Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Cover by Sash

Kim Dokja collapsed onto an open seat without even a half-hearted glance around the subway car to check for the presence of pregnant women or elderly people. Forget that. Tonight, he was the elderly person. His back creaked enough to qualify.

Wearily, he dug through his bag for his earphones. He put them in while the Star Stream app loaded on his phone. By the time he logged in, Yoo Joonghyuk’s stream had long started. His mood lifted when the familiar black avatar appeared on his screen. As [Supreme King] had promised, he was halfway through a solo run of the Ichtyosaur Lair dungeon. He was being besieged by a group of the sea dragons.

Within seconds of Kim Dokja watching, [Supreme King] launched a flurry of skills. The ichtyosaurs reeled, the Staggered icon appearing above their heads, just in time for a massive AoE attack to reap them down.

The chat room exploded.

Kim Dokja frowned.

Who the hell scheduled a department meeting at six in the evening, anyway? Usually Kim Dokja just caught the beginning of the stream at his work station, one browser window stealthily pulled up in the corner of his screen. Although he had been bothering less and less with the stealth lately. What were they going to do if they caught him? Fire him? His contract was set to end in a month.

He put his long list of fruitless job applications out of his mind.

The donation message popped up on the stream. In the box in the corner, Yoo Joonghyuk’s head turned. Kim Dokja could just about make out his frown.

This was why he preferred watching on a computer instead of his phone whenever he could. The picture from the live feed was too small to do justice to Yoo Joonghyuk’s face, let alone read his micro-expressions.

“You’re late, Demon King,” a deep voice growled in his ears.

Kim Dokja found his tightly wound shoulders relaxing. Yoo Joonghyuk could have done ASMR videos with that voice. Too bad he preferred using it as little as humanly possible.

This time Yoo Joonghyuk’s frown was fierce enough to be seen from the moon.

“Mute them for an hour,” Yoo Joonghyuk said, merciless.

Yoo Joonghyuk didn’t answer, having already gone back to his systematic ransacking of the dungeon. For a few moments, Kim Dokja’s bout of spring cleaning left the chat calm and quiet.

That brat? Wasn’t general-chat muting enough for her? Did she want to get banned entirely? Kim Dokja waited for Yoo Joonghyuk’s reaction. The streamer’s only visible response was to trigger his Breaking the Sky skill, setting off the sound of thunder in Kim Dokja’s earphones.

Oh yeah, come to think of it, Uriel was also late, wasn’t she? It was only a passing thought for Kim Dokja, whose fingers were working at zooming on his screen. When he could see Yoo Joonghyuk clearly, that handsome face looked the same as ever: deep dark eyes focused on the game under an elegant but severe brow, needlessly beautiful jawline set in concentration. What smirk?

Not that unmuting Lee Jihye and Kim Namwoon would do much, anyway. Kim Dokja knew better than to think Yoo Joonghyuk had opened up to them about this.

‘Why are we talking about Anna Croft,’ was what Kim Dokja was thinking. He just wanted to spend his subway ride relaxing to the therapeutic view of Yoo Joonghyuk obliterating monsters in Ways of Survival.

[persephone] was annoyingly perceptive for someone on the other side of a screen. She had been a regular fixture of the streams for a few years now, and she seemed to have made teasing him into a sport.

What did he do in his past life to deserve this kind of abuse? Kim Dokja cast a longing look at the overhead screen facing him in the subway. The only comfort it had for him was a cartoony safety-instruction video that he knew by heart.

“Kim Namwoon, Lee Jihye,” Yoo Joonghyuk snapped, making Kim Dokja tense in his seat. “Keep using my donations as your personal chat and I’ll ban you myself.”

Those idiots! Did they want Yoo Joonghyuk to pay attention to the conversation in the chat? Kim Dokja waited, but Yoo Joonghyuk said nothing more. Only when he was certain that the man was focused on managing his aggro did Kim Dokja take to typing again.

“Demon King.”

Kim Dokja nearly jumped out of his skin. Yoo Joonghyuk was glaring into his camera.

“Stop saying unnecessary things,” he said.

Kim Dokja felt a knot form in his throat. Yoo Joonghyuk wasn’t wrong. He had meant to shut down the conversation, not feed it.

Far be it from him to acknowledge his mistakes, though.

“Be quiet.”

Well, the first part of Kim Dokja’s prediction got proven right. Would Yoo Joonghyuk put his fist through a wall next?

“It’s a decision I made for my own career. Stop asking questions.”

Having said his piece, Yoo Joonghyuk returned to the game with a vicious frown.

What the… Kim Dokja loved Uriel, but some people had weird hobbies.

A wry smile curved his lips.

Fate. Sure.

Kim Dokja rose from his seat without lifting his eyes from his phone. Usually he would just go home like this, one eye on the street and the other on the screen, but he had to make a detour to buy himself something to eat. [Supreme King] stopped to check his equipment before the chamber of the final boss. Yoo Joonghyuk would probably conclude the stream after this. A little frustrated that he was going to miss the end, Kim Dokja moved his finger to close the window.

“Demon King.”

He halted. Yoo Joonghyuk glanced at his camera, a brief look in between clicking on tabs.

“Don’t be late next time,” he said.

Weirdly moved, Kim Dokja smiled.

You could never tell how much of the chat Yoo Joonghyuk caught. He rarely reacted, and could even go as far as to ignore donation messages. But he wouldn’t have spoken up if he hadn’t caught sight of [demonkingofsalvation] leaving.

He zoomed. Yoo Joonghyuk’s only answer was the curl of his lips. Sometimes, the bastard could be a bit cute.

Kim Dokja pushed the door shut with his shoulder and toed off his shoes. He dropped his convenience store kimbap on the kitchen table, then poured himself into the nearest chair and thunked his forehead down next to the plastic bag. He let out a deep sigh.

He wanted nothing more than to spend his evening reading webnovels, but after dinner he should probably muster up the energy to write a few more job applications.

It felt so futile, though.

Say he found another job. All that that would achieve was to offer him more of the same: days spent in the company of people he disliked, doing something he disliked. He would try to be the dutiful employee at the beginning, but soon enough he would slip back into his usual apathy. If he could muster some zeal at work, maybe he wouldn’t find himself so often staring the specter of unemployment in the face. But faking enthusiasm for his job was taking it too far in his book, even to keep a roof over his head.

Sometimes, he wished he was more like Yoo Sangah. His ex-colleague was still thriving at Mino Soft while he was stuck in one dead-end job after another. Some people were just the protagonists of their own lives. That’s the way it was, for people like Yoo Sangah and…

As if summoned by his thoughts, the fulguration bloomed behind his eyelids. Kim Dokja smiled ruefully.

“… nother great stream, Joonghyuk-ssi!”

In Kim Dokja’s mind eye, a familiar office appeared. The wall in front of him was occupied by a bookshelf with more trophies than actual books, all neatly arranged. The blinds hadn’t been closed on the window and city lights glowed in the corner of his vision. The desk he was looking at was the most cluttered surface in the room, two monitors taking center stage amid gaming paraphernalia and the mess of cables that came with it.

The cursor navigated with practiced ease through Star Stream’s menus. The replay video started uploading. The software was closed. With a pang, Kim Dokja noticed that the desktop background had finally been changed. The picture of Yoo Joonghyuk and Lee Seolhwa, gorgeous in their wedding attires, had been replaced with Transcendence Gaming’s logo. A hand wider than Kim Dokja’s came up to card through thick hair. He felt it, a ghostly sensation on his own scalp.

“Keep it short,” Yoo Joonghyuk said. “I have to start dinner for Mia soon.”

“Of course,” Uriel’s voice chirped through the phone pressed to Yoo Joonghyuk’s ear. “Oh, but how is your sister? Hasn’t she just entered middle school?”

“She is fine.”

“You could give her a little more than that, Joonghyuk-ah,” Kim Dokja said. “She’s trying to bond with you, you know.”

Yoo Joonghyuk didn’t react. He couldn’t hear him. Kim Dokja knew that very well, but it didn’t prevent him from speaking to him out loud sometimes, like he was sending a comment on one of his favorite novels. Han Sooyoung would have laughed at him if she knew. But Han Sooyoung used her own fulgurations as inspiration for her stories, so she was hardly a model of healthy soulmate dynamics.

Kim Dokja straightened and stretched his arms up, realigning his spine with an audible click. He got up to pour himself a glass of water. Halfway across Seoul, poor Uriel kept chattering away, only getting curt responses for her efforts.

Transcendence Gaming was a new esport company. When Yoo Joonghyuk had left Zarathustra eight months ago, his old coach had snatched him up and founded Transcendence essentially around him. She had bullied a friend of hers into taking care of the business part of the venture while she gathered promising young gamers under her wings. Namgung Minyoung had a real eye for this. Transcendence Gaming’s two teams were already making waves in their respective leagues.

The rest of the company was no slouch either. Uriel, the manager of Yoo Joonghyuk’s new team, genuinely did her best by him. That had been enough to endear her to Kim Dokja, even before [demonic_judge_of_fire_] and [demonkingofsalvation] had met on Yoo Joonghyuk’s Star Stream channel.

Kim Dokja unpacked his dinner with a helpless smile. “Fate”, [persephone] had said earlier.

It hadn’t been fate that had guided him to Yoo Joonghyuk’s channel.

Yoo Joonghyuk was in the kitchen now, washing his hands and picking ingredients from the fridge. Kim Dokja hoped the fulguration would end soon. Looking at the culinary masterpiece that Yoo Joonghyuk was gearing up for was bound to put him off his own lackluster meal.

“… and the gaming house is coming along nicely,” Uriel was saying. “Did I send you the address?”

“Yes,” Yoo Joonghyuk said, and pulled the phone from his ear long enough to confirm that he had made a memo of it. “When are we moving in?”

“We’re hoping to make it happen by the end of the month. I know it won’t be a problem for you to get back into the habit of commuting, Joonghyuk-ssi, but hopefully you can get Kim Namwoon to stop fucking whining about it. Does that brat expect to be able to work from home his whole life?”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“I’ll be counting on you, team leader! If anything, you’d think he’d be happy to see Lee Jihye in person every day. Doesn’t he have a crush on her?”

Kim Dokja picked up his chopsticks as the conversation continued. It was like eating while watching a movie. Just a normal evening of listening to trade secrets and events happening to people he had never met.

Modern science struggled to understand fulgurations. What set them off? How did they work? Why was it that some people only received thoughts, or emotions, while others got the full experience of their soulmate’s five senses?

Only a couple of things were known for certain. At seemingly random moments, some neurons in the brain would fire; without even noticing, that person would start projecting. Their soulmate would then receive the projection as a fulguration.

It was a fact of life, and easy to get used to and to ignore.

Except for people like Kim Dokja, who received a record-breaking average of four fulgurations per week. It was surprising, because Yoo Joonghyuk was usually successful at everything he set out to do, but the man was just abysmal at bond control.

Kim Dokja was swallowing a mouthful when a shout rent the air.

“Oppa!”

He choked and fell into a coughing fit. Yoo Joonghyuk turned away from the counter with a burst of alarm. Mia usually knew better than to startle her brother when he was using sharp knives.

“What’s wrong?” he said as he hung up on Uriel.

The girl stood in the kitchen door. Yoo Joonghyuk and Kim Dokja looked her up and down, but she didn’t seem injured. If anything, her eyes shone with excitement.

“I got one!” she squealed. “I’m having one. A fulguration!”

Kim Dokja’s shoulders unwound. So that’s what it was. Come to think of it, Mia was eleven. She was about due for her bond to settle. Was it her first time?

“She’s growing up so fast, Joonghyuk-ah,” he whispered.

He felt old all of a sudden. He could barely remember having been in her position. He had matched her enthusiasm, that much he knew.

Yoo Joonghyuk smiled as Mia rushed to hug him.

“I have a soulmate,” she giggled.

“Is it nice?”

She nodded with energy.

“I think he’s not Korean?” she said.

“It’s a he?”

Kim Dokja snorted at the wariness that bloomed in Yoo Joonghyuk’s mind. Mia would have a hell of a time dating when she got to that age.

He finished his dinner, only listening to the siblings with one ear. He generally tried not to pay too much attention during private conversations, but he had seen things far more intimate than this over the years… especially when Yoo Joonghyuk and Lee Seolhwa were still together. That had been the only times of his life when he had actually cursed Yoo Joonghyuk for never walling up his mind.

“I can sort of tell he’s not speaking Korean. But I can still understand what everyone in the vision is saying? It’s weird,” Mia said.

So Mia’s soulmate lived in another country. Well, that was common. It was far more unusual for two soulmates to be born in the same city, the way Yoo Joonghyuk and Kim Dokja had been.

“I’m bilingual, now!” she proclaimed proudly, hands on her hips.

“In what language?” Yoo Joonghyuk said.

She faltered.

“Uh… I think… Maybe…”

The corner of Yoo Joonghyuk’s lips lifted. She smacked his arm and huffed.

“Well, what about you? What language does your soulmate speak, huh?”

“Korean, corporate English, and I can say ‘where are the toilets please’ in Mandarin,” Kim Dokja said, amused.

But the smile faded from his face when he felt Yoo Joonghyuk’s unease.

Yoo Joonghyuk was reluctant to answer her question. He didn’t want to upset her.

He didn’t want to upset her? What did that mean?

“Oh, is it Seolhwa-unni?” Mia whispered, looking contrite.

The divorce had happened just a few months ago. She knew it still hurt her brother to talk about his ex-wife.

Yoo Joonghyuk shook his head and ruffled her hair in reassurance. He kept his expression unaffected.

“I don’t have a soulmate.”

Kim Dokja froze.

“You don’t?” Mia exclaimed. “How come?”

“It happens sometimes.”

Yes, to people whose soulmates were dead.

What was going on? Was Yoo Joonghyuk so underwhelmed by Kim Dokja that he’d rather lie to her? But Kim Dokja would feel it if he was lying. There was no impression of disconnect between Yoo Joonghyuk’s words and his thoughts.

“But that’s not fair!” Mia shouted. “Are you sure? Really really sure?”

“It’s not important, Mia. Fulgurations would distract me during a tournament. It’s better this way.”

And there, now, there was dissonance in his mind. This part, he didn’t really believe. This part, he was lying about. There was a pang of sadness, of loneliness in his chest.

Kim Dokja recoiled as if he had been burned.

If this had been fiction, the scene would have ended here. But no matter how much Kim Dokja pretended sometimes, Yoo Joonghyuk’s life wasn’t a book, and Kim Dokja couldn’t just turn the page in denial. He had to sit here, staring at the wall, as the fulguration continued; as Yoo Joonghyuk comforted a disappointed Mia and sent her back to her homework; as Yoo Joonghyuk returned to his cooking like nothing had happened.

Unaware, like he had apparently been all along, of the man looking over his metaphorical shoulder.

Finally, the sound of running water faded. The view of Yoo Joonghyuk’s hand on the faucet disappeared too. Kim Dokja was left alone in the ringing silence of his small apartment.