah,” he says softly. “Happy thirty-fourth birthday.”
Yoo Joonghyuk stands there for a moment, processing. Ah—the year’s careened into August, already. He’s long forgotten he has a birthday. He lowers his hand and allows Kim Dokja to snatch his phone back.
“It’s today, but I thought we’d celebrate on the weekend.” Kim Dokja slants his mouth. “You know, since the kids have school. And we should be working, technically. It was supposed to be a surprise, but—” He gives Yoo Joonghyuk a displeased glance. “That’s not possible anymore.”
He can’t remember a single birthday party in his life, actually. Yoo Joonghyuk’s not resentful of his two-and-a-half decades of blank history; Han Sooyoung was on a time crunch, then, and it would’ve been strange at that stage for her to craft his past in such detail. But this is strange in a different way, and new, and nice.
He must have smiled or done something adjacent, because all of a sudden Kim Dokja is laughing and smacking his shoulder. Kim Dokja backs out of Yoo Joonghyuk’s space, one secret lighter as he turns to go.
“Don’t go,” Yoo Joonghyuk says, then mentally kicks himself. And then wonders why he kicked himself. He wants him now, has wanted him since he drifted through the endless sprawl of black space with only the story of his sole reader to sustain him, has wanted him across countless screaming battlefields, has wanted him since he dangled him off a bridge, the glint of knowing hard against his temple. All in different ways. The latest: in his entirety, with the intention to never let go. If this is his end goal, he need not hide anything.
“It’s scorching hot in here, you cheapskate,” says Kim Dokja, fanning himself with a limp hand. “I’m getting out. See you tomorrow.”
Yoo Joonghyuk catches his wrist, pulls him back. Brings them nose to nose, ignores Kim Dokja’s gasp as he wraps a hand around his waist. “Stay.”
It’s evening, and the AC’s off, but the air’s still stuffy and slow-moving, thick around their bodies. Heat paints them red. Yoo Joonghyuk tries not to beg, but it fights its way out of him anyway, his loss. He makes his hands as gentle as he can. “Please, Kim Dokja. Stay.”
Kim Dokja holds his gaze for a moment, then sighs. “You’re lucky you were once my favorite character,” he says, but instead of sounding malicious it comes out fond.
“‘Once’?” questions Yoo Joonghyuk. His surroundings have blurred into indistinct patches of color; all he sees is Kim Dokja. The flush on his cheeks, as if slightly drunk, the perfect connecting curve from cheek to chin. His eyes, dark and wondering.
Kim Dokja tilts his head. “We’re quite the same now, are we not?”
“Right,” Yoo Joonghyuk says, dry-mouthed. When he lifts his hand and fits it against the side of Kim Dokja’s face, he does it as if handling the thinnest glass, the disintegrating wisps of a beautiful dream, the shreds of a dying fire. Kim Dokja stays unmoving, but Yoo Joonghyuk can see his pulse beat strong. “Right. We are.”
They are, and they aren’t. Yoo Joonghyuk bears faded scars all over his body, and he’s far too old to be a professional gamer, even if his reflexes are still up to scratch. Kim Dokja looks the same as when Yoo Joonghyuk met him several years ago, or a hundred years ago, but he moves different. Like he’s landed on both feet in this right world. They have both read and read until words burst from their tongues and elbows and necks. They have both thought to lay the universe at their feet and tread over it.
They stay like that, waiting, worlds springing up between them, squeezing into the atomic space between Kim Dokja’s cheek and Yoo Joonghyuk’s palm. Until Kim Dokja says finally, throat raw with want, “Yoo Joonghyuk,” and Yoo Joonghyuk leans down to kiss him. Kim Dokja arches up to meet him, first yielding and then throwing himself in, knotting his fingers in Yoo Joonghyuk’s hair.
Into the living room they stumble and onto the sofa they collapse, where the night sky yawns huge and loud beyond the open window. Kim Dokja’s fingers are everywhere, brushing against the throbbing vein in his neck, snaking down his chest and tugging at the hem of his shirt. Yoo Joonghyuk lets him yank it up and over, shaking his head as it comes off. Summer air glances off his back.
“It’s a lot cooler like this,” he tells Kim Dokja, then lets his head tip back as Kim Dokja lowers his mouth to his neck. All things hot and bright and concentrated with love have been possessed by their lips.
“In a moment,” Kim Dokja says. Delight runs the edges of him electric. He swings a leg over Yoo Joonghyuk’s lap, straddles his hips as he brings a hand up to cup Yoo Joonghyuk’s face, mirroring his earlier movement. Summer is too much to bear, putting relentless cracks through the wood and glass and stone, and only the two of them are impenetrable. Yoo Joonghyuk lets his eyes fall shut. “I want to take my time taking you apart.”
And he does. They meld hot and sweet into each other, two people too different to ever stop surprising each other, too irreparably entangled to ever pull apart.
A demon, a broken man says silently: By grand invention, my near-death robbed from you your ability to die. Only to live, live, live; and I know it is no comfort that I lived right along with you as you turned through thousands of years and I meandered through ten. But love: selfishly, I am glad I lived to see you. I am glad you love me enough to keep me living forever.
An avenger, a broken man says silently: By grand invention, I was born when you wished for me, and I lived because you loved me. More than loneliness, more than fear, you held on and I walked forward, even as pieces of me flaked off and crumbled to ash. But love: selfishly, I am glad you had only me for a time, and that you kept me even as you gained more. I am glad you loved me enough to bring me into the pages, and love me enough to bring me out.
“How old are you, really?” asks Kim Dokja.
They sit in the kitchen on tall wooden barstools, still shirtless, finishing off the last popsicles in the freezer. The moon passes behind and through scattered clouds, a waxing gibbous. Yoo Joonghyuk feels liquid, bones soft and heavy. He breaks off a chunk of blue ice and crushes it between his back teeth.
“I don’t know,” he says honestly. Kim Dokja gestures and he holds out his popsicle. “Shouldn’t you be clear on this?”
Kim Dokja takes a bite and licks his lips contemplatively. “Math has never been my strong suit. And there were a lot of skipped turns—ah.” Since Han Sooyoung never wrote them, no one knows how long Yoo Joonghyuk spent inside them before he died. In essence, though he theoretically lived through them, there are no memories attached, and so their existence is uncertain. Only old scars are proof of those rounds, cut into him by the author’s sleep-deprived pen.
Yoo Joonghyuk shakes his head before Kim Dokja can apologize. He lets Kim Dokja have the rest of his popsicle.
“Then how old do you think you are?”
“Over two thousand years old, at least,” he says, tongue blue. “But thirty-four if you wish me to be.”
Kim Dokja laughs. Yoo Joonghyuk wants it to never stop happening. “That’s perfect. You’ve got some grey in your hair, but your face doesn’t match. It makes sense, though.”
“Does it,” says Yoo Joonghyuk, but he doesn’t care very much, because it’s right anyway, and Kim Dokja is leaning in again. And this will happen in winter, and another summer, and when he is thirty-five and three thousand and still a contradiction grown too large to puzzle out. Because this loop of a world is right, and unhurried, and created in mercy for their love to lead them right back to each other.