Work Text:
It starts again with a text.
Dokja – 23:25
Hey. Sorry to ask this of you, but I’m in town and the place I was going to stay in had some issues. Could I sleep over for a night? I’ll find a place tomorrow, it’s just that. It's late.You – 23:30
You know the passcode.
Joonghyuk drops his phone on his desk and reaches over to turn off his PC, ignoring the queue dodge warning on his screen. He runs on sheer muscle memory—takes off his headphones, drops them on his mic stand, and closes the door behind him when he leaves the room.
Only once he’s walking out of the guest room, dusty sheets under one arm and the bed freshly made, does it really register. He leans over the washing machine, letting its vibrations reverberate through his wrists and up his arms as he wonders what it will be like to see Dokja again.
What will it be like to have him as a guest in a house they used to share?
When the sound of a trundling car engine cuts off outside his place, Joonghyuk goes to the open kitchen to receive his… guest. The car starts up again, then fades from hearing, but still, the knock does not come. To get a handle on his own complicated emotions, he taps out a new character’s meta-breaking combo in the latest game patch against the marble countertop.
It only takes him maybe three minutes more to remember: Kim Dokja is an overthinker allergic to awkward situations and vulnerability and whatever his strange mind conjures up as burdening others. Joonghyuk taps a new message into his phone and retreats to his bedroom.
You – 01:13
Going to sleep now. Left the light on. Let yourself in. The guest bed is made.
Half an hour later, sleep still refusing to claim him, the front door swings open. Joonghyuk closes his eyes again. Dokja’s light footsteps down the hall sound the same as they used to, and the years-old ache in Joonghyuk’s chest finally starts to settle.
Before he falls asleep to the lull of a distantly familiar routine, Joonghyuk makes sure to set his alarm back a couple of hours.
▮▮▮
It starts with a text.
Or ends. The end, if Dokja must track it to a single moment’s trigger, starts with a text.
Hyuk-ie – 12:04
Have you packed?
Dokja wrinkles his nose in amused offense.
You – 12:04
Of course
What kind of person do you think I am?
He reopens his luggage and checks everything again anyway, just in case. Underwear, socks, shirts, pants, shorts, jackets, neck pillow, toiletries, beach towel, extra wall charger, charging bank.
Hyuk-ie – 12:13
Did you pack the clothes?
Dokja rolls his eyes fondly, shooting his partner a photo of the open suitcase as reply.
Hyuk-ie – 12:14
You don’t have shoes. Will be outside in 20.You – 12:14
And you have everything packed?
The read receipt flashes up at Dokja with all the dry judgment of Joonghyuk’s signature glare. He tucks his phone away with a small grin and fetches a couple pairs of shoes from the shoe rack, stuffing them in alongside the rest of his things. Joonghyuk’s suitcase is still unzipped, though closed, at the foot of their bed, so Dokja checks Joonghyuk’s packing too before zipping it up and bringing it out with his own.
He whiles away the minutes by the front door, suitcases pressed up against his legs with insistence. His plan had been to read, but when the words slide off his memory stubbornly after his fifth read of the same sentence, he gives up. Here, at the door, the idea of a holiday suddenly sinks dread-tipped talons into his stomach, the edges of a headache encroaching.
Precisely twenty minutes from his notifying text, the familiar tempo of Joonghyuk’s hybrid car cuts off outside their house. The early autumn breeze is still warm as Dokja opens the door to greet him, but he shivers in its wake. In lieu of hello, Joonghyuk tugs Dokja’s white coat lapels closed and ties up its belt. “Wear it properly.”
“Aren’t I?” Dokja jokes, shooting him a fluttery grin.
“Are you sure you have everything?”
Dokja snorts as they take their respective suitcases in hand and drag them out to the car, “I could ask you the same thing.”
His fingers tap an anxious rhythm on the plastic handle. Joonghyuk puts his hand over Dokja’s, stilling it.
“Don’t think by yourself,” he grumbles, “you never come to the right conclusions.”
Dokja gives a token protest, but he must still look out of sorts. Joonghyuk’s gaze flits back to him the entire length of the drive.
▮▮▮
Dokja wakes up in a room, in a house, that shouldn’t feel half so natural to wake up in. He turns off his alarm, rolls onto his back, and stares at the smooth flakes of glue on the ceiling that used to keep plastic stars afloat. Joonghyuk probably took them down when Dokja moved out. It has been years. It would be weirder if they were still stuck on the ceiling, really; it makes sense that they’ve fallen by now.
But beside the stars fallen from the white plaster and the new pair of potted plants outside the bedroom window, Dokja thinks he could trick himself into believing this is seven years back; some normal workday morning, a year before Yoo Joonghyuk had said in half as many words, “I like you. You like me. Let’s go out.”
Dokja chokes on a laugh and the accompanying pang in his chest at his own imagination. Actually, Sooyoung had done most of the confessing for them, drunk with their friends on the living room floor of this very house. Joonghyuk had looked at him with an awful, soft, searching gaze as their friends skimmed easily past Dokja’s best-worst-kept secret, and said, “Kim Dokja?”
Is it true?
“Yes,” Dokja mouths to himself like an old echo in his old bedroom-turned-guest room. He lets his cheek fall lethargically back against the pillow, facing the door like he’s talking to Joonghyuk himself. It smells good—freshly cooked kimchi pancakes. Down the hall, he can hear the sizzling. Joonghyuk has always been good like that.
“Sorry,” he mutters, still an echo of their past but also as a long-owed admission.
Joonghyuk’s low, rumbling response does not follow.
Dokja heaves himself out of bed, unheeding of the mild head spin, and shuffles to the kitchen. He had hoped to wake up either early or late enough to avoid this situation, but he does not trust his chances of waiting Joonghyuk out without missing the team induction… trust Minosoft to leave him to the offsite project that doesn’t even have enough funding to justify temporary relocation benefits.
“Good morning,” Dokja calls before he has even rounded the counter and laid eyes on his host.
“Good morning.” Joonghyuk’s response comes laden with intent that Dokja will gladly continue to ignore. Much more appreciated is the plate of breakfast Joonghyuk pushes his way. Dokja digs in with an involuntary noise of delight—Joonghyuk’s kimchi pancakes are as good as he remembers. Joonghyuk himself is as taciturn as always. It feels only slightly wrong to cut him off when he finally goes to speak.
“Sorry about this,” Dokja jumps in, flashing a blithe grin at Joonghyuk and pretending not to notice the way his perfect mouth snaps shut. “The place that I booked had some intense plumbing issues. I’m sure I can find somewhere to stay by tonight and I’ll be out of your hair.”
“Kim Dokja.”
“Seriously, thanks for housing me! It’s… uh. Just like I remember.”
Joonghyuk does something with his expression. Dokja is surprised to find he can still identify the minute changes, even if they leave him somewhat at a loss now. “Is it still to your taste?”
“Ah. Yes?” He doesn’t quite catch his own perturbed grimace, ducking his head and staring at his now empty plate instead. In the ensuing silence, Dokja turns his answer over. It’s true. His tastes have not changed much in their time apart. Really, they haven’t changed at all.
“I’m getting it refurbished,” Joonghyuk states. Dokja hums a bemused acknowledgment. It isn’t his house anymore and Joonghyuk isn’t one for small talk—even if the idea itself makes Dokja’s chest ache, who is he to say it?
His plate gets refilled with a couple more pancakes, and his ears with another weighted question: “Did you notice anything?”
“Did I notice…” Dokja has not been here long enough to find anything wrong with the house’s functions, but Joonghyuk stares at him, waiting for an answer. As he wracks his brain, that first jetsam realisation drifts to the forefront. “The glue from the ceiling stars. You should get that removed properly.”
It sounds less accusatory than ‘you took our stars down in my room,’ and less questioning than ‘the stars fell down.’ Joonghyuk grunts, a familiar noncommittal sound, and starts gathering up his cooking equipment to wash. Once Dokja finishes off the second serving, he hovers a few steps away, caught between the opposing urges of making himself useful and making himself scarce.
He turns the plate over in his hands. Turns it again. His thumb rubs against a rough part on the underside of the rim: a familiar chip in the ceramic he remembers making when he first moved into the room down the hall. It’s his plate. Dokja swallows back a disbelieving scoff and reaches for his cutlery. His cutlery, the set that he remembers finding on sale and showing Joonghyuk with a gleeful grin, the ones with the handles that fit perfectly to the shape of his fingers.
Joonghyuk holds out a dripping, rubber gloved hand. Dokja blinks.
“The dishes.”
“Ah—it’s alright, I’ll do them myself.” He steps forward. Joonghyuk doesn’t move.
“What time do you have to leave?”
Dokja hands over the dishes begrudgingly and checks the time. At the terse grimace he pulls, Joonghyuk jerks his head toward the hall. “Get dressed. I’ll drive you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Let me.”
Dokja presses his lips together, internally debating the offer, before he sighs and turns on his heel. “I’ll be ready in fifteen.”
▮▮▮
On the first day of their vacation, Joonghyuk wakes to the smell of something burnt—not burning, at least, but concerning enough that he stumbles into the kitchenette with a scowl on his face and a game plan in case their travel insurance tries to cut them off early. Instead of the charred mess of cooking utensils that Joonghyuk expects to find, there stands Dokja and that shifty, taut smile, and a sink full of soapy water.
“Something burned.”
Dokja shrugs, blasé as ever, “Just an egg.”
“Hm.” Joonghyuk scans the room once more. “You cleaned it up.”
“You say that like I don’t know how to clean up after myself.”
Joonghyuk stares at him, judging slightly. It is a fact of the matter that Kim Dokja does not clean up after himself except in the most literal sense of the word—he can do the dishes, clean a table, vacuum the floor, but his entire social circle is proof of the messes that Dokja will dip his fingers in to help before leaving as quickly as he came. The emotional messes.
Not that anyone in their right mind would look at the adults of their group, each markedly successful in their own right, and describe them as messes. Joonghyuk cracks a couple of fresh eggs in another pan. The sizzling is soon joined by Dokja’s companionable chatter, drifting through the dream he had about the beach they would visit today: stars falling from the sky above Joonghyuk, a furry tuft with a horn floating down too close to the waves and almost drowning in them before Joonghyuk fished the creature out and set it on his shoulder.
“It was strange, you know. It was my dream, but I wasn’t there. You were watching the stars fall into the seas with that little creature in your hair—it climbed all over you, it was so cute—and it felt like you were looking for me. I was seeing it all happen like… someone was reading it back to me.”
Joonghyuk sits next to Dokja at the table, setting their plates down with a clink. He catches Dokja’s left hand in his right and twines their fingers together in an unbudging grip.
“Yah, Joonghyuk-ah, there’s a perfectly good seat over there!” Dokja gripes light-heartedly as he waves his cutlery at the chair opposite.
“There is also a perfectly good seat right here.”
Dokja rolls his eyes but does not back away from the slight brush of their knees. With a cheeky grin, he teases, “I don’t know why I bother… you’ll do what you want either way.”
Joonghyuk only holds him tighter.
▮▮▮
Because Dokja has always managed to fail at rebuffing anything that will save him money, Joonghyuk picks him up from the meeting too. It is, admittedly, very convenient to skip the half-hour bus; it’s only the first day, and Dokja can already tell how miserable this month-long project will truly be. He had only just let his eyes fall shut with exhaustion when Joonghyuk clears his throat. “How did it go?”
Dokja baulks. Small talk? From Yoo Joonghyuk? It’s weird. It’s new. It’s…
“Fine,” he responds, puffing out his chest and flashing the grin that he knows gives Joonghyuk a headache. The façade only lasts a moment. Joonghyuk shoots him that ‘knock-it-off’ glare and Dokja slumps back in the passenger seat with a petulant grumble. “It went fine. The project’s gonna barely break even, but everyone knows that already. It’s just for a tax write-off. That’s why they sent the contract worker, after all! Penny-pinching rotten old buffoons, the lot of them.”
He rolls his eyes in exasperation, gesticulating in manners unbefitting of being seen in any office—though they are globally thrown up under the desk as the boss walks away. “Ah, Joonghyuk-ah… must be nice not having to put up with them.”
There falls a strangely tense silence, before Joonghyuk makes a short sound of agreement. Dokja replays his words and winces, playing the slip of his tongue off with a laugh. “Hah. Anyway... what did you do today?”
Long, dexterous fingers rap a mindless rhythm on the steering wheel as they both watch the traffic light slip from yellow to red. “I waited.”
“Uh-huh,” Dokja hums, confused. “For?”
Joonghyuk’s eyes shift to him in a long, evaluative stare. Dokja blinks back, smile faltering. Joonghyuk lets out a frustrated breath and mutters, “Don’t ask stupid questions.”
Dokja’s brow furrows. “Well, that’s rude.”
“It’s true.”
“Then what were you wai—”
Dokja cuts himself off sharply as Joonghyuk’s glare intensifies, a slight shiver running down his spine. Joonghyuk turns forward once more. His knuckles are white on the steering wheel. The light turns green. They go.
Back at the house, Dokja shucks his loafers off in the entrance hall and tosses them under the shoe rack. There must already be shoes under there; his left loafer lands half-exposed. Behind him, Joonghyuk scoffs, picking up his own shoes and dropping them primly on the top shelf of the rack.
“Not all of us have bank-breaking shoes that can’t take a bit of scuffing,” he remembers grumbling a dozen times over, returning late from work to Joonghyuk’s disapproving stare down the hall. Joonghyuk would point out acerbically, “I offered,” and Dokja would have to explain why that kind of thing was just plain unnecessary: wasting money on a contract worker whose supervisor would find a dozen other things to pick on before he reached the shine of Dokja’s shoes.
It is a small mercy that Joonghyuk does not repeat his offer now. Or… something of the like. Dokja frowns at the memory and crouches to fit his shoe in properly—he’s a guest now, he should be less slovenly. The shoe won’t fit under the rack anywhere, so he sticks his hand under and pulls out whatever is blocking it.
“Huh.” Dokja drops into a flat-footed crouch, surveying the scattered shoes. “You didn’t throw these out? Sell them? Donate?”
“They’re not mine to throw out.”
He shrugs blithely and sticks his left loafer under the rack with its pair. “That’s unlike you, Joonghyuk-ah. It’s been years. You should have.”
The shoes aren’t dusty. They should be, after so long under the rack. Dokja picks up a pair of cheap black canvas shoes and scratches the fabric. No dust comes off. He puts them all away neatly this time, mentally calculating if he has enough space in his suitcase to take these pairs with him and everything else he has burdened Joonghyuk with in his absence.
When he straightens, Joonghyuk’s gaze lingers heavy on his back. It’s not crushing-drowning-suffocating with expectation and concern and frustration in the way it was before they parted, but something more scouring.
Dokja drops his bag in the living room and drapes himself over the couch with a hefty sigh. It’s just as comfortable as it was when they first had it delivered, though the cushion under his head sags slightly with use.
Joonghyuk bypasses him in favour of the kitchen cabinets and starts pulling out an array of pots, pans and seasonings. Dokja sits up, mouth opening—
“No. Rest.”
He shuts it again sulkily and drops back on the couch, pulling out his phone. There are few places in Seoul that offer cheap short-term stays on short notice. It’s convention season, after all—moving into concert season in a mere week. But there is a place an hour’s bus from Minosoft’s Seoul branch for only… Dokja refreshes the webpage.
Joonghyuk makes a disgruntled noise at the sound of Dokja’s dismayed shout. “What?”
“The stay house I was looking at just tripled its price. Tripled! Those scalpers, what even…” he devolves into incoherent anger, jerking upright as he opens a new webpage.
“You haven’t found another place.”
Dokja glances over with a strained smile before returning to his phone. “I’m trying, aren’t I? Don’t worry, I’ll be out of your house soon enough.” A pan clangs hard on the induction stove. His head whips around. “Hyu—Yoo Joonghyuk, you’ll have to be patient. It’s a rough market right now.”
Another slam, this time of a cupboard, accompanied by the faint rattle of glassware and a harsh snap of words: “Do you need to?”
“Of co—” Dokja bites off his words so hard he fears he chipped a tooth. He had taken a moment to register the more vulnerable curl of hurt underlining Joonghyuk’s frustration, but undeniably, as the question repeats in half-time through Dokja’s mind, it is there. Dokja swallows the sudden lump in his throat. Is he really so out of practice in understanding Yoo Joonghyuk that something that would have once alerted him immediately could so easily slip past?
“I don’t want to intrude,” he tries instead.
“You fool,” Joonghyuk says. Now that Dokja is paying attention again—letting himself pay attention to Joonghyuk again, for one of the first things he had done when he left was teach himself to stop—he gently combs through Joonghyuk’s timbre and finds the fonder parts. In the pause that Joonghyuk takes to shove down his irritation, as Dokja had, lies the fine grit of exhaustion.
“Mia’s school term just started. You don’t take up space.” Joonghyuk rests a hand on the kitchen counter, a persistent glint in his gaze that Dokja shies from instinctively. “Kim Dokja. Stay.”
Dokja opens his mouth, then closes it again as Joonghyuk’s shoulders shift back slightly, bracing for impact. He swallows and puts his phone screen-down on the couch, chest tight with the concentration it takes not to break eye contact, to flee like the coward they both know he will always be. Dokja swallows again. He flashes a meaningless grin. “Okay. You can’t take it back, you know! Even when you get sick of me.”
Joonghyuk’s dark lashes flicker at Dokja’s feigned light-heartedness, a near imperceptible widening and narrowing. A momentary ache in Dokja’s cheek makes his smile falter. Joonghyuk nods once, solemn, and turns back to the kitchen.
▮▮▮
“Forever is a long time,” Dokja muses from the back porch. He has been doing that recently, jumping between his web novels with voracious desperation. Joonghyuk watches his fingers dance over his cell phone, close the current story, then pull up another one. The sight in front of them is one of rare peace—few people holiday here at this time of the year, and the beach is empty. Clean. Dokja does not even spare its beauty a glance. “With one person… Hyuk-ah, what do you think?”
“It’s not that long, with the right person.” Dokja scrunches his nose good-naturedly at that. Joonghyuk can almost hear his cynical response: How optimistic, Joonghyuk-ah. He leans down and catches Dokja’s lips with his own. “Life and death companions, Dokja.”
Dokja pulls him in, then pushes him away. His expression has gained that calm, patronising edge to it that never fails to get on Joonghyuk’s nerves. Their saliva hasn’t even dried on his lips before he points out blandly, “Joonghyuk, if you don’t want to, you don’t have to. I know that’s the angle your publicity team picked for us, but it’s not—”
“If I didn’t want to, I wouldn’t.” The ring in Joonghyuk’s suitcase burns itself behind his eyes. “Do you not want to?”
Silver-starred eyes blink slowly as the question sinks in.
“No!” Dokja nearly shouts, frantic, his smile unbalanced and hands gesticulating meaninglessly. “I mean, how could I not want to? I’m just saying, it’s not… shameful or anything to change your mind. That’s what I mean. Joonghyuk-ah, don’t let your pride get in the way of good decisions.”
He finishes it off like a parable, a kindergarten teacher delivering a lesson.
Joonghyuk is still stuck on wanting. “Kim Dokja. Do you want…”
Dokja’s eyes widen. He swallows.
“Yes,” he murmurs, as if any louder would break them. “More than anything.”
Joonghyuk forces himself to look away. Dokja says it with such reverence that the echo in Joonghyuk’s ears sounds like mourning.
He doesn’t know yet. It is.
▮▮▮
The longer that Dokja stays, the stranger everything is—who would have guessed, it is hard to live in a place that he was once so familiar with. He lays awake long after the hall lights stopped seeping under the door, staring up at the barely perceptible sheen of glue spots where there were once glowing stars. At some point, he wanders out to the living room and lets the glow of the WiFi modem, the expensive fridge display, and his phone lull him to sleep instead.
When he wakes up, it’s to a blanket draped over his shoulders, breakfast plated up in front of him, Joonghyuk’s lap under his head, Joonghyuk’s hands in his hair, and a bottomless stare.
“Don’t read before you sleep,” Joonghyuk rumbles instead of a greeting as Dokja sits up and stretches with a feeble groan—his body is much too old for this kind of thing. Dokja feels his eye twitch.
“What does my sleep schedule matter to you?”
Joonghyuk raises a perfectly pruned brow.
Dokja flinches from the threat of that conversation and demurs, “It hasn’t killed me yet.”
He flees to the bathroom to brush his teeth and splash his face. When he returns, Joonghyuk waits for him to take a calculated four mouthfuls of omurice before jumping right back in. “Didn’t you break that habit?”
Dokja’s spoon clacks against his chipped plate loudly, flinging a few grains of rice onto his pyjama shirt. He swipes them up with his thumb and sticks them in his mouth despite Joonghyuk’s noise of disapproval. “So?”
“You aren’t sleeping enough. Or well. What’s wrong with the room?”
Dokja wrinkles his nose. “Nothing. Just a bit—” he deliberates on the word for a moment. It’s a small enough truth to let slip. “—darker than I’m used to.”
Joonghyuk does not even acknowledge the statement in his micro-expressions, and Dokja pushes all those complicated little feelings back into the recesses of his mind. The food is good. It always is.
A week into their driving arrangement, it is starting to feel natural to sit in Joonghyuk’s car again. There is only a slight break in routine this evening: Joonghyuk snatches up a plastic bag from the passenger seat and drops it into the back when Dokja opens the door. It is done so swiftly, so casually—unfair protagonist skill, to turn a scramble into something almost elegant—that Dokja almost thinks he imagined it. His inquisitive glance is ignored, the sudden burst of movement unacknowledged. He puts the kid’s craft logo out of mind—just something Joonghyuk overlooked, then. Despite the uncharacteristic nature of litter in Yoo Joonghyuk’s car.
When they return, the routine continues: Dokja kicks his shoes under the rack and collapses on the couch. Joonghyuk cooks dinner. They eat to the accompaniment of Dokja’s latest grievances and Joonghyuk’s punctuating grunts. This time, Dokja does the dishes; Joonghyuk has a late-night scrim session, scheduled in the universally inconvenient manner of international events.
He empties out the kitchen bin and changes the lining. The bin is empty—the truck must have come by earlier today—except for a bottle of tacky glue. Dokja squints at it in the faint streetlight, before dismissing it. If Joonghyuk has picked up a hobby, that is none of his business. It’s a funny mental image, though, to imagine the ever-lofty man hunched over a broken figurine and caring enough to fix it.
On his way back to his room, Dokja grabs his work bag from the couch. The door to Joonghyuk’s streaming room is ajar, so Dokja pokes his head in to check on him. He bids Joonghyuk’s oddly watchful glance a whispered goodnight and shuts the door properly, tugging on the handle until it latches. Once in his room, he exchanges the bag for a pile of clean clothes and his toiletries.
As he showers, he catalogues which of the clothes he’s packed can be worn and which need washing and makes a mental note to himself to drop his laundry in with Joonghyuk’s. Or maybe put his through a separate load to spare them the awkwardness of sifting through each other’s underwear. Not that that should matter, since they’re both well into their thirties, roommates for a third of that, dating for a tenth, separated for another tenth. Dokja has been here for a week now, with no sign of Joonghyuk doing the laundry. Creature of habit that the professional gamer is, he will probably do a round before he sleeps tonight.
Dokja weighs it up a moment more as he dries himself and redresses, before helping himself to a few of the largest laundry meshes stowed in the laundry room. They would be hard to find, thrown into a cupboard and hidden under a selection of cleaning sprays, but Dokja was the one that tossed them there in the first place and he’s been getting the sense that Joonghyuk has changed little since he moved out.
He drops his laundry in the hamper, curls up in bed, and finishes off the webnovel he had started at the beginning of this trip. It’s good, if a bit anticlimactic of an ending—nothing really to linger on, which is probably a good thing seeing as the project team have an early morning meeting tomorrow. It’s a wildly inconvenient time for both the local team and the overseas consulting firm they are thinking of bringing in, but Dokja is not paid to give deserved criticism. He puts his phone on the bedside table, flicks off the lamp, and sprawls on his back.
And chokes on his own breath.
The ceiling is aglow with five-point stars, their light so achingly gentle. Dokja cannot close his eyes. He cannot draw a breath. He is pinned to the bed by the realisation: the damn constellations in these new stars are identical to the ones he pointed out six years ago to the man in the room down the hall.
Dokja flings himself out of the bed and stumbles to the door in the darkness, in the not-dark-enough-ness. It is harder to turn the doorknob, like the warm hall light might wash away the stain and prove it all a hallucination. He wouldn’t be surprised; he has a history of maladaptive daydreams. Surely hallucination is not that much of a leap. Dokja just breathes, head against the door, eyes closed. One, two, and on the third inhale he turns the knob and walks out. He stands there. Pokes his head back in, just to check.
It feels less daunting with the door open—less a wound of a memory reopened, fluorescence like viscera splattered across the ceiling. When? How? Why? It’s so needlessly kind. An entire room illuminated with kindness that Dokja does not deserve, that he cannot handle. He forces himself to behold it anyway. The guilt of no remorse might just crush him alive.
“Kim Dok—”
“Fuck! You scared me! Don’t just creep up on me like that,” he wheezes.
Joonghyuk takes a couple steps closer, dark gaze flickering between Dokja and the bedroom, searching. His lips have curved in a tiny, heart stopping smirk. It is a devastating sight. Maybe it is the house, the situation, that plays the trick. He blinks and it is as if, in this very hall, they are still in that sliver of time three years ago, the honeymoon phase months they had spent together, and Dokja knows the taste of that smirk and would not mind terribly tasting it again. But the temptation is strong. If Dokja was still his partner and thus allowed to do such things, he would—
He steps back instead of forward like his body has swayed, stumbling a bit from the abrupt shift of weight from the balls of his feet to his heels. “Joonghyuk-ssi. The stars.”
“Will they help?” Joonghyuk asks.
How awful. How cruel of Yoo Joonghyuk, to do this to him. No sane man would wait this long, this fruitlessly, for someone they loved. But Dokja has returned now, unplanned as it is, and Joonghyuk is sticking stars back in place for him.
“Mia can’t sleep with the glow,” Joonghyuk fills in when Dokja does not reply. It’s such a perfect, easy, simple explanation that Dokja curses himself for having felt any manner of way about the lack of stars when he arrived. The stars. Their stars, once.
“You didn’t have to put them up again for me.”
Joonghyuk tilts his head ever so slightly to the side, the same image of judgment as back then. “I did.”
“No. Yoo Joonghyuk, you did not. You do not.” Dokja’s voice quivers. He grins to hide it, throws his head back to wrangle control of his voice. “Seriously, this sunfish! Who would know you had such a soft side to you? Careful, someone might take advantage of you.”
He drags his words out slow and syrupy, taming his masking grin to a saccharine simper. It has… an effect. There had been no intended effect, but the shuttering of Joonghyuk’s deep, perceptive gaze is not it. Joonghyuk grimaces, the rise and fall of his chest stuttering briefly. He closes his eyes and sighs, rolling the words on his tongue before shaping them clearly: “You can.”
Dokja flinches and snaps, “Don’t say that.”
“Then don’t do that.” Joonghyuk scowls deeply, hands clenching at his sides. Their glare is broken by the quiet sound of a ping notification. Joonghyuk pulls his phone out and checks it briefly. He looks back at Dokja, lips pursed, expression still closed off. But the edges of his eyes soften as they linger. Dokja shifts uncomfortably under the attention. “Go to sleep, Dokja.”
When he closes the bedroom door behind himself, he feels put on display once again; the gaze of the stars stare down, benevolent, uncaring, at a Kim Dokja made weak by unwarranted consideration. He curls up under the blanket and closes his eyes firmly against the light, chest oddly tight and throat clogged. Sleeping sounds good. It sounds incredible, actually.
His only other option is to cry.
▮▮▮
There are good moments too, on their trip. It is just easier to recall the bad—not that they were bad in the moment.
Joonghyuk dives into the waves, Dokja’s steady gaze on his back. Today marks three years since their tipsy confession, the ambiguous start to a more romantic form of their historied companionship. He has a ring in his discarded boardshorts and a dearth of words to accompany it. When he looks back, still submerged, Dokja’s outline wicks. Joonghyuk tracks his movement through the shallows, the sweeping turns that Dokja takes as he wades further.
“—hyuk! Joonghyuk-ah!”
He brings his feet down to the sand and stretches out his arms. Dokja spins, stepping backward into an oncoming wave. The water breaks around Joonghyuk with a rush of sound; Dokja is light in his arms, voice overloud in shock. “Oi, Joonghyuk-ah, put me down!”
“Why did you call?” Joonghyuk asks, readjusting his grip on his partner.
Dokja combs through his soaked hair with a slight huff, “I thought you might have drowned.”
“Hm.” Joonghyuk glances down at his black rash shirt and swimming trunks, then out to the deep blue of the water.
“Look at you, dressed for a funeral on the seaside… ah, you stupid sunfish, what would I do if you drifted off? Your little beaky mouth couldn’t even tell me you were going.”
“Says the squid.”
The grin Dokja shoots him in reply is radiant, shivery, secretive but indulgent in the rare manner of living in the moment. Joonghyuk takes it in for a second—then another, and another, because he was born greedy for the transient things amidst the monotony of life—and drops them both into the water. Dokja screeches, indignant, latching onto Joonghyuk’s arms with a clawed grip. Joonghyuk feels the unpractised warmth of laughter swell in his chest. Perhaps this is what Dokja meant on the bungalow porch, musing on forevers. Joonghyuk thinks he might disagree.
To live in the chaste brush of their lips, even eternity would not be enough.
▮▮▮
Dokja gets back the next day by bus, because Joonghyuk has an afternoon sponsor meeting and Dokja has an early end to the day to compensate for the morning meeting. Small mercies. He opens the clothes dryer and recoils at the smell.
You – 15:57
Your dryer didn’t run.
Can I borrow some clothes?Yoo Joonghyuk – 16:09
My bedroom wardrobe.You – 16:09
Thanks.
He runs into a situation mere seconds after entering Joonghyuk’s bedroom—their bedroom, once. The ceiling stars in this room are the originals. Dokja can tell, because he squints up at one of the big ones above the foot of the king-sized bed and spots the little plastic bubble on its window-pointing arm.
The right side of the wardrobe is normal enough, with Joonghyuk’s signature monochromatic assortment of shirts, jackets, coats, pants, all ironed and hung up. The left side, however…
There are so many things that Dokja has been noticing over the past fortnight. The stars, his cutlery, the shoes by the door, the photos in the hall. Their clothes in Joonghyuk’s wardrobe—because that’s what the left side is filled with: Dokja’s clothes. All the ones he had not packed on that fateful trip, that he had thought as good as gone.
When he fishes a familiar white garment out from a garment bag in the back of Joonghyuk’s wardrobe, it feels like the final nail in his coffin. He had sent this coat back in the mail half a year after he left, the other half of a limited-edition set custom-made for one of Joonghyuk’s most famous promotional deals. The selfish, wanting thing in his chest that he still has not managed to kill brightens up at the sight of it—the familiar sturdy fabric and tailored cut that he used to wear like a flag, the symbol of their pair three years ago.
Dokja sits on Joonghyuk’s bed and waits. His thoughts should be racing. His mind feels numb. The words pile up on his tongue.
▮▮▮
Joonghyuk does not get down on one knee when he proposes.
Joonghyuk does not even get to propose.
The words are piecing themselves together on his tongue, the sun drooping to the foaming seas.
He reaches into his coat pocket—the black one handmade to pair with Dokja’s white, half of a set, companion pieces—and Dokja, eyes on the horizon, says, “I’ve been thinking.”
They stop walking. Dokja faces Joonghyuk; it is ambiguous at best if the glance he shoots at Joonghyuk’s hand in his pocket is knowing or indifferent.
“I’ve been thinking,” Dokja repeats, his expression that familiar harbinger of his unique brand of terrible self-sabotaging ideas, “maybe we should take a break.”
What. The sentiment must show up on Joonghyuk’s face, because the stupid squid twitches, the corners of his meddlesome mouth dropping.
“I just—have you properly considered? All your options?”
“What other option?” Joonghyuk snarls, his own voice thunder in his ears through the ringing of shock. “I chose you.”
Dokja’s smile slips off his face. With matter-of-fact candour, he confesses, “The ring. I saw it. I won’t say yes.”
Joonghyuk steps forward, going to grab him by the shoulders, but Dokja dodges like he expected it, skittering back several steps. He looks at his empty, extended hands and lowers them. The bite of his nails in his palms hurts. Everything else hurts more. “Why?”
“I can’t do that to you. To me. I can’t do this, Yoo Joonghyuk.”
“But why?” Self-consciousness scratches in Joonghyuk’s throat; twenty-eight years old and he sounds closer to his sister’s teen age, petulant and stubborn despite himself. “What would you be doing to us that saying no would not?”
“Dooming us, that’s what! I don’t know what I did to you, but this isn’t how your story should go.”
Joonghyuk exhales. It feels more like a growl. “It’s my story.”
“Not only yours. What if it’s someone else’s story too, and I’m getting in the way?”
“What if,” he grits his teeth, striding forward, “it’s our story, and you’re getting in the way?”
“It’s not.” Dokja’s hair falls into his eyes as he shakes his head, frustrated. “It’s not even about this being your story, or our story, you’re focusing on the wrong part!”
“Is ‘dooming us’ the right part?”
“Yes!”
“Explain it,” Joonghyuk states, heavy between them like an ultimatum he does not mean to make. He closes his eyes and breathes harshly, his restraint reasserting itself. “We have time.”
“What time, Joonghyuk-ah? Forever? Eternity? Are you sure you could handle that?” Dokja sneers. Joonghyuk meant to open his eyes again, but he finds his eyelids glued shut by some cowardly force.
“If you want,” he replies as evenly as he can. A cold, cruel laugh rings through the afternoon.
“I can’t think of anything I would want less.”
▮▮▮
Maybe an hour slips by; the sound of the front latch turning snaps Dokja out of his daze. He gives it half a minute before calling, “Yoo Joonghyuk!”
An answering grunt of acknowledgment. Dokja drops his not-his-anymore coat on Joonghyuk’s bed and stalks into the hallway, each staggered breath displacing the emotional silt complications in his lungs. He calls again, “Yoo Joonghyuk. What is this?”
The background noise of movement dies. A heartbeat later, Joonghyuk appears down the hall. He does not say anything. Dokja does not elaborate. When they are both in Joonghyuk’s bedroom—the room still decorated like their bedroom, Dokja can no longer deny—evidence laid out in front of them, he waits.
For a justification, maybe. What reason is he looking for? He tries to ignore the searching gaze that Joonghyuk casts over him, Joonghyuk’s shoulders tense and jaw tight in his periphery.
“It’s your coat.”
“Why?”
“Kim Dokja,” Joonghyuk enunciates lowly, frustrated, the intonation that means, you fool, use your brain, don’t ask stupid questions. Finding his coat may have been the final nail in the coffin, but this conversation now stands over the grave of wilful ignorance.
“Haha,” Dokja laughs. His voice cracks on it like they’re kids again, in school again. In love again. It’s weird. This is weird. This back-and-forth thing, the onus of words, of admission, that they’ve been trading between them ever since… that other admission.
He says it out loud, just to feel the thick coat of guilt on his tongue, “I’m thirty-one. I should know better. Sorry. This is weird.”
“You think so?” Joonghyuk asks. The weight of his gaze tells Dokja there is a right answer here. Good thing Dokja’s never really been afraid of giving the wrong one.
“Yeah. Yes. You know,” a wave of his hand when he averts his gaze, as if indicating anything that isn’t in its very nature them, “your business, not mine. Ahem. You’re not my business. I don’t have a say in what you do. Sorry. You’re not mine.”
Ah. Oops. Slip of the tongue there.
“Sorry, that was weird. Again.” Dokja shuts up. Just in time, too, because he catches the low rumble of Joonghyuk’s voice and thinks he might have misheard. “Repeat that for the class?”
For a second, Joonghyuk’s glare sharpens. Then he presses his lips together and sighs through his nose. “Is it?”
“What, weird?”
Joonghyuk grunts in the affirmative.
Dokja blinks. “Isn’t it?”
Joonghyuk, ever unafraid of the hard things to say, turns to look at the stars and lays himself bare. He does not close his eyes to hide from the moment. The reflections of the stars shimmer and blur at Dokja as he watches with bated breath, waiting for them to fall back into dismissal, denial.
But Yoo Joonghyuk has never progressed by doing anything the same. He replies, and it is a new line in this story: “I pretend you’re still mine all the damn time.”
Dokja has long since read every part of Joonghyuk. Such exposure is nothing new between them—really, it is something so old that Dokja had thought it lost to time, to youth, to impassioned arguments and failed attempts at love. His skin still smarts with the memories.
“You’re the one that walked away.” It falls out of his mouth unbidden. But Dokja has said it now, a petulant mutter that sounds—constellations forbid—like he cares about being left behind.
Joonghyuk closes his eyes and exhales through his nose, lips pressed together in the way that means he’s losing control. “Yes. I walked away. Kim Dokja, have you forgotten why?”
Dokja ducks his head. Of course he hasn’t. The memory of their last argument haunts him even now, several years on. He can’t remember what had triggered that particular bout of defensive insecurity. But he remembers the aftermath. The end. One moment, they had been watching the sunset together. The next…
▮▮▮
“You don’t know what it’s like!” Dokja wraps his arms around himself, coat clutched in his hands as if he fears Joonghyuk might rip it off him. The seaside wind buffets his coat collar up, inadvertently hiding his face.
Joonghyuk stares at him, disbelief and frustration warring in the subtle shifts of his expression. “Then tell me, Kim Dokja. You use your words for everything, except this.”
They have had this argument before. Dokja responds the same now, dressing it up in new sounds spat out like bile, “You’re like a… a damn web novel protagonist! You have everything together! How am I meant to compete with that?”
A frown wrinkles Joonghyuk’s brow. “There is no competition.”
“But there is comparison,” quips Dokja, saccharine falsity drenching his words. “I feel it follow me.”
“Who?” It’s almost comedic how Joonghyuk bristles in his defence, as if there is any way to defend against stark truth.
“Me!” Joonghyuk’s threatening glare falters with a flinch. Dokja barrels on, “I can’t help it. I don’t think I’m able to stop. God, it’s you! How can I ever be good enough for you?”
“You already are.” But how can he make the fool believe it? It is an ouroboros inevitability, this conversation entrenched in their relationship since the beginning. “Kim Dokja. Listen to me.”
Dokja’s laugh is acidic in the briny seaside air. “Okay. Fine. But first, listen to me. How many times has someone told you you’re ‘lucky to have me?’ Has anyone told you, ‘Oh, he’s a lucky catch,’ ‘Hold onto that one or someone might steal him away,’—anything like that?”
Joonghyuk clenches his jaw, denying Dokja a verbal response. There is no point spelling out answers they both know. Dokja tightens his fingers in his coat as he laughs again, hollowed out by bitterness. “You don’t understand it at all. I can’t breathe when I remember I’m… with you. Of all people, me…”
“Dokja—”
“I warned you!” Dokja cuts him off. He pauses, blinking rapidly with a faintly confused frown. His eyes glisten. The setting sun fractures on the sea. “At the start of all this, Sooyoung’s launch party, I told you it could never work.”
“What will you do?”
“I just—I just need space right now. I can’t do this. Just leave me alone!”
“You—”
“Joonghyuk. Please.” He swallows deeply. “You make me… want to be someone I’m not. I can’t be some—some kind, clever doctor, or a well-loved celebrity, or anything else half as successful as you. And I love that it’s me you come home to, but I hate that I feel guilty when you walk through the door.”
In the silence, Dokja heaves a few gulps of breath, unsteady and unmoored. One. Two.
On the third, something pops back in place between his complex feelings and his rationality. He grins wryly. “I’ve been hanging out with that hack author too much. Sorry. You can just ignore me.”
“How can I convince you?” Joonghyuk ventures.
To stay, to listen, to wait, to forget all those useless emotions and just accept that Dokja might be enough, at least in Joonghyuk’s eyes… Whatever he means exactly, Dokja has no answer, except that he can’t. He keeps his gaze averted, even as Joonghyuk’s signature glare carves into the side of his face. His face scrunches, shoulders rising, before the tension drops with a sharp exhale.
“You can’t. I saw that ring and I panicked, Hyuk-ah. I didn’t feel happy. I didn’t feel fond or smitten or relieved or… I thought about you offering that ring to me and I wanted to die from the guilt. I’m not good enough for you. Even if you believe it, even if I want to believe you. Isn’t my reaction proof?” It is honest in the way that Dokja thinks he might never be again. Against the sand, Dokja watches his companion’s shadow take a slow step back. Joonghyuk hesitates. Takes another step back. The sand crunches, a punctuation, a full stop under his heel.
Dokja’s teeth worries into his chapped lower lip, the metallic taste of blood not enough to get him to stop. If this were any other situation, any other conversation, he could expect a gentle, calloused thumb tugging his lip free. He lifts his gaze. Joonghyuk is a shadow of his shadow, matching black coat rustling in the wind.
“Joonghyuk-ah?” Dokja grimaces at his own subconscious whisper. What an ugly, plaintive sound.
Joonghyuk turns his head slightly, though even his sharp hearing would not have been able to pick up on it. His profile is sharp as ever against the dusk sunlight. “You wanted to be alone. I’m heading back first. I’ll… be waiting for you.”
Dokja laughs, mocking and airy with the ache in his chest, and spits, “You’ll be waiting for the rest of your life!”
Joonghyuk’s eyes flutter shut in a faint grimace. The past months have felt like they were both holding their breath for something like this. Coming to his conclusion, Joonghyuk sighs. His face returns to its neutral, slight frown. Dokja tenses up, ready for him to end things right then and there, to finally stop this façade that perfection could ever love Dokja’s mess. But Joonghyuk replies, “I know.”
Dokja is suddenly all too aware of his feet buried in the sand, the waves lapping at his ankles. The grit grates against his skin as he curls his toes, and with the sensation strikes an overwhelming urge. Dokja lifts his foot so fast that the wet sand goes flying, then his other foot. Left, right. His legs carry him away from where he knows Joonghyuk will be waiting, stumbling off the sand where he bends to snatch up his shoes.
To the train station, they carry him. To the ticket office. To a platform. To a seat by a window. It feels like he can almost see Joonghyuk’s figure in the glass, in his own reflection, that normally rigid frame hunched in the single armchair of their hotel room. Waiting. But give it a day or a week or a month, and surely, Joonghyuk will realise that Dokja is not the kind of person he is meant to be with. Surely, this will be the end.
The Supreme King is hardly fool enough to wait around.
▮▮▮
“I remember,” Dokja snaps. He has the wherewithal to look vaguely regretful over his actions—over the days that Joonghyuk waited alone in a rented beach house on what should have been a celebratory vacation. “But that still doesn’t explain this!”
The white coat flaps as he shakes it emphatically, snarled shame apparent in the furrow of his brow. Joonghyuk looks at it. Looks back at Dokja. Tells him straightforward, “I told you I would wait for you.”
“It’s been years.”
Joonghyuk’s brow raises as if there is some obvious answer Dokja is just not getting. “If you don’t want it, then dispose of it yourself.”
Something in Dokja’s mind reviles the very prospect—and it’s not just for the pricelessness. “But why do you have it? And my plate in the kitchen, with the chip on it! And the stars? And my shoes! They didn’t have any dust on them—why would you clean my shoes and put them back like that? It’s not like you!”
“But it is like you,” Joonghyuk says, like it matters, like it hasn’t been years since Dokja left and started a new life. Like he has not been— “You said your contract would be up in a few months. Your project will wrap up in a week.”
“I’ll—”
“—leave again? Answer me, Kim Dokja: will I wait for the rest of my life?”
“I told you that you would.” He dislikes the petulance in his own voice, but it’s true. Dokja had warned him. Though running away like that was not his proudest moment, he has no regrets. “If I hadn’t left then, it would have been at our engagement party, or during wedding planning, or the morning of. That was the—”
Joonghyuk grabs him by the collar, and it is still so familiar that Dokja’s hindbrain registers no threat. Up close, Joonghyuk’s frown has a few more wrinkles than when Dokja left. In the corners of his eyes, there is the tension of pain. “The lesser evil? You made that choice by yourself.”
“And it would have made no difference either way.”
“I waited for you,” Joonghyuk growls.
Dokja shoots him a wobbly smile. “Correction: you still are.”
The grip on his collar falters, and Dokja stumbles back, sitting heavily on the bed. One hand lands on his coat. He curls his fingers in the fabric like a lifeline. Joonghyuk scrubs away the beleaguered downturn of his lips. “Yes,” he snaps, “I’m still waiting for you, you fool.”
Dokja’s face goes blank. After a long, tense stare-off, he shakes his head and asks, “How have you been?”
It’s the question they both should have started with, the first morning Dokja walked into the kitchen. Joonghyuk’s brows tilt down.
“I mean it. How have you been?”
“You…” Joonghyuk glances between Dokja and the door. Dokja gathers the coat in his lap and pats the mattress next to him.
“Leaving was good for me,” he admits. Because in an awful kind of way, it was. Sure, Joonghyuk’s house has reopened many an old wound, but it does not pierce him in the same way sharing space with Joonghyuk used to. Perhaps it is the reframing of them—of Life and Death Companions—as acquaintances instead. Dokja does not have to be worthy of life to coexist with the man he loved anymore.
He swallows hard, moistening his lips before he repeats it all out loud for Joonghyuk to hear. “And you?”
Joonghyuk’s face contorts, a myriad of micro-expressions chasing each other until he lands on constipated. “Not good.”
“Not bad, either, I bet.” His quip is not received kindly. Dokja purses his lips. “It’s true, though. The world didn’t end for either of us.”
“You should have texted.”
It is strange, entirely foreign, to see a man like Yoo Joonghyuk bow his head like this. The sight reminds Dokja of his imaginings on that train ride away: Joonghyuk folded in an armchair waiting. A slight frown creases his forehead, concerned and confused, as he leans forward to try and catch Joonghyuk’s eye. Instead of his steady, dark gaze or long lashes lowered in consternation, Dokja glimpses a silvery sheen.
The hollow thing in his chest aches at the sight. He leans back and stares at the ceiling instead, at the stars that don’t glow. “I’m sorry, Joonghyuk-ah. I mean it.”
▮▮▮
Joonghyuk does not know what to think during the days that he spends searching. He doesn’t think much of anything, really. His mind is stuck on autopilot, pulling up every place he knows Kim Dokja would go, every bad habit Kim Dokja would turn to. It’s only when Han Sooyoung texts him with a curt, he’s fine, that Joonghyuk stops.
He stops completely. His manager puts out a statement after two days of no contact, and three major sponsors drop him in the month that follows. The house he came back to is devoid of what made it home. He keeps the plants alive because Dokja likes sitting by them in the spring. He cleans the house because neither of them can stand clutter unless it is out of immediate sight. He serves two meals for breakfast and dinner, packs two lots of lunch, then boxes half of them. His freezer fills with extra servings for no one to eat.
A package comes in the post, which is strange because Joonghyuk strictly does not get mail except when delivered by his manager. He opens it with no hesitation, because the address is written in a familiar script. The content is nothing physically dangerous, but it damages something in him all the same. Joonghyuk hangs up the white coat in their wardrobe with the rest of Dokja’s abandoned clothes. In the house with the rest of Dokja’s abandoned things.
Another month passes. Two. Winter swells to its full ferocity and it is viciously cold in bed alone.
Yoo Mia shows up at his doorstep during her winter break and says, “Oppa. Why are you all soggy?”
“What?” he asks her, unheeding of how his voice cracks on it as he shuts the door behind them.
She stomps her feet a few times to warm up, watching him closely. “I told you so. That squid was sketchy from the start.”
Joonghyuk can’t find it in himself to react beyond a raised brow, not when Mia herself looks like she is grappling with her own complicated feelings about Dokja’s… absence. A sharp clap of her hands, gloves hanging from her wrists, snaps them both out of it. “You’ve been moping for too long, let’s play something together!”
“Like?”
He watches his sister, not quite a child anymore, charge into his streaming room. His feet shift into motion, and for the first time in a while, the movement is easy.
▮▮▮
Dokja is wearing his coat when he meets Joonghyuk at the front door. It still fits him well; he has regained weight on Joonghyuk’s cooking, a healthier colour in his cheeks, and like this he is a mirror of the past. But they are not going on a trip this time. Dokja’s train leaves late afternoon. Joonghyuk is not invited.
He helps bring Dokja’s bags out to his car. There are more, he notes, than Dokja arrived with—two extra bags to make a total that could be carried by one person uncomfortably. Is Dokja taking some of his clothes back? His shoes?
How will it feel to get dressed in the morning before a half-empty wardrobe? This is Joonghyuk’s personal, eternal wound: everything bad that happens in his life must happen again. He has lost Dokja once. This time, Joonghyuk will at least see him off in person.
The new form of the undying thing between them is still raw, still healing. But the words they have been dredging up between them, Dokja’s truth and Joonghyuk’s verbosity, wash out the debris from their wounds. It has been easier, under the guise of genial acquaintances, to know each other again.
“I forgot how good this could be,” Dokja had said, four days of concerted peace between them and three days of cohabitation left. Joonghyuk’s Stream Ending screen was paused and full-screened on his phone, abandoned in favour of idle conversation as Joonghyuk cooked.
“What?” Joonghyuk remembers asking. How good could what be? Them?
Now, at the end of the run, he feels Dokja’s eyes on him as he nudges around the bags in his boot. It takes a breath, two breaths, a sideways glance at Dokja and the easier way he holds himself, to decide. Joonghyuk makes one more trip inside.
They get in the car and Dokja keeps peeking.
“What?” Joonghyuk asks again, tense.
A humoured huff comes from the passenger seat. “Thank you for housing me this month. You didn’t have to put out like that.”
“I was not putting out.”
“You’re too considerate, Joonghyuk… what if I take advantage of you?”
“As long as it’s me.” He checks over his shoulder as he merges.
Dokja is silent for a while after that. Then, with a wry chuckle, he jibes, “You can take advantage of me too. Permission granted.”
Joonghyuk grunts. Dokja can probably understand what he means by it.
▮▮▮
As Kim Dokja is prone to do, he puts the whole situation out of mind—as best he can with what money he has, anyhow. He is too stubborn to go back home and grab his things. In the meantime he stays with the kind neighbours who kept in touch after he finished high school. Both Hades and Persephone, and his mother when he visits, do not pry for the why of his situation. Persephone uses her connections to help set him up in a decent apartment. It’s not Seoul suburbia by any means, but what does that matter?
His phone, once he plugs it in to charge, lights up with a flurry of missed calls and texts. He shoots off a few nonspecific responses and ignores the others. He dismisses their notifications the moment they show up. Everyone around him knows who it is when Dokja checks his phone, swipes, and tucks it away again.
Overall, the breakup is not bad—in Dokja’s opinion, at least. It is an indescribable relief not to languish under the voices in his head comparing him endlessly to perfection incarnate. Like this, Joonghyuk is out of reach. Dokja can be the background character he has always been; no stakes for the world to raise or challenge, nothing that he can lose.
Lee Jihye gives him a disapproving glare when he leaves her graduation early, timed to narrowly miss Joonghyuk. He should have left himself a bigger margin, prone as he knows he is to the world itself working against him. The traces of his decision must linger on him, because Sooyoung points it out drily over dinner and her new manuscript the next day.
“Subconsciously, you want to see him again. You’re just too repressed to admit it.”
“But we’re doing fine apart,” Dokja replies. She rolls her eyes.
“Fine doesn’t mean good. Don’t be stupid, squid-brain. Joonghyuk may be sticking to his streaming schedule again but trust me when I say he is the furthest thing from good.”
Dokja does not want to understand, so he flashes her a bemused smile that makes her launch a chopstick at his face. “I don’t know what you mean. Everyone has been saying I look better. I feel better too, you know. There’s no more comparing me to that sunfish. You say we’re not good now, but in the long run, we’ll both reach it.”
Sooyoung scoffs, pulling out her phone and opening the notes app. “The mythical thing that is a good life. Then what’s yours? Your ideal future. Because the best good you’ll ever get is with him, and the only good he wants is with you, and from everything that you’ve told me, you burned all that to ash because you’d rather live a miserable life than a life that you’d dread to lose.”
His face falls blank. “You’re out of line.”
She laughs mockingly and retorts, “I don’t lie half as often as you’d like to think I do. It’s been a year and a half. You broke up with Joonghyuk for his sake. You’ve never done anything for your own.”
“You sound like my parent,” Dokja says, and means the trio of Lee Sookyung, Hades and Persephone tiptoeing around the topic of finding someone else.
Sooyoung has always been a no-nonsense woman. A few more glasses of white wine in, she curses Dokja like the witch their friends fondly call her: “You’ll keep taking your chances in barely missing Joonghyuk, so you’ll have an excuse to see him again when that chance fails.”
A year and a half on, she’s proven right. Minosoft assigns him to the Seoul project, no accommodations provided—limiting the risk of loss on a tenuously profitable project, they cite. Relocation support is not stipulated in the contract he signed when transferring branches. He searches for cheap Seoul accommodation as his boss drones on. A headache appears at the project duration announcement. One month. Cities are never as big as they seem.
Dokja books the cheapest room he can find, though it puts him a dreadful public transport trip out from their Seoul partner’s office. The reviews are terrible. When he opens the motel door to a spreading puddle across the entire floor, it’s not even that surprising. With numb fingers, he opens an old chat and scrolls past years-old unread messages.
Oh, Dokja thinks to himself as he types out a greeting, this is how it starts again.
▮▮▮
The car pulls into a parking lot across from the train station. Two men get out.
Dokja checks his ticket yet again as Joonghyuk pulls his suitcase out of the boot.
“Platform Three,” Dokja mutters to himself and checks his phone. When he reaches for the luggage handle, Joonghyuk tugs it out of reach. “Yoo Joonghyuk!"
He takes a few measured strides backward, lips curling ever so slightly up. “Kim Dokja.”
“You don’t need to walk me all the way, you know.”
“There is two hours of free parking.”
It’s no real reason, but Dokja sighs like he understands and falls into step at his side. Their shoulders brush every few paces as they walk, wordless and laden with Dokja’s impending departure. The pedestrian light turns green the second they reach the crossing. Joonghyuk’s jaw clenches. They cross.
At the gate, Joonghyuk releases his grip on Dokja’s suitcase and helps balance two bags on top of it. He sticks his hands in the pockets of his coat; the words are stuck in his throat again. Dokja scans through the turnstile as Joonghyuk fights himself, slipping away before Joonghyuk can catch him by the wrist and let these last lingering thoughts free. Joonghyuk’s fingers ache with how hard he clenches them.
On the other side, out of reach already, Dokja pauses for a pensive moment. His head tips up slowly, gaze striking the serene distance of stars observing. Something more intense bleeds through the edges as he meets Joonghyuk’s stare. He swallows. Opens his mouth.
Joonghyuk steps forward.
Dokja snaps out of his reverie. He waves slightly, eyes crinkling with shallow ease. “Don’t be lonely without me, Joonghyuk-ah!”
Joonghyuk reaches for him, opens his mouth—
A small crowd passes through, high school kids jostling each other merrily as they swarm out of the station. The movement breaks the spider strands still locking them together. Joonghyuk knows it like a stab through his heart. When the group disappears, Kim Dokja is not standing there anymore.
Come back, Joonghyuk does not say. I still love you.
A ring burns a hole in his coat pocket.