Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Cover art by hehearse

Why do I exist in this world?

The thought came to Kim Dokja suddenly and fully formed, as if it had been passed into his brain from somewhere else.

He was standing on the subway in the early morning, travelling to work among the press of other commuters. He had his phone in his hand, but the screen had gone black from inactivity. He couldn’t remember what he had been looking at before that thought had come out of nowhere and distracted him.

He tried to shake it off, but kept staring at the black surface of his phone. The faint reflection of his face looked back.

Well… If he had to answer a question like that, pointless as it was, he would probably say: who cares why anything exists? Things happen, one after the other. Effect after cause. The only place where one could ask why something exists, and get a clear answer for it, was in works of fiction.

And the life of the person called Kim Dokja… was very much not a work of fiction.

If it was, I would have asked for a much better story.

Kim Dokja lived a deeply unremarkable life. He was twenty-eight, scraped out a living working in the QA department of a software company, and came home every night to a cramped, empty apartment. It was a repetitive, boring, and stagnant existence shared by millions of people.

Maybe he felt a bit trapped—maybe that was why that thought came to him so suddenly, and why it had stuck in his mind like a sliver he couldn’t quite dislodge.

Why do I exist in this world? As the subway eased to a stop, he heard it again like an echo.

But, as he had just told himself… there was no why. It was a pointless question phrased in a pointless way. A person like him just kept on existing, regardless of any reason.

***

He often dreamed of people he had never met.

The person he saw most often was a short, slight woman with hair cropped above the shoulders. She had beautiful, sharply defined features, somewhat undercut by the occasional appearance of a demonic, self-satisfied grin.

In this particular “dream”, though, she looked exhausted, dark circles hanging under her eyes. She was staggering into a subway station, expression frayed, a hand flung out in front of her.

With a shock, Kim Dokja followed the line of her raised hand to see a familiar silhouette with his head ducked over his phone. Is that… me?

What do you want? Kim Dokja wanted to ask this exhausted, reaching person. Moments from grazing his shoulder, she froze up, her eyes glazing over. “Kim Dokja” walked away, oblivious, while she stood stock-still. Can you tell me? What is it you want from me?

“Kim Dokja.”

The wheedling voice startled him out of the vivid daydream.

Right—He was at work. In a meeting, even. The head of the QA department was calling him out directly for some reason. The room was utterly silent.

“I—I’m sorry. Could you repeat the question?”

That earned him a self-important lecture about paying attention, which he completely tuned out. What was the point? Both Kim Dokja and the department head knew that his contract hadn’t been renewed, so he would be out of this job soon enough.

When the long workday finally wound to a close, he took the subway back home staring dead-eyed at his phone. There was nothing at all interesting to hold his attention in there—it felt like there should be, but he could only idly refresh his email and check social media so many times.

Pages refreshed at his fingertips again and again. A formless anxiety began to churn in his gut. It felt like… he was forgetting something? Something really important.

When his phone’s clock turned to 7:00 PM, he instinctively looked to his left. The seat there was empty. For some reason, he felt his body tense even further, almost like he was waiting for something.

The time flipped to 7:01. The next stop arrived. Commuters began shifting around, getting ready to depart when the doors slid open.

Calm down. What is wrong with you? Kim Dokja put the phone away and leaned back in his seat. Maybe this job is getting to me more than I thought.

Groups of people shuffled out of the car while others shuffled in. When the empty seat left of Kim Dokja filled in, he moved his knee out of the way without so much as glancing in that direction, still deep in thought.

But then: “Hey. You’re Kim Dokja.”

Confused, he looked up—and stopped dead.

It was her. The woman with the sharp smile and exhausted eyes from his “dream” was sitting right there in the subway car. Her face was guarded, staring at Kim Dokja as if she expected him to leap up and attack. For a second, they both just looked at each other, completely at a loss for words.

Kim Dokja had never met this person in his life. So, why…

The tension abruptly broke when they both asked the same question at the same time.

“Who are you?”

***

The social protocol for this situation was an absolute mystery to Kim Dokja. They ended up getting off the subway and going to get coffee as if they were old friends meeting to catch up.

Except—this woman was still glaring at Kim Dokja like he was about to leap across the table and snatch her drink out of her hands. A friend wouldn’t be making that sort of expression.

“All right,” she said. “Stop bullshitting me and tell me the truth. What the hell is happening?”

“I don’t know,” Kim Dokja repeated for what had to be the third time. “I know exactly what you know.”

“You’re lying to me,” she snapped. “Kim Dokja.”

He had not said it out loud: I’ve been having dreams about you was the strangest, most embarrassing thing Kim Dokja could think of to say to a total stranger, never mind a woman. Dancing around the issue probably wasn’t helping, but, then again, what the hell could help this inexplicable situation?

Recurring dreams were one thing… but for them to have recognized each other from dreams made no sense at all.

“How do you know my name?” he asked her instead.

“That’s not the point of contention here. How come you recognize me if this isn’t your fault somehow?”

“Seriously, that’s the angle you’re taking on this?” he demanded. “You’re the one who sat next to me on the subway and called me by name, even though I have no idea who you are. Are you stalking me or something?”

“I’m not stalking you!” she exclaimed a little too loudly for the café, then quieted down as people glanced in their direction. “Look, don’t say things like that in public, people will get the wrong idea.”

“It’s really the only explanation that makes sense, though.”

“Yeah, right. The moment you saw me, I could tell—you may not know my name, but you recognized me.”

Kim Dokja really didn’t want to admit that she was right, so instead he said, “What is your name?”

He was not sure why she actually told him, or why, even as her lips were forming the syllables, he seemed to know the shape of it already. “…Han Sooyoung.”

“Kim Dokja,” he said by way of introduction, not that there was much point. “So, you already knew my name because…”

She grimaced, then seemingly decided to take the plunge. “I had this dream. That’s all. You reminded me of someone I saw in it.”

There it was. “And that person in the dream was also called Kim Dokja.”

“Yeah. My theory is that we must have known each other from a long time ago, and I subconsciously remembered you from then.” Her tone of voice was casual, but she was watching his face carefully.

“I don’t think we’ve ever met,” Kim Dokja said. “But, I also… I had a dream about you.”

“Creepy,” she returned immediately. “Is that a pickup line, do you really think I’d fall for that so easily? That’s perverted.”

Somehow, Kim Dokja had known she’d turn it into something like that the first chance she got. He tried to smile, feeling his eye twitch. “Stop messing with me, I’m being serious. I saw someone who looked just like you in dreams I’ve been having. Didn’t we both experience that?”

“But it doesn’t make any sense.” Hidden in her defiant glare, Kim Dokja thought that he recognized a kernel of fear. “I mean, having dreams of people you don’t know…”

“Maybe it’s like you said,” he suggested, speaking words he didn’t believe in the slightest. “Maybe we knew each other a long time ago.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” she agreed. Her eyes, though, were flat—she was also lying. Whether it was just to him, or to herself as well, he couldn’t say. “In that case—did we meet through work? Where do you work?”

It seemed like it might be a bad idea to respond, just in case she really was stalking him, but the only way Kim Dokja was going to get more information out of her would be to offer some of his own. He explained about his QA job as painlessly as possible and said, “What about you?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Why don’t you take a guess?”

“How should I know?” Despite his protests, something prickled in his memory… as if far away, through a deep fog. “If I had to guess… maybe, an author?”

Her face instantly contracted with some inscrutable emotion, then relaxed as she mastered it. “As if. I work in a coffee shop, idiot. What kind of a guess is that?”

“You asked me to guess,” Kim Dokja sighed. It was actually kind of a relief that some of these weird hunches were wrong. “So, you’re saying we probably met at the coffee shop?”

Han Sooyoung squinted at his face. “…Maybe. I do see a lot of people in a day.”

“I feel like I would have remembered a barista as unpleasant as you.”

“Unpleasant?” Han Sooyoung demanded. “Oh, please, as if you have beautiful young women lining up to ask you to take them out for a coffee. You should be grateful you got to meet me, you know.”

“Should I? We’ve only just met, and you’ve already called me both a pervert and an idiot.”

“I have a very good sense for people,” Han Sooyoung declared, leaning back with a satisfied smirk. It was so similar to the expression she sometimes wore in his dreams that it caught him, for a moment, off guard.

“… I’m not sure how you go around calling yourself beautiful with a straight face,” he said by way of recovery.

“As if you could possibly talk, with your looks…!?”

Well, everything else aside, this person calling herself Han Sooyoung was very, very easy to argue with. It should have been annoying, but the bickering, like so much else, felt faintly familiar. Nearly even comforting.

“Anyway,” Han Sooyoung said after a second, effortlessly dropping the disagreement, “maybe it wasn’t at work, then. Where did you grow up?”

As if they really were out on a first date, they exchanged all the basic information of their lives over coffee. No details, just the broad facts: the neighbourhoods, the schools, the first jobs.

While it seemed possible that they could have run into each other before, the maps they were drawing of their lives made it difficult to imagine how. Each time one of them had gotten a job or moved somewhere a little closer to where the other was living, the other person had swiftly relocated far away again. It almost seemed like they were avoiding each other on purpose.

“You really didn’t live anywhere else?” Han Sooyoung challenged him.

“No. I’m already up to the present day. It seems like we have never worked or lived in so much as the same general area.”

Han Sooyoung scowled. “… I really feel like we’re missing something.”

Kim Dokja opened his mouth to object, then paused. It… did feel a little like something was missing from the picture he’d just painted of his life, even though he’d accounted for every single change in life circumstances he’d ever had.

“Did you forget about somewhere you lived?” he asked, instead of confronting that.

“I’m not stupid, of course not.”

They sat in silence, both thinking hard.

“Actually… I have something else to ask you,” Han Sooyoung abruptly spoke up, pulling out her phone. “I’m going to show you a picture of someone, so just tell me if you recognize him.”

Kim Dokja blinked as she started scrolling through her phone. “… Okay?”

When she turned the screen towards him, he nearly leapt out of his skin.

 Of course Kim Dokja recognized this person. His sharp jawline, elegant eyebrows, and stony expression… Well, he’d glimpsed them in his dreams.

The last “dream” Kim Dokja had had about this man had been completely inexplicable—he’d really thought it had been an ordinary dream, the sort of nonsensical scene his brain might shake up after blending up random daily experiences. He and this man in Han Sooyoung’s phone had been in Gwanghwamun, trying to beat the shit out of each other. Throughout the fight, Kim Dokja had been quite convinced: this guy was a total psychopath.

“That’s…” He swallowed. It felt so familiar, but even so, he knew for a fact he’d never seen this face before in his waking life. Even a second time, it was spooky. “I’ve seen him, too. But I don’t know his name.”

Han Sooyoung scrolled slightly up, revealing that she was viewing a profile on a gaming website. “I didn’t either, but I happened to see him in a video online and found out pretty quick. He’s called…”

“Yoo Joonghyuk,” Kim Dokja muttered. The characters of that name seemed to dance in his vision, taunting him with their almost-familiarity.

Even though he had no idea what was going on, and even though what he had dreamed of Yoo Joonghyuk so far made him less than eager to meet him, it felt like something agitated in his chest suddenly settled.

Han Sooyoung and Yoo Joonghyuk. Those two…

Somehow, in some way, they could give him an answer to a question he’d been asking.

***

Han Sooyoung displayed a concerning aptitude for actual stalking, quickly discovering where Yoo Joonghyuk would be the next day and wringing a promise out of Kim Dokja to meet her there.

Well… in fairness to Han Sooyoung, it was publicly available information. It seemed that Yoo Joonghyuk was a pro gamer with a pretty large following, so if he participated in in-person competitions, an entire subset of Twitter quickly knew about it.

That night, Kim Dokja very nearly came to his senses.

What the hell are we even doing? he thought, staring up at his dark bedroom ceiling. We’re tracking down this guy because we both had a dream about him? If he’s famous, didn’t we both just dream about him because we knew who he was?

When he finally fell asleep, the “dreams” came to him stronger than they ever had before.

He saw the face of Yoo Joonghyuk twisted in a mask of rage. A hand closed around his neck. The other punched into his stomach with brutal strength.

Kim Dokja floundered away from that scene only to end up in another. They were… fighting again, this time with swords? Yoo Joonghyuk’s expression was blank and oppressive. Kim Dokja felt it in his bones… if I make a wrong move here, he’ll kill me.

The final scene was the most brutal of all. He was speared through, falling against the body of the man who had stabbed him. Kim Dokja dreamed his own death in vivid detail: the taste of his own blood, the strength leaving his limbs, the choking gasp of his final breaths.

He woke sweaty and gasping for air, half-rolled off the bed.

Heart pounding, he hung there on the edge of the mattress with a hand on his chest, where he’d dreamed the sword had pierced him, and tried to get a hold of himself. It was dark, in the early morning. He was alone.

If these dreams had anything at all to do with reality… There was no way in hell he should be going to see this Yoo Joonghyuk guy. The dream almost seemed like a warning telling Kim Dokja to stay far, far away.

Except…

Why was it, in the dreams, when he looked at Yoo Joonghyuk’s face, he had felt something so mismatched to the situations at hand? In that last one especially, even though he had literally died at Yoo Joonghyuk’s hands, Kim Dokja had not felt afraid or angry.

No, he’d felt almost… content. Or maybe fulfilled, along with a hundred other things, all of it wound so tightly together it was impossible to fully comprehend. It was a feeling that he’d never once experienced in waking life. And as Kim Dokja died in his arms, stabbed through the heart, Yoo Joonghyuk’s expression had been…

Damn it. Yes, it was stupid, yes, the dreams seemed to suggest it could even be dangerous, but Kim Dokja could not make himself ignore all of this. He would go meet with Yoo Joonghyuk.

If he wanted to make sense of these feelings, he had no other choice.

***

He and Han Sooyoung chose to wait outside the building where Yoo Joonghyuk was attending his event, like groupies waiting to harass him for an autograph. Kim Dokja felt incredibly stupid.

“Did you have any dreams last night?” he asked Han Sooyoung, trying to take his mind off the situation.

To his surprise, she immediately bristled. “No! I didn’t.”

He gave her a sidelong look. “… that was weirdly defensive. Why, was it a weird dream? You don’t want to tell me?”

“Shut up. Don’t ask me invasive questions. You have no tact.”

“Aren’t the dreams the whole reason we’re doing this? I don’t see how it’s tactless.”

“Well, did you dream anything, then?”

Kim Dokja paused. “Well… yes, actually. About this guy we’re trying to meet.”

“Oh?” Han Sooyoung seemed happy to change the subject to his dreams instead. “Tell me the details. Anything stand out as important?”

“Well…” he struggled for words, which began to fail when he saw their target exiting the building just a short distance away. It looked like the competition was over. “He, uh, murdered me.”

“What?” Han Sooyoung muttered, then spotted Yoo Joonghyuk as well. A second later, he saw them.

Though there were a few key differences to the Yoo Joonghyuk in Kim Dokja’s troubled dreams, the similarities were more striking. He had the same confident stride, disconcertingly beautiful face, and muscular frame. Even without the black trench coat and sword, he gave off an intimidating aura.

Yoo Joonghyuk’s eyes lit with recognition—that was good. He immediately started stomping towards Kim Dokja and Han Sooyoung with murder in his eyes.

That was less good.

Warning bells screamed in Kim Dokja’s head. He quickly backed away, raising his hands. “Yoo Joonghyuk-ssi, wait.”

Yoo Joonghyuk only approached faster, his glare zeroing in on Kim Dokja. His left hand came up, and Kim Dokja was certain that he was about to be strangled to death on a public street. Kim Dokja’s back hit a wall.

And then he was… dreaming.

It was the clearest instance of the “dream” yet. He felt the wind on his skin; he smelled smoke and the acrid, bloody stench of rot. There was a hand locked around his neck, holding him over a crumbled section of the destroyed Dongho Bridge, threatening to drop him.

He immediately forgot that it was a dream at all.

“Name.”

“What?”

“What is your name?”

“Kim Dokja.”

“A strange name.”

“I’ve heard that a lot.”

A fist to the stomach and intense, blooming pain in the abdomen. As if the pain had sparked it, there was a brief but intense feeling of… understanding.

Kim Dokja’s dream self knew why this was happening—knew who Yoo Joonghyuk was, knew why he was being dangled over the bridge, and had a plan for what would happen next. Was still calculating that plan even as his feet dangled above the churning water far below.

Kim Dokja grasped desperately at that understanding, but it seemed to fall through his grasp like water. He could only hang onto the smallest pieces. Something… survival… ways to survive… what?

And then, in another flash, he was standing in the street with Han Sooyoung yelling on one side of him and Yoo Joonghyuk looming directly in front, his hand raised up just an inch away from Kim Dokja’s neck.

Yoo Joonghyuk dropped his hand as if it had been burned. Kim Dokja reached automatically for his own neck, still feeling the phantom squeeze of fingers. It seemed that, in the real world, Yoo Joonghyuk hadn’t even touched him.

“You,” Yoo Joonghyuk growled. He turned to encompass Han Sooyoung in his glare. “Who are you? What did you just do?”

“You saw that, too?” Kim Dokja asked faintly. “I should be asking you what you did. I’m not the one who tried to strangle somebody…”

“Okay, what exactly is happening?” Han Sooyoung demanded. “Saw what? You both just froze up and stared into space for like thirty seconds.”

Kim Dokja rubbed at his throat until the sensation of the gripping hand faded, clearing his throat with a light cough. “It was another one of those dreams, but… way more intense than usual. It was like I was really there.”

Yoo Joonghyuk shifted his glare in between Kim Dokja and Han Sooyoung. “Explain what’s happening, now.”

***

They did their best to explain without prompting any more strangulation attempts.

The facts were pretty simple. Han Sooyoung and Kim Dokja had both been having mysterious, recurring dreams of people they had never met. They had run into each other on the subway, and then had tracked down Yoo Joonghyuk.

“You recognized us,” Han Sooyoung said to Yoo Joonghyuk. “So, you must be having the dreams as well, right?”

In an effort to have a quiet conversation, they had moved away from the busy street. Ironically, the footpath they had found themselves on overlooked a familiar area of the Han River from a distance, Dongho Bridge just barely visible where it cut across the water. Whole and undestroyed, of course.

(…Had the bridge really been destroyed in that dream? What could have caused something like that?)

Yoo Joonghyuk looked between the two of them with open suspicion. “I have had dreams recently, but nothing like what we just experienced.”

“Me neither,” Kim Dokja agreed. The memory of the pain was still quite fresh. “Why do you think that is? I even had that exact same dream before, the one of you trying to kill me in the river, but it didn’t feel like that.”

“Maybe… it was like a flashback or something?” Han Sooyoung suggested. “I guess creating a similar situation to the one in the dream could have brought it to mind.”

“I was not going to strangle him,” said Yoo Joonghyuk.

Kim Dokja barked an incredulous laugh. “Are you kidding me? What was that then, stomping towards me with that look on your face and your hand like this?”

Yoo Joonghyuk glowered. “I suddenly felt you were dangerous. I am not sure why.”

“Dangerous?” Kim Dokja repeated in disbelief. “Me? Look who’s talking.”

Yoo Joonghyuk’s face went blank. His shoulders were very stiff—the man was clearly uncomfortable with this whole situation, and he wasn’t doing a very good job of hiding it.

Kim Dokja had been pretty apprehensive about meeting this guy. The Yoo Joonghyuk of his dreams was certainly some kind of psychopath, effortlessly enacting extreme violence with a blank face. Hell, Kim Dokja had even been murdered by him.

In real life, though, he almost seemed more awkward than dangerous. He didn’t have all the combat scars crisscrossing his skin, the huge black coat, or the sword that had killed Kim Dokja. He was just an unusually handsome guy with an unusually unpleasant glare who worked as a professional gamer. Kim Dokja couldn’t shake the feeling that this guy wouldn’t actually kill him.

Finally, Yoo Joonghyuk said, “I don’t know why I attacked you in that dream. For a moment, it seemed clear, but now I can’t remember.”

“It did seem so clear for a moment,” Kim Dokja agreed, leaning on the footpath handrail and trying to force his brain to work. It was a grey and unpleasant day, the city lights fighting off hazy grey clouds in the distance. The air was uncomfortably damp on his skin. “For a second, it was like I understood everything, but I only hung on to the tiniest piece afterwards. Do the words ways to survive mean anything to either of you?”

Both just stared and shook their heads.

“What about you, then?” he prompted Yoo Joonghyuk. “Did you hold onto anything at all?”

Yoo Joonghyuk seemed to briefly consider. “… I remember thinking that everything was your fault.”

When both Yoo Joonghyuk and Han Sooyoung turned rather sharp looks to Kim Dokja, he could only smile sheepishly. “… Well, I don’t know what that was about exactly, but the dreams aren’t my fault. I have no idea what’s happening to us either.”

“… Maybe we can find out,” Han Sooyoung suggested. “That flashback you two had, if it really was triggered by a similar situation to the one you dreamed about… We could try to recreate other things that happened in the dreams?”

“I don’t know. Some of those dreams are pretty unpleasant,” Kim Dokja said with a wary look in Yoo Joonghyuk’s direction. “Did I mention I saw this guy murder me?”

Something odd crossed Yoo Joonghyuk’s face at that comment, but he remained silent.

“Clearly it doesn’t require actually hurting each other,” Han Sooyoung pointed out, “since you had that memory of being strangled without him even touching you. And anyway, we must have some dreams we can test this on that don’t involve horrible violence, right?”

“I guess so.” There hadn’t been any violence in the dream he’d had about the exhausted Han Sooyoung on the subway, but she had seemed like she was suffering somehow. The thought of recreating that made him uncomfortable. “Yoo Joonghyuk?”

“I need more information about the dreams,” Yoo Joonghyuk said. “If that’s the only way, I will try it.”

There was something in the intensity of his expression that made Kim Dokja frown. “Is there some reason you’re particularly invested?”

“No.”

“Really? It’s certainly worth looking into, but you seem dead set on it.”

“It’s you who’s weird for treating it casually,” Han Sooyoung interjected, shooting Kim Dokja a look. “Whatever this is, it isn’t normal. We need to figure out what the hell is going on here so I can move on with my life.”

“Fine,” Kim Dokja sighed, deciding to keep a close eye on Yoo Joonghyuk on his own. “So, who has a good candidate for a dream to try recreating? I’m vetoing the ones where I die.”

“Ones, plural?” Han Sooyoung repeated, raising an eyebrow.

Kim Dokja ignored her. “What was yours about last night, Han Sooyoung?”

“We’re not talking about that one!” Han Sooyoung snapped.

“So, you did have a weird dream.”

“Just shut up. Don’t ask invasive questions of a woman.”

For a moment, they all stood there, looking at each other.

It was a bit uncomfortable, Kim Dokja had to admit. Han Sooyoung was presumably joking when she called his questions invasive, but explaining the dreams did feel… weirdly intimate. Whether it was getting murdered by Yoo Joonghyuk or watching Han Sooyoung reach out towards him at the subway station, they always felt so emotionally intense. Describing any part of that out loud was…

“I have one,” Yoo Joonghyuk finally said. Reluctantly, he held up his cell phone. “I need your phone numbers.”

Mystified but intrigued, Kim Dokja allowed Yoo Joonghyuk to fumblingly add him as a phone contact and then open a group chat that included all three of them. After that, though, he just stared at the screen.

Kim Dokja sent a message first.

Kim Dokja

So, what dream is this supposed to trigger?

Yoo Joonghyuk

Shut up. I should send a specific message.

Han Sooyoung

Go ahead and do it then, I don’t have all day.

Yoo Joonghyuk

I am trying to remember it.

“What, you forgot already?” Kim Dokja said out loud. “Is your memory that bad? Aren’t you only twenty-eight?”

“You’re plainly aware that the dreams are difficult to remember,” Yoo Joonghyuk growled. “How do you know my age?”

Kim Dokja wracked his brain. “I must have seen your birth date on your profile online. By the way, you’re actually a bit younger than me, so if you want to begin speaking more respectfully—”

“Can we argue less about stupid stuff and try to actually make progress on this?” Han Sooyoung complained. “Yoo Joonghyuk, what was the message about?”

Yoo Joonghyuk seemed like he was back to contemplating murder, but looked down at his phone after another moment. “It had something to do with the word ‘tryst’.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“Tryst?” Han Sooyoung repeated. “As in, romantic tryst?”

If possible, Yoo Joonghyuk looked even more uncomfortable. “I’m not sure.”

“What the hell weird type of dream—?”

Kim Dokja

Which one of us did you have a romantic tryst with, Yoo Joonghyuk?

Kim Dokja

To be honest, I don’t think I would do that with a man, so don’t ask.

Yoo Joonghyuk was briefly silent, then: “I’m deleting the chat.”

“No, no, no, wait,” Kim Dokja insisted, successfully suppressing his smile. “We may still need to use it to coordinate. Don’t delete it, you might think of the message you needed to send later.”

Yoo Joonghyuk stared at him, his face a warning, but slowly lowered his phone.

“Any other bright ideas?” Han Sooyoung suggested dryly.

After a moment's delay, Yoo Joonghyuk turned to walk away. “This is pointless.”

“Hey, hang on,” Kim Dokja called after him. “Why is it pointless?”

“I will solve it on my own.”

“And how the hell do you plan to do that? What exactly about this situation is there to solve?”

Yoo Joonghyuk was already halfway down the street, leaving the questions unanswered. Kim Dokja watched him go. “That guy has a terrible personality.”

“He'll give up and come back to us for help sooner or later,” Han Sooyoung muttered. “At least we've got his number, so we can keep pestering him.”

“I wonder if he saw something in those dreams that made him not want to trust us?”

“Maybe.” Han Sooyoung shrugged, then glanced in his direction. “Hey—Kim Dokja. Do you have a theory about all this? What are these dreams really about?”

He stared at her blankly. “Why would I have a theory?”

“I don’t know.” She narrowed her eyes at him appraisingly. “It just feels like you're the type of know-it-all who would come up with one.”

“… Well, I don’t have any theories,” he admitted. “If this were a novel, they would probably be memories of a past life or something like that.”

She snorted. “That's stupid.”

“It may sound stupid, but it's possible that something similar—”

“Oh, fuck!” Han Sooyoung suddenly hissed, looking at her phone. “I have an evening shift tonight. And a morning shift tomorrow, if you can believe it. Shouldn’t that shit be illegal? I barely have time to sleep.”

“Uh—”

“If you have any more dreams that seem important, put them in the chat,” Han Sooyoung said, waving her phone in his face. “We can try to see if there are any similarities, at least. Maybe we can get Yoo Joonghyuk to do that, too.”

“I’m not sure if he would cooperate.”

“Whatever. I have to go slave away for the next six hours, so just think of some ideas for what else to try. Write down your dreams.”

With that, she took off, leaving Kim Dokja alone and mystified on the street.

He opened the chat multiple times that night, wondering how he could even begin to describe some of the dreams he’d had so far. In the end, he decided it was best to simply summarize the vision he and Yoo Joonghyuk had experienced that day.

Kim Dokja

Met Yoo Joonghyuk on Dongho Bridge. He tried to strangle and kill me.

Well, maybe to drive the point home, he should add another one.

Kim Dokja

He also stabbed me to death with a sword at some point.

To think, this was what they had to work with and Yoo Joonghyuk was acting like Kim Dokja was the suspicious one? Looking at the dreams typed out like that, they looked suddenly very stupid. No one replied—Han Sooyoung was still at work, and Yoo Joonghyuk left him on read.

That night, Kim Dokja’s sleep was troubled once again. Strange scenes passed through his mind, an invisible force tossing him from one to the next like he was being dragged through a riptide.

He saw skies close over with apocalyptic, bruise-purple clouds. Gwanghwamun Plaza flew past several times, in various states of destruction. He saw a wall. He felt an indescribable pain like his body was cracking into disparate pieces.

Unfamiliar faces darted by, too. There was a pair of children. A large man with an earnest expression. A woman with a gentle beauty in her face and daggers in her hands. A pair of people wielding swords, one of high school age and one a woman wreathed in vengeful flames.

Kim Dokja had no idea who they were, but his heart ached as if he missed them terribly. When he reached out a hand and tried to call out to them, the vision dashed apart, leaving him alone.

No, not quite alone—Yoo Joonghyuk was there. He stared at Kim Dokja with a boiling fury that was far and above his usual prickly temper. He looked… hurt.

He turned to look at the other faces that were flickering just out of reach. Talking about Kim Dokja, he said: “That guy, he is deceiving you.”

In the inescapable logic of the dream, Kim Dokja knew without a doubt that he was right.

He woke up scrambling away from the incoming deathblow of Yoo Joonghyuk’s sword. His hands were tangled up in something, preventing his escape, and a moment later, a burst of sharp pain hit his cheekbone.

Only afterwards, lying flat on the floor, did he register what had happened. He had been fighting his bedsheets, fell off the side of the bed, and hit his face on the bedside table on his way down.

He could have laughed if the adrenaline from the nightmare wasn’t still pounding through his system. Instead, he lay there shaking until the stinging in his cheek prompted him to get up to check the damage in the bathroom.

Blearily, he turned the light on. He seemed to be bleeding—he must have really hit his cheek quite hard. Still dizzy and disoriented, he splashed water in his face, trying to clear away the blood and sweat.

When he looked up, the reflection that stared back was that of a monster.

He jerked away, back hitting the wall. In the space of an eyeblink, the specter was gone, but its image remained crystal clear in his mind’s eye: the two horns on the forehead, the ragged black wings, and the blank, white orbs in place of its eyes.

The hallucination was gone, but there was something on his mirror that should not have been there. A message had been scrawled up the mirror in bright red blood.

It read: DON’T REMEMBER.

Chapter Text

The next day, Kim Dokja went to the coffee shop where Han Sooyoung worked.

She appeared to be making drinks at the bar behind the counter rather than directly interacting with customers, but she nonetheless turned and glared absolute daggers at him as soon as he showed up. He smiled pleasantly and ordered his drink.

He watched her closely as she made it to make sure she didn’t spit in it. The face she made when she went to hand the drink over was nothing short of murderous.

“Thanks!” he said cheerfully, taking his coffee.

“What the hell are you doing here,” she hissed.

“Buying coffee? Do you talk to all customers like that?”

Called away to do more work, she was tragically unable to finish her comeback and could only give him a parting glare. Pleased, Kim Dokja went to find a table and sit down.

After he had sipped his drink for a bit and scrolled around on his phone, Han Sooyoung, apron and all, abruptly dropped into the seat across from him.

He looked up. “Don’t you have work?”

“I’m on break,” she said, offering him a very fake smile. “I thought I’d drop by and tell you to get the hell out.”

“I don’t see the problem.” He sipped the Americano he had ordered, which, as a person who didn’t drink much coffee, he found a bit gross. “It’s a public establishment.”

She pointed to her cheek. “Also, what the hell happened to your face? Did you get beat up by someone else you were annoying?”

He’d almost forgotten about the bandage. “I just hit my face.”

“Right.” She frowned at him. “Did you have another crazy dream or something? I can’t imagine you’d come here willingly on your day off just to harass me.”

“How am I harassing you?” Kim Dokja sighed. “I just thought coming here might knock some more memories loose. Everything I have is just so… fragmentary. None of it makes sense.”

“Why would it? They’re dreams,” Han Sooyoung said dismissively. “Dreams don’t make sense.”

“I think we’re past the point of pretending they’re just ordinary dreams. Multiple people who have never met don’t share dreams.”

“Maybe we did meet in the past!” Han Sooyoung snapped, as if they hadn’t spent their whole previous coffee date ruling that out entirely. “Or, I don’t know, maybe dream sharing really is a thing. Like ESP, or something.”

“ESP?” Kim Dokja repeated dryly.

“Shut up. Like ESP is any stupider than what you were saying about past lives.”

“Okay, I get your point.” He hesitated. “I’ve been thinking, though. Those people we are in those dreams… do you think they’re really us?”

“Was that sentence even in Korean?” Han Sooyoung asked blandly. “Are the people we are really us?”

“I just mean…” He struggled momentarily to put it into words, doubting whether Han Sooyoung was the right person to ask. Unfortunately, he had no one else. “That Kim Dokja in the dreams. I think he’s done some questionable stuff.”

“Oh, is that all?” Han Sooyoung only shrugged. “Dream Han Sooyoung does all kinds of fucked up things. It’s not going to keep me up at night.”

Kim Dokja stared. “Wait, really? Like what?”

“I’ve definitely murdered people,” she said brightly. “I think I did some conspiracies to gain political power, though some of those were really weird, there was a whole kingdom of tiny people… well, it doesn’t matter. I’m just saying, why should any of that bother me?”

“I just feel like what I did was a little more personal than that,” Kim Dokja said, then frowned. “Who the hell did you murder?”

“Oh. No one important,” she said, suddenly unusually interested in looking at the ceiling.

… Don’t tell me she also murdered me? Definitely not, right?

When no elaboration was forthcoming, Kim Dokja let it go. “Well, I guess all I’m asking is if you think it means anything—the types of people we are in the dreams. I’m beginning think Yoo Joonghyuk might have his reasons for not wanting to trust me.”

She scoffed. “Oh, he’s just being dramatic. Didn’t you have one where he murdered you? None of it really means anything.”

“Well, that being the case… maybe I should still bring it up with him. He could remember details from the other side that dream that I don’t. Maybe he had a good reason.”

“For killing you?” Han Sooyoung said, quirking an eyebrow. “… Since you’re asking my opinion, I’ll tell you: I’m against it.”

At those words, Kim Dokja’s vision seemed to suddenly warp and squeeze.

He felt… shaky, like he was coming down from a panic attack. There was a heavy body draped over his back. Yoo Joonghyuk, unconscious and covered with wounds and rubble. Han Sooyoung was walking beside them, silently tapping out a message on some sort of futuristic chat system.

Han Sooyoung

For reference. I am against it.

Kim Dokja

What?

Han Sooyoung

The thing you're about to say.

Given your personality, it’s weird that you’ve been hiding it for this long.

His dream self radiated raw feelings of regret, edged with guilt. Whatever it was, Kim Dokja had wanted to keep deceiving Yoo Joonghyuk and the others about it for as long as possible, until the bitter end. The remorse was almost less for the deception and more for the fact that it had been discovered.

But whatever it was… Han Sooyoung clearly already knew about it. Not only that, but she seemed to be more or less on his side.

 

Han Sooyoung

You can keep hiding it. Just pretend you don't know. Keep on pretending to be a prophet.

Kim Dokja

Do you think they would believe that? I have to explain now. It isn't just about Yoo Joonghyuk, but the other party members, too.

Those words prickled against Kim Dokja’s consciousness. Pretending to be a prophet. He was so close to understanding what all of that meant.

 

Kim Dokja

They deserve to know.

Han Sooyoung

Is all of this for you, or is it for them?

And as they walked together with the weight of the secret stretched between them…

Han Sooyoung

You already deceived these people. Now you’re going to ask for forgiveness?

Kim Dokja

I don't mean to be forgiven.

The secret they held, the reason for the deception. It was because…

Suddenly, Kim Dokja was back in the seat at the café with Han Sooyoung seated across from him. He had just been about to take a sip of his coffee and now inelegantly choked on it, leaning over into his elbow as the bitter taste flooded his sinuses.

While he dizzily tried to recover his breath, Han Sooyoung just sat there frozen. The quiet of the café, with soft music playing and the light mumble of other peoples’ conversations, felt alien and unreal.

Finally, Kim Dokja managed to speak. “You saw that, too…?”

“Is that what you and Yoo Joonghyuk were talking about earlier?” she muttered, pressing a fist to her forehead as if to knead away a headache. “That was… it was like a real experience. What the hell is going on?”

“Do you remember?” Kim Dokja said, suddenly urgent. “What we were talking about. This secret we were keeping.”

Han Sooyoung winced. “I don’t remember. I should be able to, shouldn’t I? My ‘dream self’ felt like she understood it so completely. She thought you were so stupid for struggling over it.”

Feeling he should nominally protest for being called stupid, he muttered, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Shut up.” She held up a hand and squinted, thinking hard, before dropping it with a defeated exhalation. “Shit, I really can’t remember. What the hell.”

Kim Dokja gently pushed away his coffee, no longer feeling much like suffering through it. “… And you want to tell me these are normal dreams.”

“Maybe not. I don’t know.”

“In which case, the ‘people we are’ in those dreams could actually be very relevant.”

She laughed, though it was a lower and less mocking laugh than her usual. “Do you think so? Those people… are they really anything like us?”

“I think so—” Kim Dokja started, somewhat defensively, but Han Sooyoung shook her head.

“No. They… I mean, have you seen yourself in some of these dreams? I keep seeing this version you that makes no sense at all. Running around with a huge pair of wings and a sword, covered in wounds. Trying to save everyone else by pulling the stupidest stunts and sacrificing himself instead.”

Kim Dokja, who had been thinking only about the familiar ease with which he had lied to his loved ones, opened and closed his mouth. “What?”

“Right?” she said. “It doesn’t match up at all. If you ask me, we’re completely different people.”

“… I guess it is weird,” Kim Dokja admitted, closing his eyes as he tried to summon up every “dream” he’d had with Han Sooyoung in it. At this point, they all blurred together so closely that he only retained impressions and flashes of coherent scenes. “In my dreams… I think you come off as a bit dangerous. You always have some sinister scheme or plan you’re enacting, and other people are wary of you because of that. But the weirdest thing is that I feel like I actually kind of trust you. Maybe more than anyone else.”

Han Sooyoung made a sound. Kim Dokja opened his eyes to find her staring at him.

“What?” he asked. “Did I say something weird?”

“No,” she snapped, glaring over his shoulder. “It’s just stupid.”

“I’m just explaining what my ‘dream self’ felt. Relax.” He paused. “Unless… Do you have some kind of sinister scheme you’re enacting right now?”

“Fuck off,” she muttered. “Look at me. I work a dead-end part time job at a greasy café where the customers act like I’m their personal servant. What the hell plot can I come up with?”

He looked at her more closely. He couldn’t help but feel a sensation of double vision, seeing her confident, egotistical dream self overlaid over the current version of her in the lightly stained apron. Han Sooyoung stared back at him as if challenging him.

Were they the same person?

“It feels different,” Kim Dokja admitted. “In the dreams, we’re the sort of people who can change things. Who can write their own stories.”

“But in real life, we can’t change anything?” Han Sooyoung asked, completing the thought. “Wow. That’s pretty depressing.”

She didn’t object, though. The tired look in her eye was oddly familiar.

“I had a dream about you once that took place in a subway station,” he found himself saying. “I think, in that dream… you were running after me, like you wanted to tell me something. Have you seen that one?”

He thought he saw some kind of recognition flash in her eyes, but she shook her head. “No.”

“Oh. In that case… never mind. It’s not important.”

“I do want to know about a different dream of yours, though,” she said after a moment. “Where did you get the idea that I was an author from?”

“That wasn’t from any specific dream,” Kim Dokja admitted. “Just a feeling. I was probably just imagining it.”

“Right.” She stared down at the table.

A little concerned at the sudden lack of vitriol, Kim Dokja prompted, “…Why do you ask?”

“Nothing, just… the way you said it. That in those dreams, we’re people who can write our own stories. It’s stupid, but I always wanted to be a writer when I was younger. I just couldn’t cut it, life got too busy. And no one read what I wrote anyway.”

“Oh.”

“I was thinking that other version of me probably pulled it off,” she said. “Which I know is a stupid thing to think. I really don’t need you to tell me.”

Kim Dokja opened his mouth to tell her it wasn’t stupid, then faltered. It wasn’t like it was his place to reassure her. They barely knew each other, right?

Even so, he wanted to say he would read her work. He had a feeling he’d enjoy it.

From the direction of the counter, someone called: “Han Sooyoung-ssi, your break is over.”

“Ugh.” She momentarily draped her head on her arms. “Well, I think it would probably be best not to mention that experience we just had to Yoo Joonghyuk just yet. We need his help to figure this out, so we can’t just tell him we had dreams about lying to him.”

“So, to prevent him from learning about deceiving him, we’ll deceive him for real,” Kim Dokja summarized.

“Unless you got a problem with it?”

Despite everything they had talked about… “No, I think you’re right.”

“Great. Now get out of my hair, I have another couple hours before I’m free.”

Kim Dokja frowned—that almost sounded like an invitation to bother her again once she was free—but she just whirled around and left him at the table, headed back behind the counter.

Given that it was his day off, Kim Dokja would normally have gone home and relaxed for the rest of the day, but he still felt restless. Experiencing yet another of the “dreams” in such explicit clarity was wearing down his nerves. His dream self’s panic had left him with a lingering headache.

He had told Han Sooyoung that he didn’t think that they were normal dreams—in that case, what the hell were they? Were they just going to spend the rest of their lives struggling with these visions from a world that didn’t exist? Wondering if those people were really them after all?

Most of the locations in the dream had been unfamiliar or so destroyed as to be unrecognizable… but he recalled that in the blurry confusion of the previous night’s dreams, he had seen the massive gates of Gwanghwamun Palace several times. It was as good a place as any to go and try to shake some clarity out of his confused brain, so after a moment’s debate of whether to finish his coffee or not, he headed out.

After emerging from the closest subway stop, he started wandering the plaza without much of a plan. He couldn’t say where exactly in the area his dreams had taken place: only that he was sure he’d glimpsed the gate in the distance. He let his feet carry him along with the flow of foot traffic until he found himself pausing in front of the statue of Admiral Yi Sunsin in the central plaza.

Kim Dokja stared, trying to jog his memory. A few kids played in the fountain at the Admiral’s feet, giggling and stomping around. There did seem to be something tickling in the back of his mind when he looked at the statue, but the specifics completely escaped him. Maybe he was confusing his memories from learning history in school with the dreams.

When he’d stared at the statue long enough to feel self-conscious about it, he sighed and kept walking. The gate was now fully in sight in the distance, braced against the mountainous landscape beyond. There was also the King Sejong the Great statue, seated in his elevated throne, and in front of it…

Kim Dokja blinked, sure for a moment he was seeing incorrectly. Standing in front of the statue, looming noticeably above the gaggle of tourists with backpacks and retired couples holding hands, was Yoo Joonghyuk.

At first glance, Kim Dokja’s brain had filled in the details of the billowing black coat and swords hanging at his waist, but after a second the image resolved into reality. Yoo Joonghyuk was actually wearing a black athletic jacket and running shoes, like he had interrupted his jog to come solemnly stare at the statue. He did seem to have a somewhat constipated expression, however.

Kim Dokja debated what to do, taking an uncertain half-step back. At that moment, Yoo Joonghyuk unexpectedly turned. His eyes flashed toward Kim Dokja immediately.

… Ah. Well, it seemed escape would not be a viable option. Smiling, Kim Dokja approached Yoo Joonghyuk and the statue. “Good morning. It’s a surprise to see you here.”

Yoo Joonghyuk’s expression was dark. “Are you following me?”

“I don’t know how I would manage that,” Kim Dokja said, dropping the smile. There really wasn’t much point in trying with this guy, was there? “I really am surprised to see you here. You didn’t strike me as someone who hangs out in an area like this. And to jog?”

“I finished my jog already,” Yoo Joonghyuk said stiffly. “Before I returned home, I wanted to come here.”

“To admire the history,” Kim Dokja nodded emphatically, just to see Yoo Joonghyuk’s scowl deepen. “Ah, unless you actually came here because you had a dream about this place. That’s why I’m here.”

Yoo Joonghyuk ignored him to stare at the statue again. Kim Dokja also looked, this time feeling an even more insistent pull of memory.

He had seen this very area, in his dreams, utterly destroyed. Almost, he could still taste the smoke in the air and see the fallen statues. Looking at the plaza now, with kids splashing in the fountains and buses gliding into the nearby bus stops, it all seemed very far away.

“What do you remember?” he tried asking Yoo Joonghyuk.

“… I am not sure.”

Kim Dokja had not expected an answer at all, so he was surprised when Yoo Joonghyuk continued talking.

“What I see happens in many layers. I see myself seated on a throne forty-one times. I see it stand empty. At one point, I see...” He suddenly touched his chin as if in reflex. “…You did something incredibly stupid.”

“What throne?” Kim Dokja asked, instead of commenting on that. “The one the statue is sitting on?”

“Not quite. But something similar.”

“I suppose you could try climbing up there and sitting in his lap if you want to try and trigger a memory.”

Rather than glare at him and call him stupid, Yoo Joonghyuk said, “I don’t want to trigger that memory.”

Kim Dokja shot Yoo Joonghyuk a sidelong look. His expression was oddly distant, as if he were staring deeply into a world that Kim Dokja couldn’t see. “Why not?”

“Many of them are unfocused. Even while I’m dreaming, I fail to understand where I am or what is happening.”

“Unfocused…?” Kim Dokja repeated. It seemed a little different than how he experienced the dreams—in Kim Dokja’s case, he always felt that his dream self understood what was happening, even if his waking self did not.

“Too many layers.”

Kim Dokja was at an even further loss for words. For another minute, they stared silently at King Sejong in his throne.

“What about the memory we accidentally triggered together yesterday?” Kim Dokja asked, somewhat reluctant to bring it up. “Did that one also seem unfocused to you?”

A small crease appeared on Yoo Joonghyuk’s brow. “No. That one was very clear.”

“Even so, you decided to go off on your own without accepting help from myself and Han Sooyoung?”

In lieu of answering, Yoo Joonghyuk just stared ahead with a cool expression. Damn, how was it that this guy looked so handsome even when he was being unbearably stupid?

“I won’t call you stupid,” Kim Dokja said magnanimously, “but I will ask you to help me out. I keep seeing a lot of Gwanghwamun in my dreams, and walking around with you might cause something to trigger. I feel that I’m so close to understanding more about what’s happening… I just need one vital piece of information.”

Rather than immediately turning him down, Yoo Joonghyuk frowned. “What is that piece of information?”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t be asking for your help at all.” Once more, Kim Dokja raked through his own memories. “There is something very important, something absolutely key to all of this. The reason why it all happened.” The reason why I deceived you. I almost had it.

Unexpectedly, Yoo Joonghyuk’s lips formed a familiar phrase. “Ways of Survival.”

Kim Dokja felt an inexplicable jolt of terror go down his spine, too sudden to hide. For some reason, hearing those words from Yoo Joonghyuk’s lips felt awful. It was something that should never happen. His heart rate kicked up immediately.

Yoo Joonghyuk also flinched slightly, seemingly at Kim Dokja’s reaction. “What?”

He tried to get a hold of himself. “Nothing, just…Those words—what do they mean?”

“I don’t know. You said them earlier. I thought it was related.”

He had said those words, right after the memory of Yoo Joonghyuk strangling him. Kim Dokja tried to force his body to relax. “I think it is, but I just can’t piece it together yet. Come on, we’re not getting anywhere just staring at the statue. Let’s at least walk around.”

To his surprise, Yoo Joonghyuk acquiesced. After taking a few steps in silence, the panic fluttering in Kim Dokja’s chest began to calm.

Walking around Gwanghwamun Plaza with Yoo Joonghyuk looming at his side was a novel experience. They probably looked as if they were out to sightsee along with the rest of the crowd. This early in the day, though, it was mostly families and retired married couples who were out and about. They did stick out a bit, especially given Yoo Joonghyuk’s habitual glare. Anyone walking in their direction took one look and gave them a wide berth.

“Loosen up a little,” Kim Dokja said, daring to lightly jab Yoo Joonghyuk in the side with his elbow. “You look like you’re out for blood.”

Yoo Joonghyuk looked momentarily deeply offended at being touched, but didn’t attempt to snap Kim Dokja’s arm as he had half-expected. “I don’t.”

“You do. Are you not even aware what your face does? How do you get by day-to-day in your job if you’re always so disagreeable?”

When he said nothing, Kim Dokja continued on the same line of questioning. “Speaking of which—how did you get into pro gaming, anyway? It’s so competitive.”

“I am not sure.”

It was such an odd thing to say that Kim Dokja paused. “You’re not sure how you got your job?”

Yoo Joonghyuk, predictably, clammed up again.

“I can tell you about mine, if you’re curious,” Kim Dokja said. “I already went over all of this with Han Sooyoung—we thought that we might have actually met each other in the past, which could be a reason why we’re having these dreams.”

This seemed to catch Yoo Joonghyuk’s attention. “Did you meet in the past?”

“Honestly, based on where we lived and worked, it seems unlikely. It’s not completely impossible, though.” Just mostly impossible.

They soon reached the far end of the plaza, directly facing the gate itself. Kim Dokja was considering whether they should just turn around and walk the whole plaza again when Yoo Joonghyuk suddenly moved to stand in front of him.

“I don’t want to know about your job,” he said. “I just want you to tell me something. Who are you, really?”

Kim Dokja began to answer, then stopped. Yoo Joonghyuk was staring at him with a look he’d never seen… intense but plainly expectant. Like he was certain whatever came out of Kim Dokja’s mouth next would give him all the answers he was looking for.

Why on earth would he be giving Kim Dokja a look like that? Even in the dreams, he and Yoo Joonghyuk treated each other terribly. Unrepentant violence, blatant distrust, wholehearted deception.

And outside the dream, faced with that expression, Kim Dokja was struck by the desire to lie. To say he was something more than what he was—maybe that man with the sword and the wings from Han Sooyoung’s dreams, someone whose only goal was to protect those around him. Someone who could do something useful. He’d seen glimpses of that man, too.

But even in dreams, that person was a façade.

Kim Dokja slumped, unable to meet that gaze. “I’m not anyone, Yoo Joonghyuk. I’m not whatever it is you’re looking for.”

They had been fighting.

The sword’s hilt in his grip was damp with blood. They fought with everything they had, pouring all their pain, confusion and feelings of betrayal into the simple brutality of an all-out fight. The emotions tearing through Kim Dokja were so intense he could hardly separate them from one another. Grief, anger, desperation, something like a helpless love…

They were both injured severely. Yoo Joonghyuk was reaching for his sword—he had dropped it when Kim Dokja struck him down. Kim Dokja, though, was standing still.

“…Hey, Yoo Joonghyuk. You probably know this already, but I'm not a prophet. No, I am as far removed from such a being as you can get.”

“I'm not the 'Demon King of Salvation'. I'm also not the 'King of a Kingless World'.”

A painful stillness. It felt like the world itself might be coming to a close. His dream self’s words felt so weak and colourless, but necessary—These words that Kim Dokja didn’t understand were deeply meaningful to his dream self.

“My name is Kim Dokja. Twenty-eight… No, wait. I was twenty-eight, and I was an employee of a game company. My hobby was reading web novels… It's pathetic, right?”

No answer from Yoo Joonghyuk.

“Well, this is who I am… Yoo Joonghyuk, who are you?”

When Yoo Joonghyuk finally spoke, it came like a revelation.

“I am Yoo Joonghyuk.”

The blade moved to cut him down.

“Yoo Joonghyuk, a former Regressor.”

Kim Dokja staggered back into reality, still choking on the pain of that final attack. Registering Yoo Joonghyuk directly in front of him, he flinched away—but Yoo Joonghyuk kept his distance. There was a look in his eyes as if he were far, far away.

“Why are all the ones with you and me like that,” Kim Dokja finally said weakly, coughing at the lingering sensation of the wounds. The pain was gone, but the locations of the injuries still tingled. His headache returned with a vengeance.

“I don’t know.” Yoo Joonghyuk stared down at his hands, looking mildly confused. “… Sorry.”

That sent Kim Dokja into another coughing fit. When he finally recovered, he managed, “absolutely don’t apologize. That is the most out of character thing I’ve ever heard in my life. I’ll say I deserved it, just don’t talk like that.”

“What could you know of my character?” Yoo Joonghyuk asked, voice low.

Something deep inside him flinched. “Nothing, I… it just sounded weird, all right?”

“Regressor,” Yoo Joonghyuk said. “What does that term mean?”

Kim Dokja stared at him. Something stirred in the back of his mind, but all he gathered from it was a sense of rightness. Yoo Joonghyuk, the regressor. The terms followed after one another. It meant something. “I wish I could tell you.”

“Hm.” Yoo Joonghyuk seemed to scrutinize him. “You said you aren’t who I’m looking for—Then who is? Where is that person? Can you tell me the meaning of ‘Demon King of Salvation’?”

“How should I know any of that, either?” Kim Dokja snapped, one too many times beat to hell by this person to keep a cool affect. “Who are you looking for exactly? Maybe I can help if you tell me something instead of acting like I’ll just know it.”

“I thought you might know,” Yoo Joonghyuk said in a way that bordered on another apology. “All I know is that there is someone I need to find. To meet. But the details…”

“Did you think I was that person?” Kim Dokja asked, smiling faintly. “I don’t think you really want to meet someone like me. I think we’ve seen how that goes down.”

Yoo Joonghyuk just gazed back at him.

“You know who I am, more or less,” Kim Dokja sighed. “So, then, who are you in the real world, Yoo Joonghyuk? Why are you so determined to find this mysterious person you can’t remember? I suppose that’s also because of the dreams?”

Yoo Joonghyuk’s eyebrow twitched. “I don’t know.”

“You can’t keep saying you don’t know to basic questions like ‘who are you’ and ‘how did you get your job’.”

“I don’t,” he said, crossing his arms. “I can’t explain it, but much my life feels like… a blur. Something I can’t think about in specifics.”

“What, you have amnesia?” Kim Dokja demanded. He’d been joking, but Yoo Joonghyuk neither seemed amused nor rose to the bait. Huh. He wasn’t kidding around—he really didn’t remember. “Then, like Han Sooyoung and I did, we should go over your history. Where you lived, worked, went to school. If there are any commonalities…”

Yoo Joonghyuk shook his head in a very minute side-to-side motion.

“You can’t even tell me that much?” Kim Dokja asked weakly.

“The dreams,” Yoo Joonghyuk said. “They are much stronger in my mind than any real memories of mine. I wonder if they are beginning to take over.”

It was the first time that Kim Dokja had considered that the dreams could be actively harmful rather than just disconcerting. For some reason, he thought back to the spectre in his bathroom mirror and shuddered.

He had frantically scrubbed off the bloody words written on the glass with hand soap. Unlike the monster, they had been very real.

“It’s okay,” Kim Dokja found himself saying. “We’ll figure it out. I just need that final piece I’m missing.”

“Ways of Survival,” Yoo Joonghyuk said again, softly under his breath. Though neither of them knew what those words meant, Kim Dokja felt another knot of dread twist in his stomach.

“It will explain everything,” Kim Dokja said, feigning a confidence he did not feel. Yoo Joonghyuk looked at him blankly for another moment, then started back to walk the plaza in the other direction.

Though they strolled around for some time, Kim Dokja attempting to make idle conversation on the way, they could generate no more flashes of memory nor gain any further understanding of what they knew already.

Eventually, they parted ways with Kim Dokja managing to wring a grunt of acknowledgement from Yoo Joonghyuk to check the group chat. As he headed back to the subway, Kim Dokja went to open up the chat himself to drop in a description of the dream the two of them had just triggered.

Before he could, his phone buzzed with a text from an unknown number. Expecting spam, he was startled when the banner lit up with a short message:

Forget or you will die.

Fighting off a cold shiver of dread, Kim Dokja deleted the message and blocked the number.

***

That night, a black confusion of night terrors came to meet him. The scenes and images were so hopelessly jumbled that prising any meaning from them was impossible.

In the brief periods when he woke up tossing and turning, half-strangled by his sheets, he acknowledged to himself that whatever this was, it was getting worse. Had the dreams always been this painful? It was just death after injury after horror. A wall of pages devouring someone he loved. A wall of pages devouring him.

Throughout the confusion of scenes, scattered like lampposts, he glimpsed the faces of Han Sooyoung and Yoo Joonghyuk. Sometimes calm, sometimes bloody, sometimes angry or dismayed. He would reach for them and they would scatter into nothing every time. In the dream he knew it well: he could never meet them again.

***

They decided to meet up again at a small park that was within reasonable distance of all three of them.

Kim Dokja was not initially sure where the others would be waiting, but it turned out that they were difficult to miss. The argument those two were having was carrying so clearly through the air he could use it like a homing beacon.

“You won't eat at any restaurant? Really?”

“I fail to see how my eating habits concern you so much.”

“It's just a crazy thing to say! What, you think that someone is going to poison you? You really make all your own food yourself?”

“Get that out of my face.”

… Actually, the more he heard of this, the less he wanted to walk over there and openly associate himself with them. Unluckily for him, Han Sooyoung spotted his approach. She was seated on one side of a bench while Yoo Joonghyuk was on the complete opposite, and she appeared to be menacing him with some sort of gimmicky street food in a cone.

“Hey! Kim Dokja!”

He made his way over, accepting his fate. “You two are talking so loudly I can hear you clear across the park.”

In response, she shoved the cone at him. “I brought this as a peace offering but he won't even look at it. You take it.”

He looked suspiciously down at an item he could only describe as “fried”—whether it had once been animal, vegetable, or grain remained a mystery. “Where did you even get this...?”

Han Sooyoung jabbed a thumb at the park footpath behind her. “There are street vendors the way I came, and I skipped lunch to be here, you're welcome.”

Kim Dokja took the cone and sampled one of the mysterious objects inside. Though overly greasy, it was actually pretty good. Sweet potato?

Realizing they were both watching him, he said, “It's terrible. Yoo Joonghyuk was right, is it poisoned?”

“You are such a liar,” Han Sooyoung snapped when he blatantly kept eating. “Hey, give that back, I didn't say you could just eat all of them.”

“You told me to take it...”

They momentarily wrestled with the cone until Han Sooyoung managed to get it back by kicking Kim Dokja in the knee.

“Are you a toddler?” he complained, rubbing his knee as he sat in between the two of them on the bench. He was absolutely certain this situation should have been awkward, but he felt weirdly at ease—more so than he had in a long time. He’d dreamed he would never see them again, but that was obviously wrong. “I didn't come here to get attacked.”

“Then don't steal my food, bastard.”

“Okay, okay.”

Kim Dokja shifted to look at Yoo Joonghyuk, who he found was staring back at him with slightly narrowed eyes. “Uh... what?”

“You're sick.”

“... No, I'm not? I feel fine.”

“You do look weirdly pale,” Han Sooyoung commented, glancing at her snack. “... You better not have gotten your germs on these.”

“I'm not sick,” he repeated. “It's just been difficult to sleep lately. I'm sure you two can relate.”

“I sleep fine,” Han Sooyoung said with a shrug. “If you're talking about the dreams, it's not like they keep me up at night.”

“Lucky you. Mine have been... well, not very conducive to sleeping.”

“Explain it,” Yoo Joonghyuk demanded.

Kim Dokja would normally have had an excuse ready, but unfortunately, they had met for the express reason of discussing dreams, so there was little hope of escaping the conversation. “To be honest, I don't know if I can. They've been getting so jumbled up lately. Do you two feel like... maybe there is a person who is responsible for this?”

“What makes you say that?” Han Sooyoung asked, mouth full of sweet potatoes.

“I think…” I think I’m going crazy. “Nothing, it’s just a thought.”

“Not a very useful one,” Han Sooyoung said. “I’ll tell you about a dream I had lately. Again, it was about the tiny people…”

For awhile, they went back and forth exchanging stories. They was always vague—then I think there was a giant snake?—but surprisingly, someone else often had a missing piece that fit in. Yamata no Orochi, the mythical Japanese beast.

Oh, I do remember now… Why the hell did we both dream about that…?

Han Sooyoung tended to weave the recollections into vibrant scenes, plainly filling in the blanks of what she didn’t remember until it began to sound like a coherent story. Yoo Joonghyuk, on the other hand, recalled scenes in tiny, confused fragments, which didn’t always match up with the others.

As for Kim Dokja’s part, he was finding it difficult to remember anything at all in clarity. The harder he thought about the dreams, the deeper the lingering headache from his sleepless night dug into his temple.

Even so, he didn’t want to stop. They had to be getting close to answers. Besides, Yoo Joonghyuk was suffering from some kind of actual amnesia. It wasn’t like a headache was a big deal in comparison.

They just had to push through. They just had to find that final missing piece, no matter the cost. That was what he…

“You were late.”

“Shut the hell up.”

They were facing the end of everything, scattered with wounds overlooking an incredible battlefield. The fight was too overwhelming to even track—everywhere, gods and beings of impossible strength clashed, shapes and movements inexplicable to the human eye.

It was the end, but they had come here to reach that end together. Kim Dokja’s wings were spread, hovering over the shoulders of those two people beside him.

Han Sooyoung spoke: “… I can’t figure out why, but it feels like it’s been a really long time.”

Whatever they were doing was inconceivably dangerous. They walked on a knife’s edge.

Even so, they had come to that place together. Inexplicably, it kind of felt like… Kim Dokja was home.

From outside of the dream, Kim Dokja greedily reached out for that feeling. Suddenly, he didn’t care at all whatever stuff his dream self had gotten up to. Whether he had deceived others, whether he’d killed. That feeling of being home—he needed more of that. He needed to understand that.

That's right, those two people under his wings, pulled as close as he would let himself pull them. The protagonist of a novel. A writer who plagiarized it.

That novel, the thing that connected them: Three ways to survive a ruined world.

The dream burst like a bubble, and Kim Dokja was hit by a wall of pain.

It seemed to squeeze his lungs flat, sending him into a violent coughing fit. It almost felt like his body was trying to bring something up, but the wracking coughs were weak and dry. For few moments, he thought his head would split open.

When he managed to recover, pulling in a couple of long breaths, he registered that Han Sooyoung and Yoo Joonghyuk were both in his face. A sense of urgency had followed him from the dream, but… what had it been about again?

No, damn it. He’d understood. For one second, he had had it.

“What's wrong with you?” Han Sooyoung demanded.

 “… I don’t know… lately, these dreams…” He hacked a few more times into his elbow, starting to get dizzy. If he could only stop and think for a few seconds without the pain, he was sure he’d remember again.

“The dreams are causing it,” Yoo Joonghyuk said in a tone that may or may not have made it a question.

“I think so,” Kim Dokja admitted. Blessedly, the pressure began to ease off his chest.

“Why the fuck didn’t you say so sooner?” Han Sooyoung demanded.

“How could I be certain?” he pointed out. “Does it make sense, dreams making you sick?”

Yoo Joonghyuk frowned. “You are bleeding.”

Confused, Kim Dokja lifted a hand to his face. It seemed he was also getting a nosebleed. “Oh. I… what memory did we trigger just now? I think remembered something important.”

“▪▪ ▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪…” Han Sooyoung said something, but her words didn’t make sense, as if spoken in a foreign language. Suddenly unsure of whether he was dreaming or awake, Kim Dokja stared at the meaningless movements of her mouth.

To Kim Dokja's utter surprise, Yoo Joonghyuk reached out and touched his forehead. The cool skin of his palm was surprisingly grounding before he quickly withdrew. “You do seem sick. You should go home.”

“I feel okay,” Kim Dokja insisted. He really did feel fine—almost floaty. “Han Sooyoung, did you just explain to me about the dream? I didn’t understand what you said.”

Yoo Joonghyuk and Han Sooyoung exchanged a look. A few minutes later, they were escorting him to the subway station to take him home.

It was kind of funny. He could go home himself if he wanted to; their concern was unfounded. They had been having a pretty nice time in the park, right? Why leave so soon? Why keep worrying about the dreams at all? He had dreamed that he would never see them again and that had been wrong, so how could it matter?

As the they sat down on the subway, Kim Dokja sandwiched between the other two, his good mood started to fray. Something about the smooth movement of the subway and the flickering shapes seen through the windows was putting him edge.

… Am I supposed to be here? He felt the need to take out his phone and look at something. In the end, he only ended up staring at the black screen reflecting his own face.

Before long, the stop closest to his apartment began to approach. Han Sooyoung shot Kim Dokja a look.

“… Whatever is going on here, we should be careful about it,” she said. “We should try not to trigger anything else just yet.”

“I'll see them again tonight, anyway,” Kim Dokja pointed out. “Or when I start daydreaming at work.”

“Can you still not remember it?” Yoo Joonghyuk asked. “The last piece of information you needed. The answer.”

Kim Dokja stared at him. Words formed in his mouth that he didn’t fully understand. “… I think it’s something we are not supposed to know about.”

When Han Sooyoung said, “According to who?”, Kim Dokja was left speechless. He felt another tickle in his lungs.

The subway pulled into Kim Dokja’s stop and the doors slid open. Rather than just turning him loose, Yoo Joonghyuk and Han Sooyoung stood up, evidently intending to drag him right up to his front door.

Kim Dokja's vision doubled.

He recalled the last time that he had seen those two—really seen them, in person.

It had been a subway car just like this one. Yoo Joonghyuk and Han Sooyoung stood to leave with Kim Dokja between them, one of his hands on each of their backs.

They had glanced back, as if looking for something they had forgotten, but had not seen it. They had not seen him, or half of him anyway, letting them leave him behind.

Good. That meant they could live happily. He told himself that this was exactly what he wanted…

For nobody to turn back and look at him ever again.

The scene evaporated. Kim Dokja doubled over in his seat, coughing again. When in real life, Yoo Joonghyuk and Han Sooyoung turned back towards him, it felt like such a fundamental impossibility that he could no longer understand anything.

“What was that?” Han Sooyoung hissed. Evidently, she had also seen that memory. “Kim Dokja, what the hell did you do?”

Kim Dokja looked at them, caught between intense feelings of horror and relief. “You're not supposed to turn back.”

No, not just that—none of them were supposed to be here. This entire world, with all of them living their sad, normal, lonely lives, shouldn’t exist. For them to be here made no sense.

His heart started pounding.

The “dreams” had always been real. It was this life that wasn’t real.

Kim Dokja stood and pushed past Han Sooyoung, staggering for the bright white square of the subway door.

He half-expected there to be nothing outside, but it was just the usual station. People gave him odd looks as he hurried past, but their shapes seem to shift and writhe in the brief darkness of his eyeblinks, the human silhouettes twisting into something incomprehensible.

It was the same station where he always disembarked, so he knew the way out by pure muscle memory. The sunlight, when it finally hit his skin, felt colorless and harsh.

His body was still wracked with coughs, so he could only get so far before he had to brace himself against a wall.

“Hey!” he dimly registered that someone was yelling at him. “You idiot, stop running!”

The coughs had grown deep and suffocating, like whatever was lodged deep inside had finally started to come loose. For a while, he could only try to drag in enough breath in between them to keep from passing out.

After what felt like an eternity, it finally petered out. He had doubled over on the ground. Shakily, he removed his face from where it had been buried in his elbow.

With a shock, he saw a scattering of what looked like small, glowing fragments covering his sleeve. Some were bunched in his elbow, but others floated through the air—when one of the bright shards brushed his hand, a sentence seemed to reverberate inside his head.

⸢The world that couldn’t be lived in, unless one read it. ⸥

He knew what these were called.

The air was filled with story fragments. He’d coughed some of them up, but others seemed to be peeling off his body even now, hovering white and gleaming in the air like a gentle snowfall. When he looked to the storefront window he’d collapsed against, he saw his dark reflection huddled at the locus of the storm.

No, it wasn’t his reflection after all. The dark wings, the horns. It was that monster he’d seen in his bathroom mirror.

Kim Dokja blinked, but unlike the first time, the vision didn’t go away.

Han Sooyoung suddenly burst through the fragments, shooing them away like they were insects. “What the fuck is happening? Why do you look like that?”

Kim Dokja touched his forehead, finding that the horns were very real. “I don’t…”

“You,” said another voice from behind him. Kim Dokja weakly turned to find Yoo Joonghyuk wreathed in the shining fragments as he approached. His expression was blank and unreadable. “You really must be that fool, after all.”

“What are you talking about?” Kim Dokja rasped. Something clawed desperately at the back of his mind, desperate to be let out. Something else pushed it back down with equal desperation. “Who am I exactly? And who are you?”

It all twisted up in his head. The Regressor, Yoo Joonghyuk. A plagiarist writer with black flames in her grip. Ways of Survival.

Don’t remember.

But he had to remember. What else did he have left?

With the fragments filling the air, still scattering from his body, their surroundings had become foggy and indistinct. The three of them stood on a tiny concrete island in an infinite field of white. Kim Dokja steadied himself on the storefront window and climbed back to his feet.

“Are you not the one who caused this?” Yoo Joonghyuk asked. “You tell me the answer to those questions.”

All he could glean from the confusion of his memories was a sense of something like despair. A boundless loneliness. “I… I really don’t know.”

Instinctively, Kim Dokja dug out his phone. If he could just read that novel again, all of this would start to make sense. He could understand himself, the world, and why he was in it. But… he didn’t have Ways of Survival here. Wherever here was.

The sheets of fragments in the air became thicker still. Nothing of the city street could be seen, as if the fragments were whisking everything away, devouring the bricks and the concrete and the people who had been walking there. His body felt light and unmoored.

“Fuck.” Han Sooyoung’s hand darted to her head. The fragments she had been shooing away were collecting on her shoulders in a layer of white. Her expression, confused at first, suddenly sharpened. “What… the hell are we doing here?”

She reached out a shaking hand toward Kim Dokja. When she reached his shoulder, her hand passed right through, as if he was nothing more than a shadow cast on the ground.

Something else lit in her eyes: Recognition, fear. “Wait. Kim Dokja.”

He felt something on his cheek. When he lifted a hand to his face, he was surprised to find tears seemed to be flowing from his eyes, completely involuntary. “Oh. This is…”

“Stop,” Yoo Joonghyuk said, his voice tight. His hand also passed uselessly through Kim Dokja’s dissolving forearm as he drew near. “Don’t leave.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. He hesitantly reached out, his hand phasing through Yoo Joonghyuk’s. “It’ll always end the way it always has. I think… It was this place that was the dream.”

Kim Dokja’s phone buzzed. When he looked down, a message from an unknown number appeared on the screen. Even as he read the words, the phone slipped out of his hands and vanished, claimed by the fragments.

You’re not the one dreaming, the message read. I am.

With that, the reality they were all clinging to finally broke apart.

Chapter Text

“Why don’t we do everything over?”

“What?” Dokja said.

Sooyoung, hanging off a tree branch with several leaves already stuck in her school uniform, glared at him with all the fury contained within the vessel of her thirteen-year-old body. “I said, I’m doing everything over, and I don’t care what you say.”

“That isn’t what you said the first time.”

“Yeah, it is.” She threw a stick at him, then dropped down to sit beside him. Clambering around like a monkey apparently helped her think. “I decided that the whole idea is actually annoying. It would basically be writing the same story again and again for the entire novel.”

Dokja shrugged, busy plucking pieces of grass in his fingers. “I thought it was cool.”

“That’s only because I let you pick all the powers. I’ll let you pick some powers for my new story, too.” She turned her notebook towards him, where a long list of notes was already forming. “I have all the main characters already.”

Dokja considered whether he was particularly attached to their old project or not. “I guess it’s okay if you want to do a new one.”

“Of course it is, I’m the one who writes it.”

“I’m the one who comes up with the powers,” Dokja countered, realizing even as he said it that, admittedly, coming up with powers was a far less impressive job.

“And draws the charts,” Sooyoung said automatically.

“And the charts,” Dokja repeated. “I suppose if I didn’t draw those, you would forget all of the weapons and skills you already wrote.”

“No, I wouldn’t. I remember them all.”

“Except when you completely forgot you gave Joonhyun a level 5 sword in chapter two, then had him leave it behind for a level 3 sword in chapter seven...”

“That’s because Joonhyun and his sword are both stupid!” Sooyoung declared. “My new idea is way better. And it has a dragon in it. So, the characters are...”

Dokja and Sooyoung were friends, despite an apparent lack of having much in common, because they were both losers with zero other options. The previous year, they had managed, as complete strangers, to get in an animated argument in a bookstore. It had gotten heated enough that they had been asked to leave.

For some reason, Sooyoung had decided that this encounter meant that they were friends. Dokja nominally fought back against this, but secretly didn’t mind that much.

Mostly they talked about books, especially whatever story Sooyoung was trying to write. Even a year later, she had never actually finished any of her projects—but that was fine. Most of the fun came from talking about it and passing chapters back and forth anyway.

“How do you get all these ideas, anyway?” he asked once he had heard the whole spiel for her new book. As usual it was a winding, overcomplicated action story with an unwieldy cast of characters and an opaque plot structure—though in terms of characters and premise, it was very different from her last story.

Sooyoung paused. “I don’t know. I just daydream about stuff during the day and come up with scenes I want to write. Then I think about how they might fit together in an interesting way.”

“Oh,” he said, as if he understood. Dokja himself didn’t have much of a generative creative impulse—he loved digging into and theorizing about a good story, but never seemed to be able to invent ideas from scratch. “You know, I had a funny dream the other night that you actually plagiarized all your writing.”

“What?” Sooyoung demanded, clearly genuinely offended. “As if I would ever plagiarize something! I don’t need to steal anyone else’s crappy ideas. Mine are already great.”

“You were mad in the dream, too,” Dokja mused. “Actually, it was weird. We were both adults. There was something crazy going on in the background... all kinds of buildings were destroyed, it was like it was the apocalypse or something.”

“So, the world was destroyed and instead of finding a way to survive, you decided to harass me and call me a plagiarist?”

Dokja paused to clear a tickle from his throat, then shrugged. “I really thought it was true for some reason. Just out of curiosity, are you a plagiarist?”

“I’m not! You are such a moron.” She threw an empty plastic drink can at his head while he tried not to smile. “Why do I even care about this stupid dream, anyway?”

“I don’t know. I don’t usually have dreams that feel that real.” He was struck by a sudden uncanny feeling, looking at his friend sitting there in the grass and sunlight. A sense of mismatch. “It almost felt more real than actual, real life does. Do you ever have dreams like that?”

“Stop,” she said, holding up a hand in front of his face. “I don’t want to hear it.”

“Why are you so miserable all the time?” he complained, attempting to lower the hand out of his face, an attempt she furiously resisted. “Really, sometimes these dreams...”

“I don’t care about your dreams,” she declared. “Is there anything in the world more boring than listening to other people describe dreams? Talk about something more interesting.”

“I will if you get your gross hand out of my face.”

“It’s not gross, you’re gross.”

Not too long after that, when ▪ ▪ happened—

When Kim Dokja moved away to live with family, he and Han Sooyoung lost touch. He never got to see anything of the new story—not until years later, when a familiar face tracked him down on social media and sent him a preorder link for a novel.

He went and checked it. The synopsis described a long-winded adventure story with an expansive cast, including a dragon, published by a surprisingly respectable imprint.

He replied to the DM. I think this is plagiarized from someone I knew when we were kids.

The reply came promptly: I am not a fucking plagiarist!

After a few minutes, an additional message appeared.

Han Sooyoung

For the record, this story has nothing to do with you. I made it completely on my own and only for myself. But you can read it if you want.

He did read it, pretty voraciously. It was a compelling enough read that he found himself really wanting to talk to Han Sooyoung about it. That got them chatting, and somewhere in their conversation they decided to meet up and see each other in person.

It had been years; they were both young adults now. Kim Dokja was shocked to see Han Sooyoung looking so similar to the aged-up version of her that he had seen in those silly apocalypse dreams he used to have. His subconscious had been weirdly accurate, right down to the way her sharp eyes had settled into her grown-up features.

Actually, she was shockingly good looking. It brought him up short for a second. For the first time, he felt an inkling of self-consciousness in seeing her again after so long.

When she saw him approaching, though, she just raised an eyebrow—like nothing had changed at all. “Well? Tell me your review of the ending, then.”

“Too easy,” he said immediately, glad to lapse back into a familiar conversation topic. “Happy endings are a bit overdone, you know. If the groundwork isn’t properly laid, it ends up feeling cheap.”

“There was plenty of groundwork!”

“It wasn’t perfectly believable, though. I felt like the probability of some events was—”

“Probability! Who cares!” she scoffed and complained, though couldn’t seem to fight off a smile. “You never change, do you, Kim Dokja.”

At first, it felt a little awkward to just have a normal outing together as adults, eating a meal and trying to make conversation.

As the night went on, though, he stopped worrying about awkwardness. They always had books to fall back on as an easy discussion point, a topic about which they always had a lot to say. Their discussion wandered naturally from that point. Speaking with Han Sooyoung was surprisingly easy—easy in a way that Kim Dokja had never found conversation to be with anyone.

… Even if half of those conversations ended with bickering.

Now that they were adults, they were different people entirely, essentially strangers to each other. Even so, they still clicked on some level.

After leaving the restaurant, they lingered on a raised walkway nearby. Kim Dokja’s single drink had left the pleasant buzz of alcohol in his stomach, though he wasn’t drunk—It was just enough to make him feel unusually warm. The city lights were spread out in front of them like a field of stars.

Han Sooyoung said, “So, you really didn’t like the ending, huh?”

“This again?” Kim Dokja asked, leaning on the handrail beside her. “It’s not bad. I think it’s just not the type of ending I personally understand.”

She laughed, and it came out sounding surprisingly bitter. “I knew you’d say something like that. You’ll only accept a happy ending if it’s reached through some kind of horrible sacrifice. To be honest, I just felt like writing a simpler ending for once. It wasn’t for you.”

“Why would it be for me?” He smiled. “Even when we were kids, you only ever wrote what you wanted to write.”

“You’re right,” she said. Her eyes flashed, something unreadable in her face. “I did.”

For a while, they stared out at the city in companionable silence.

“I’m going to attend university,” she said abruptly. “I’ll keep writing, but I want to branch out and learn some other stuff, too.”

“Oh,” he said. “I’ll be leaving soon for my military service.”

“Hm. Guess it would be a while before we could meet up again.”

“You want to meet up again?”

She turned her face away, scoffing. “I… might just need to run my next book by you when I have the draft finished, that’s all. So don’t forget about me or anything.”

“You could always email it to me.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe. Hey, can I ask you a weird question?”

“... Sure?”

“Are you happy?”

He stared at her, silhouetted there like a black cutout against the city lights. “Am I... happy? In what way?”

She waved a hand. “Generally. Is this life okay?”

He thought it over for a bit. “I’m not happy. I’m not sad, either. It feels... I don’t know. Like I exist, but I’m not sure why.”

As she looked back at him silently, he realized what a strange thing that was to say out loud. “Never mind, I’m just messing with you. Of course, I’m happy.”

“You’re a liar,” she sighed.

“I learned from the best.”

“So, you admit you always learned from me even though you are older. I was right to never use honorifics...”

“When did I say that?”

They argued back and forth for a bit about nothing. It was clearly about time for them to head their separate ways, but Kim Dokja found himself reluctant to be the first to say so.

Han Sooyoung suddenly turned. “Hey, walk me to the subway station.”

“You’re capable of walking yourself,” Kim Dokja said automatically, though fell into step with her anyway.

There were probably more efficient ways to get from the restaurant to the nearest subway station, but Han Sooyoung seemed intent on skirting around a nearby park. Kim Dokja began to feel less like he was walking her anywhere and more like he was just following her random whims.

This became even more obvious when she suddenly paused next to a park footpath. “Hey, do you hear that?”

Kim Dokja tilted his head. A faint string melody was carrying through the trees, almost impossible to make out. “… I do. What is that?”

When he turned back to look at Han Sooyoung, she had already taken a sharp left onto the footpath. After a moment’s surprised delay, he hurried after her.

“Hey, where are you going?”

She could move surprisingly fast for someone with such short legs. By the time he caught up, she had come to a stop at a break in the trees, looking down a sloping hill towards another area of the park.

Just as he approached, he heard the music start up in full clarity: melody, countermelody, and bassline weaving together in a powerful swell of sound.

It looked like, down at the bottom of that hill, a small seven-person orchestra was having an outdoor performance. They played from a covered gazebo to a huddled audience, mostly seen by the scattered lights of their phones. String lights had been drawn across the gazebo roof, casting the scene in a starry haze.

The quality of the music, echoing up the hill towards them, was almost otherworldly. Though far away from the audience seating, their present vantage point overlooking the gazebo might have been the best possible place to listen.

“Huh,” Kim Doka said. His voice sounded unpleasantly grating against the music. “I guess there’s an outdoor concert here. Did you know about it?”

“I didn’t,” Han Sooyoung insisted, shooting him a look. “… I just recognized the opening notes of the song. It’s one of my favorites.”

“Oh.”

Figuring he had better not talk over the rest of the song, Kim Dokja elected to shut up. After a second, Han Sooyoung relaxed, staring down at the performance below with a strange wistfulness in her expression.

Her favorite song… what was it? How was it that Kim Dokja really knew so little about this person? Something about the tune made him think it was an orchestral arrangement of a more contemporary song, but he couldn’t quite place it.

Though they would soon part ways for what could be a long time, he found he was curious. He wanted to ask Han Sooyoung what her favorite song was, and why. What she thought about when she listened to it. How she saw the world behind that unknown look on her face, an expression that looked like she was ready to lose everything.

… And why not? It felt like a strangely impossible thing to want, but really, they had all the time in the world. Even if he went to do his military service and she moved somewhere far-off to study (he hadn’t asked which university, where, or studying which subject…) they could still check in. He could watch his email for the draft of that novel.

As the song began to wind to its conclusion, Kim Dokja opened his mouth to say something. Before he could form the words, his vision doubled.

“By the way, Kim Dokja?”

Fireworks lit up the night sky, bright colors brazen against the starless black. A pair of kids—children he didn’t know and yet still felt a rush of affection for—were cheering. Han Sooyoung was by his side. They had been talking about that book—A scene from it that Han Sooyoung remembered.

“Huh?”

 Han Sooyoung leaned close, disconcertingly close. Kim Dokja went still. Han Sooyoung’s breath brushed his ear as she told him:

“Such a scene doesn’t appear in the third turn of ‘Ways of Survival’.”

Something was wrong. The earth turned on an incorrect axis. Kim Dokja tried to understand, but that phrase—Ways of Survival—was like a wall settling in his mind, blocking him from understanding any more.

He was thrown to the ground, too stunned to resist.

“Hey, you. Just who the hell are you?”

A jumble of confusion, angry words, the desperate voice of Han Sooyoung… and a bright flash of pain at his shoulder.

“The guy who’ll get to read my novel… isn’t you.”

He flinched away and then was suddenly back in the real world, standing on a park footpath beside Han Sooyoung, music echoing up around them. He looked around to try and reorient himself, heart pounding.

What… had he just seen?

He turned to stare at Han Sooyoung. Relaxed and untroubled, she was looking down at the orchestra performance as the final notes of their song petered out. She couldn’t look more different than the version of her, panicked and desperate, that he’d just envisioned.

He swallowed. The details of the vision were already fading, but an off-balance sensation lingered. “Sooyoung, did you…”

“Ssh,” she hissed. A pattering of applause came up from the crowd, followed by the opening notes of a second song. “I want to listen.”

“But I think I just saw—”

“I don’t care what you saw.” She wasn’t looking at him. “Can’t we just stay here for a bit? It’s nice. Only a little cold.”

Seeing her shiver lightly, he unconsciously moved closer. Feeling the cool air of the night and the slight warmth of Han Sooyoung by his side, the incomprehensible vision began to feel less and less real.

… There was no reason for Han Sooyoung to attack him. Whatever it was he had seen… why should it matter? It would be pointless to keep worrying.

It was just a weird daydream. As he reached that conclusion, the vision seemed to lift and fade from his mind entirely.

They ended up sitting down to watch the rest of the performance, using a log as their bench. Quite unexpectedly, Han Sooyoung fully leaned into his side—aiming to steal his body warmth, no doubt—but he let her do it. When his arm settled awkwardly over her shoulder, she didn’t object either.

As the songs wandered on to those they were less familiar with, they talked in low voices under the melody.

Kim Dokja went ahead and asked his questions about Han Sooyoung’s favorite songs. She answered without making it a fight for once. In return, she made fun of him for not really being into music, which she claimed was a sign of having no personality.

They also talked about their plans for the future.

“I want to get everything I can out of this life,” Han Sooyoung said quietly. She was clearly very relaxed and a bit sleepy—it was odd to see her with her guard lowered this far. “You should, too. You’ll only get one chance to live the way you want, you know.”

“I don’t know if there’s anything specific I want out of life,” he admitted.

“You’re stuck in survival mode,” she sighed. “You’ll come up with something you want to do if you can get out of that state.”

“I guess so.” To him, it just felt like Han Sooyoung was a real person with real desires and he was like a weird, sad shadow that had ended up next to her somehow. He was a person who could barely even form his own preferences. Maybe because in the past, those preferences had never mattered.

“Go to a concert or something sometime,” she said. “I’ll send you a playlist. Develop some music opinions or I’ll kick your ass. You can care about stuff other than books if you give it a shot.”

“Okay, okay.”

It felt like hardly any time had passed before the performance was over, the musicians rising and putting away their instruments. The evening silence settled back over the park.

“… Is this how normal people get to know each other?” Han Sooyoung asked abruptly.

Kim Dokja laughed at the absurd question. “What do you mean? Are we not normal people?”

The strange look in her eye that had settled at the first notes of the song seemed to return in full force. “I guess we are. Whatever.”

“Anyway, running away into a random park isn’t normal for anyone.”

“Shut up.” She inched even closer, resting her head on his shoulder. Kim Dokja froze up at first, then relaxed.

Like normal people. It was true that, unlike the type of person called ‘normal’, Kim Dokja had never felt capable of reaching out to others casually. Since the events of his childhood, he had built a thick wall between himself and other people.

Han Sooyoung was also a person who built her walls high—he knew that well, though he couldn’t explain how he knew. Maybe he just recognized it in her; that careful distance she was ready to deploy at a moment’s notice.

They were both like that, so… maybe this was okay.

They stayed there until it had become too late and too cold to justify it any longer.

Later, once they had finally made it to the subway station, Han Sooyoung stood in front of the platform while Kim Dokja hung back. He found himself unsure what to say. Their lives were likely headed in different directions from here, so… What sort of goodbye was appropriate?

While he was overthinking it, the subway train could be heard making its approach. Han Sooyoung had been waiting with her back turned to him, but she abruptly turned around and pulled him in for a hug.

… Huh. He let his arms settle around her, too, surprised at how small and sturdy she felt. She squeezed him back way too hard.

“Kim Dokja,” she said. “Just live your life the way you want to. Live happily. That’s all that matters.”

“…Why does it sound like you’re preparing to see me off forever?” he complained. As they both broke away from the hug, he frowned at her complicated expression. “Send me that draft of your novel. We can keep talking.”

… If you want to. Han Sooyoung had presumably always stuck around him out of what had to be a misplaced sense of pity. So, maybe this was her way of putting it all to an end.

To his surprise, though, she grinned and reached up to annoyingly pinch his cheek. “Yeah, sure, as long as you promise not to be annoyingly critical about it.”

“Don’t you want a beta reader who brings up criticisms? Someone who just reads and delivers pointless compliments isn’t useful at all.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” she admitted as the doors slid open. “Fine. I’ll message you. Argue with me all you want, you annoying bastard.”

She moved onto the subway and the doors closed behind her.

***

It was several years before they saw each other again.

By then, things had changed a lot for both of them. Kim Dokja had been through his military service and several shitty jobs. Han Sooyoung had been all over and had continued with her writing career, becoming pretty famous in certain circles. As Kim Dokja had expected, her talent and ambition had taken her to a much higher place than he was capable of getting in his own life. Despite everything, he had not managed to develop that mysterious skill of wanting things.

They had kept up with each other intermittently via text, but Kim Dokja never suggested that they meet up. Han Sooyoung was busy with her new success, and he doubted she wanted to be bothered by him any more than necessary. In any case, their schedules were challenging to match up.

But to his surprise, one day Han Sooyoung sent him a message out of the blue, completely unattached to any novel chapter or other conversation they’d been having.

Han Sooyoung

Meet up with me.

They managed to work out a time and date, but plans to meet at an outdoor café that Han Sooyoung apparently liked were dashed as the weather gave way to sheets of pouring rain. Kim Dokja found himself hurrying to their meeting spot under an umbrella, trying his best not to step in any puddles.

She was waiting for him in a nearby smoking area, releasing a stream of white vapor through slightly parted lips. The image, for just a moment, stopped him dead—her shadowed against the hazy city lights, face wreathed in smoke.

He approached, tilting his umbrella away as he squeezed in next to her under the awning. “You started smoking?”

She glanced at him with an expression that seemed too world-weary for her face. “Why, does it bother you?”

“Not really. It probably bothers your lungs, though.”

“Everything’s temporary, Kim Dokja,” she sighed, then seemed to shake herself out of her funk. A genuine smile darted across her face. “Hey, you brought an umbrella. That’s convenient. I don’t have one.”

“I think your café plans aren’t going to work,” Kim Dokja observed—across the street, he could see that the café’s limited indoor seating was completely full.

“Ah, who cares,” Han Sooyoung shrugged. “Their coffee really isn’t that good, anyway. We can go look for another place.”

She dropped the cigarette butt into a receptacle and fell in beside him like it was natural. Holding the umbrella above their heads, he could only follow where she wanted to go.

They traced a winding path through the downtown shops and businesses. They passed a few other cafés, but Han Sooyoung apparently had problems with all of them, keeping them out in the rain and the cold.

Kim Dokja complained, though secretly he didn’t mind much. It gave him the time to feel out whether he and Han Sooyoung still got along.

They did; as ever, talking with her was easier than talking with anyone else, even if they bickered. At some point they forgot that they were even looking for a café and just kept walking and talking, catching up over the years they had spent apart.

“I told you years ago to develop music opinions,” Han Sooyoung said.

“… Right. The playlist you sent me back then was fine.”

“Only fine? What’s your favorite song right now?”

Though he didn’t want to betray it, he had actually put a lot of time and effort into coming up with the correct answer to that question. An artist he figured would be within the realm of Han Sooyoung’s taste, but just out of left field enough to make it seem interesting.

On hearing the song’s name, she sighed, somehow intuiting his reasoning. “It’s not like studying for a test, you weirdo. Just genuinely love something and don’t apologize for it.”

It felt like there was only one thing in the world that he loved like that—but when he reached for it, he came up empty.

They ended up the only ones traversing an elevated road that looked down on the foggy, rain-choked Yongsan. The wind picked up significantly at the higher altitude—so much so that, in a moment of clumsiness, Kim Dokja’s grip slipped off the umbrella.

He could only watch dumbly as it tumbled out of his hands, straight over the handrail, and down the side of the steep incline.

The rain hit instantly, soaking their hair and shoulders. He and Han Sooyoung looked at each other in silent dismay, but a second later, Han Sooyoung started to laugh.

“What the hell is wrong with us,” she gasped, gripping his elbow for support. “Fuck! This is so stupid. Is this our idea of a date?”

That startled him so much that he almost forgot about the umbrella. “Is that what this is?”

“Kim Dokja, you are genuinely the most stupid person I know,” Han Sooyoung declared, glaring up at him through the streaks of rainwater. “Would you like it to be a date?”

Somehow, every word of that sentence sounded like a trap. “I… don’t know?”

“That’s the wrong answer,” she sighed, leaning on the handrail and looking out at the city as if she weren’t growing more rained-on by the second. “Why don’t you know?”

“Why?” he repeated. Something clawed up from the back of his memory, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. “It doesn’t… We’re not supposed to date, are we?”

“Of course not,” she snapped. “Would it be that easy? If we were ordinary people, wouldn’t we just walk on past each other and never think about the other person again? Wouldn’t there be absolutely nothing between us at all?”

“I don’t really know what you’re talking about, Han Sooyoung.”

“You do, somewhere in there, you idiot.”

“I…” he cleared his throat. “I agreed to meet up because I wanted to see you again. To talk to you.”

She stared back at him with a blank expression. “What did you want to say to me?”

He opened and closed his mouth. Suddenly, her stare felt horribly revealing, like she could see down to the gross core of him and wasn’t very impressed with what she saw.

Even so, he suddenly knew he had to say it. “Even if it’s not supposed to happen, I wouldn’t mind that much if it were a date. As long as you—”

She pulled him down into the kiss by the lapels. He was so shocked that he barely felt it, only registering the gentle press of her lips against his own once she pulled away.

“Then what if it happened like this?” she asked, voice barely above a whisper.

He stared at the rainwater streaming over her face, feeling so close to understanding.

“Kim Dokja,” she said, sounding pained. “Humor me. You want to know, too—it’s why you’re here. So what if this did happen?”

Though the details remained maddeningly out of reach, something in the depths of his mind finally woke up.

This life, this existence… Growing up with Han Sooyoung, exchanging chapters and conversations with her over text… as she had said, it was “temporary”. This night was going to end very soon, and there would not be another like it.

If he turned and left this moment behind, he would have no other opportunity in the universe to know what he and Han Sooyoung could be in this world.

Even knowing that, he felt clumsy and unwelcome when he reached out to tip Han Sooyoung’s face back towards his. If it wasn’t really real, there was no reason to feel so apprehensive, but even so...

“What,” she said. “You’ll chicken out even at this point, when we’re clearly both only here because we wanted to see what would happen? Are you really that stupid? Am I really that stupid for—?”

He kissed her again. When he touched her, there was an emotion that welled up in him, separate from any memory he could grasp. It was agonizing. It felt as if he had been missing her for longer than he had been alive.

The second kiss lingered before Han Sooyoung pulled away, grinning. “Kissing me so boldly out in public, do you think this is a romance movie or something? That’s embarrassing. Come back to my place.”

“... You kissed me first.” The street was abandoned in the rain, anyway. In the sudden absence of her body against his, he felt suddenly cold.

“I was more sophisticated about it.” She took his hand in a slender but strong grip. “Come on.”

It was like something that had been holding him back all his life suddenly snapped. The future, strange visions of an unreal past, all the things struggling for freedom in the back his head that he didn’t understand—none of it mattered. He didn’t have to care about anything outside of the present moment.

It was still raining hard, so the way to Han Sooyoung’s apartment was not smooth going. Without the umbrella, they ducked under awnings and dashed through open areas. At one point a car splashed through a puddle right beside them, making Han Sooyoung shriek with fury. Staring at each other like a pair of drowned rats in the aftermath, they started laughing like kids.

Han Sooyoung tugged him by the hand with increasing urgency until they finally made it through the gauntlet to her apartment. No sooner had she thrown open the door than she was kissing him again, rainwater still dripping down their faces.

Up until this point, Kim Dokja’s fumbling attempts at intimacy had always been awkward and distant. He had never really wanted to be close to another person like this, had never felt that sort of connective spark—had tried it out with others almost with a sense of obligation, soon fizzling out.

Whatever energy was building between him and Han Sooyoung now was completely different. The strength of it was a bit blindsiding, but there wasn’t any space to overthink. Han Sooyoung was right there, pulling him along, nipping at his lower lip.

He somehow regained enough mental faculty to pull away, trying to wriggle out of his coat. “Slow down. We’re soaked. There’s a puddle on your floor.”

“Who cares about the fucking floor!” she snapped, though used the free moment to peel off her own jacket. Her shirt was damp underneath, plastered quite revealingly to her front. “None of this matters! You realize that, right?”

“Nothing matters,” he agreed.

He wasn’t sure who closed the distance next, but it was Han Sooyoung who broke away, pressing a hand to the center of his chest. “Ugh, why are you so wet?”

“I was closer to the car when it splashed us.”

“Gross.” She fumbled at the buttons. “Take it off.”

He had to laugh, even as his cold skin tingled at the brush of her fingertips. “You are really the worst?”

“Then turn around and leave, if you hate it so much,” she said, pausing to begin unbuttoning her own drenched shirt. “Or don’t you want to stay?”

In the world that shouldn’t exist, they pulled each other as close as they could, making light of what had once felt like an impossible distance separating them. They were still uncomfortably damp from the rain, but the cold skin and the awkward catch of friction made it feel so much more real—whether it ‘mattered’ or not, whether it was supposed to happen or not, the feeling was undeniably real.

Kim Dokja’s heart ached with loneliness even as he kissed her, even as they undressed, even as they touched each other. Not fully knowing what to do, he was grateful when she took the lead, which ended up with her pushing him onto her bed.

He wanted to ask, are we really doing this right now? but didn’t want to stop long enough to pose the question. Both of them seemed intent on practically crawling into the other’s skin, like they’d both lived a hundred years apart untouched and unloved.

Nothing could fully satisfy that desperation, but they made do.

Maybe unsurprisingly, she managed to be a selfish lover, focused on using Kim Dokja’s body for her own pleasure. He’d be lying if he said he didn’t actually find that kind of hot, though before long they were both frantically moving together.

Discontent with his increasing pace, though, she pushed him back down onto the mattress. “Slow down. Make this last. Please.”

Strands of hair were caught across her face, stuck there by both sweat and rainwater. He felt he should object somewhat to her casual manhandling, but his breath caught when she slid herself down onto him with a low noise. All thought of not just letting her have her way vanished. He forced himself to match her agonizing pace until they both found it was no longer possible.

Afterwards, they lay in her bed, which was in thorough state of disarray. Han Sooyoung didn’t seem to care, though, curled up like a satisfied cat on Kim Dokja’s arm until the limb was fully asleep.

Kim Dokja didn’t attempt to move her, instead just staring at her face. The sorrowful line that had been plaguing Han Sooyoung’s brow all day—maybe even for years—had uncreased. He lifted a hand and brushed some of the damp hair off her cheek.

She sighed, turning into his touch. His arm remained numb under the weight of her skull.

He should have been relaxed, happy, satisfied—And he was, to some extent. But deep in his gut, he could feel it. He was forgetting something very, very important.

“Han Sooyoung,” he said.

“Mmh.” She didn’t bother to open her eyes.

“Can you tell me… what is Ways of Survival?”

 “… An imperfect story,” she said after a moment. Her eye opened only a slit, revealing a fraction of the dark iris. “One we both tried to guide to its perfect ending. For better or for worse.”

He couldn’t see the whole picture—only pieces. He remembered why he had lived on in his original world, how he had pushed on through the repetitive slog of his existence. In school, over dinner, in bed, and on the subway… he had been reading something always. Reading the thing he loved.

That book. Its protagonist. Everything that happened when reality changed, a secret childish dream of his made manifest.

A white coat, thrown towards him. “Didn’t you never get a clear reward? Take this.”

“Coming to the 95^th scenario and only getting something like this—"

She looked at him with a cutting expression. It took him a while he understood better what she was doing for him—that she was helping him out. Like Han Sooyoung always did, in her own irritable way.

“The question I didn’t ask yesterday,” she said. “Can I ask it now?”

“… Go ahead.”

“Why did you say you wouldn’t go back to the third round?”

The third round. Kim Dokja’s existence seemed to shake at those words. Memories piled up like leaves caught in a storm drain, too stuck together to flow through easily. Faces he didn’t know but missed terribly. Challenges and hopeless scenarios he had overcome with those people. Blades, blood, the stars in the sky.

The third regression.

Han Sooyoung kept talking. “You’re playing my part over there… if you didn’t go back, that world would have perished. You should know that, so why—”

“Let’s see… Why?”

Han Sooyoung’s expression was overworn and ragged. She looked like someone from whom everything had been taken, forced to start anew with nothing. “What?”

“Even without me, the third round would have been fine for a long time.”

“How can you be sure?”

“You are there.”

Her eyes sharpened.

“I believe in the you of the third round.”

He came out of the dream struggling to breathe. He turned his face away from Han Sooyoung’s so he could cough, dislodging her from his arm.

When he recovered, she was watching him. Her expression was calm.

“That was the real world that we came from, isn’t it?” Kim Dokja asked faintly. “And you knew. You’ve known that this isn’t our world for a while.”

“I realized it pretty early on,” she admitted. She hadn’t moved far—he could still her breath warm against his shoulder. “Not all the time, though. The awareness would come and go. Still, it was enough for me to seize control for a bit. Explore it to its limits. I guess I wanted to see what it would be like if we just did whatever we wanted. If we’d meet each other again under those circumstances.”

“… I don’t understand,” he said. If only his stupid memories would shuffle into an order that made sense. He wasn’t used to being this clueless—or this vulnerable, lying naked with someone and talking with their faces bare inches apart. “Where are we, and how did we come here?”

“This place isn’t a real worldline. I think we’re only here because we were curious if it could be real.”

“But in that case, who exactly are we?”

“I don’t know exactly who you are,” she admitted. “A piece of Kim Dokja, obviously, but I don’t know which or from where in the timeline. I’ve been picking up stray pieces of Han Sooyoung along the way, but my greatest part is from the one you just saw. I was an avatar who tried to make her own perfect ending. Before I dissolved away, I wrote a very long and very bad novel. And then… I ended up here. Wherever here really is. That, I couldn’t quite figure out.”

More memories hit him like a migraine pulse. Kim Dokja coughed again, turning his head back into the mattress. Faint white flecks began to rise from his mouth, lifting into the air and away, shards of his stories he’d buried deep.

Something very important was missing from this world. “It’s... we... Han Sooyoung, where is Yoo Joonghyuk?”

“This is the world where we didn’t need him,” she said simply. “A world where he didn’t need to be created. Is it better?”

“No,” he said immediately. “He needs to exist, too.”

“He doesn’t.” She said it like it was a fact. “If I don’t create him, he doesn’t need to exist. He was made for suffering. You should know that better than anyone else.”

“He chose to live anyway.” Horror turned in his gut—he saw the faint flash of two coats, white and black, Yoo Joonghyuk’s face doubled in his blurry recollection. A world without Yoo Joonghyuk couldn’t be tolerated. “Are you saying we should just abandon him?”

She was silent.

“Wouldn’t you miss him?” His voice cracked lightly on the final syllable.

“Why would I ever miss him? I’ve been through enough grief because of that guy,” she snapped. “If we just stop thinking about him, we could probably stay here. Forget about that novel. Forget about everything. Let those annoying memories all fade away. Then, everything should stabilize. We could just keep living like this.”

He managed to pull in a few long breaths. The story fragments were crawling out of him with a vengeance, his body fraying around the edges. “Is that what you want? Are you really telling me that’s what you want, Han Sooyoung?”

“Maybe it is,” she whispered. “Maybe it’s our best option. The way we can both survive.”

“Sorry,” he wheezed. “I… I don’t regret being here with you. But that guy… he never forgot anything. I can’t just forget about him.”

“It’s fine. I know,” she muttered. “To be honest, Kim Dokja… me, neither. I can’t forget.”

Though he was still fighting off the ugly coughs, she suddenly pulled him as close. He wrapped his arms tightly around her in turn. He was struck with a sudden terror that, now that this world was coming apart, he would never see her again. That this was their last chance to speak in all worldlines forever.

“I had something I wanted to say to you,” she whispered. She sensed it, too. “I don’t know if it will make any sense to this version of you, but the you I wanted to tell became an existence that I couldn’t reach. I couldn’t say it back then.”

His body began to shake. Han Sooyoung was shaking, too, and the world along with them. White light flickered in the edges of his vision.

“That story, it wasn’t your fault,” she whispered.

Of course it was. He was coughing too hard to get the words out. They clung to each other as story fragments shredded from his body. “It’s all—it’s all…”

“I wanted a world where you existed,” she said. “No, I demanded that world. That’s why. You can think of it that way. If you’ve got to hate someone for all of it, just go ahead and hate me.”

Her voice was cold. She seemed to be about to pull away, but he didn’t move to let her go.

“I don’t,” he muttered. “I don’t hate you.”

How could he? Those who could be seen as the gods of this universe were its most helpless subjects, incapable of ever breaking free from its constraints. It had created them as much as they had created it.

He could blame himself for needing it, but he couldn’t blame her for writing that story. Han Sooyoung shook harder, then let out a breath and held onto him tightly.

For just a moment, he almost understood where they were.

It all came back to dreaming. Somebody was dreaming to make these worlds possible. Demanding that they existed; that they could meet each other here.

So, why? Why was it that they couldn’t stay?

He could feel it: someone, somewhere out there, was panicking. His own heart rate picked up as if in sympathy.

It’s okay. I’ll fix it. Next time, I’ll fix it.

He could not make sense of it before his arms were empty and the world was over.

Chapter Text

Some things couldn’t be fixed.

This was a thought that came to Kim Dokja, age fifteen, as he stared up at a hospital ceiling.

Once things went badly wrong enough, fixing one aspect of a problem only broke something else. In that way, existence itself became a bit of a balancing act—and given everything, he had less and less interest in trying to keep his balance.

His reasoning was pretty sound. He didn’t have anything good to look back on and had nothing to look forward to, either… so why make any effort at all? Why try to change something when it only made things worse?

That was the state of mind he was in when he first came across the video account online called “dem0nblade”.

Why it had sparked his interest at all, he couldn’t say. Dem0nblade was a speedrunner who posted nothing but video after video of himself running the same punishing game. Kim Dokja himself had little interest in gaming, never having owned video games himself.

Maybe it was the fact that dem0nblade started his runs from scratch, learning each level to perfection through rote repetition. There was something almost hypnotic about watching him traverse a level normally, then go back to the start and refine it, and refine it, determined to shave off even fractions of a second.

Maybe it was that Kim Dokja wanted to give up on life entirely—but dem0nblade never gave up, even if the thing he was so focused on completing was pointless. This small thing, this perfect run of the game, was something that could be fixed, and could reach its ideal, fully optimized version.

Part of Kim Dokja almost wanted to laugh at him—why try so hard for something so stupid? But instead of laughing, he was quietly riveted by the videos. While in the hospital recovering from his accident, he watched through dem0nblade’s entire backlog.

Dem0nblade’s game of choice seemed hellish to run. The coveted 100% record involved playing every single brutal level perfectly one after the other, and the current world record holder was a Japanese player with mindblowing dexterity (Kim Dokja had discovered this through a link in the comments mocking dem0nblade’s personal best, a full several minutes short of the record). If this dem0nblade guy wanted to have a shot at that record, he’d need to not only master every level, but outperform the current recordholder.

It wasn’t Kim Dokja’s preferred type of video content at all, but he kept watching after his recovery, too. Dem0nblade’s runs occasionally brushed the leaderboards but got quickly beat out. Surely with all the work he was putting in, with how quickly his character was flying through the levels, he would achieve his goal soon.

Maybe Kim Dokja didn’t care much about games, but he had to keep watching for when that finally happened.

Kim Dokja entered high school. Dem0nblade mastered the first three levels to a point that put him in competition with the record holder. Kim Dokja tried to get through classes while avoiding the family members he lived with. Dem0nblade, unable to shave off the three seconds he needed, threw away his progress for new strategies.

Before he knew it, it had been nearly a full year, and he was still religiously watching the new uploads that dem0nblade dropped every single Sunday night. Actually… when he went back and looked at dem0nblade’s first upload, his next video would be posted on the exact one-year anniversary of his account.

Over that year, view counts had been pretty steadily declining. At the beginning they’d hovered around 500—certainly not popular for video content, but at least representative of a small audience—but nowadays they didn’t pass 200. Regardless, dem0nblade continued to post new videos and develop his runs, apparently unconcerned with his popularity.

Kim Dokja decided to leave a comment.

DKOS3

Congratulations on running for a full year, dem0nblade. Keep going. I’m sure you’ll achieve the 100% record this year if you stick with your new strategy.

To his surprise, he received a reply—dem0nblade replies to comments were very rare.

dem0nblade

I’m developing a different strategy. This one isn’t fast enough.

… This jerk, did he really only comment to disagree with his viewers?

As time passed, Kim Dokja continued to keep up with the videos, dropping the occasional comment. Given dem0nblade’s own commenting habits, “DKOS3” didn’t feel the need to always be very nice.

DKOS3

I think I just watched you die seventy times in a row? I’m really surprised at your perseverance.

dem0nblade

Shut up. I will optimize the run soon.

Actually… as time went on, he seemed to be one of the only viewers still commenting. View counts continued to drop, from 200 to 75 to hardly ever getting above 10.

Frankly, Kim Dokja was a little offended. Personality aside, the guy was really good, and he’d even snatched the occasional record for running single levels. It wasn’t the 100% record, sure, but he had to be one of the best in the world at the game by now.

It wasn’t just his speedrunning, either. Dem0nblade was fun to watch. He kept a mic on to describe his techniques in a low monotone, though spoke so rarely into it that new viewers couldn’t be blamed for assuming that the videos had no commentary. When he did speak, his observations were over-serious to the point of being adorable.

This strategy is pointless, he commented after stoically leaping into a pit over 200 times trying to time a frame-perfect ledge grab. While silently laying into an invincible NPC with dozens of sword strikes as he waited for an unskippable cutscene to end, he muttered, die. When he finally executed a trick he’d been working on, he would let out a small, satisfied Hm.

The point was, he was underrated.

Kim Dokja graduated high school. Dem0nblade got a better capture card, enabling him to die thousands of times in crystal clear HD video. Kim Dokja suffered through his military service. Dem0nblade’s uploads became more sporadic and he did not respond to comments. Privately, Kim Dokja wondered if they could be around the same age, and dem0nblade could be going through something similar.

The view count, by then, had dropped to 1. With every year that passed, Kim Dokja continued to leave supportive comments on the anniversary—when he got all the way up to the tenth, he was shocked to realize he’d been watching these videos for an entire decade.

In all that time, despite the speedrunning scene seeing a lot of big changes, and his game of choice becoming retro, dem0nblade never changed. One day shortly after the tenth anniversary, however, there was an unexpected video uploaded: dem0nblade final 100% run 3:08:57.

… What did he mean, final run? That 3:08:57—it would certainly go on the leaderboard, but it was a full second short of beating the world record.

There was no commentary in the video. Dem0nblade employed all his best strategies, developed over years, and executed them perfectly. He lost very little time on all his usual difficult spots.

It was his perfect run… and it still wasn’t enough.

Kim Dokja left a comment.

DKOS3

What do you mean by final run, dem0nblade? Are you giving up after all these years?

He couldn’t explain why the idea distressed him so much. As silly as it was, these videos had gotten him through a lot, whenever he needed something to look forward to. Though they’d barely exchanged a handful of words over the comments, dem0nblade had been… almost like what he imagined it would be like to have a friend.

Though that was a stupid thought, obviously.

dem0nblade

I will no longer be speedrunning. Thanks for your support.

… That was it.

How could that be it?

DKOS3

Why did you give up?

Kim Dokja did not receive a reply. When the following Sunday rolled around, there was no new upload, and there never would be again.

***

Years passed. Kim Dokja kept on surviving.

Though putting one foot in front of the other continuously was a strength of his, he could not deny that the lack of new dem0nblade videos had left a hole in his life. That was why he found himself on the main page of a streaming site idly clicking around for something to watch while he ate his dinner.

As usual, there was very little of interest. Despite spending over ten years watching the same speedrunner, he really still didn’t know much about games or find most gaming related streams to be that entertaining. It was old habits that kept him clicking around these types of sites, though he wasn’t sure if he’d know what he was looking for even if he found it.

Food getting cold, he settled on a random suggested channel—but then froze with his first bite hovering halfway to his mouth.

The person talking on the stream. He recognized the voice.

The voice was familiar, but the face was new—the guy had facecam now. He was almost offensively good looking, with a sharp jawline and strong eyebrows. And he was using his real name, which showed up below his camera on screen.

Yoo Joonghyuk. Huh.

Maybe Kim Dokja was mistaken. What were the chances, after all? Would dem0nblade really have quit speedrunning only to take up a different job in gaming?

He was playing a different game, too… some kind of competitive team shooter. Even so, between the smoothness of his movements, the long periods of silence without commentary, and the satisfied “Hm,” when he neatly sniped an opponent…

There was no denying it. It was dem0nblade for sure.

Though it hadn’t been true before, now he was popular. There were thousands of people in the chat, messages scrolling by almost too quickly to read. The production value and branding made it clear this wasn’t an indie operation, either. He was a professional working for a real agency.

… Was this why he quit? Kim Dokja wondered, staring at the inscrutable face in that tiny square of video. Despite watching his content for a staggering number of hours, Kim Dokja was struck by the fact that he didn’t know this guy at all. Seeing his face was almost uncomfortable.

He watched the stream, though he knew even less about competitive esports than he did speedrunning. As his match came to an end, Yoo Joonghyuk bluntly said, “I'm done for the day,” and abruptly turned everything off.

Kim Dokja laughed. How the hell did this guy get so popular with a personality like that? It had to be his face. People in the chat were sending lots of hearts to the “offline” splash screen.

Feeling a little apprehensive, Kim Dokja nonetheless clicked the “follow” button.

It was pretty easy to pick up the habit of tuning into streams, oftentimes surreptitiously on his phone when he was supposed to be working. Yoo Joonghyuk streamed three days a week, which was quite an increase from the weekly video uploads in the past.

Watching the streams night after night, Kim Dokja found himself wondering how Yoo Joonghyuk was keeping up with the new pace. He didn’t really talk strategy anymore, unlike in the dem0nblade days. It seemed like he was just going through the motions, playing the bare minimum amount of hours mandated by his company and then immediately signing off.

With the fancy new setup, face cam and official sponsorships he had to read off… actually, though it was impossible to tell by his face or tone of voice, it seemed like he might be a bit miserable.

Kim Dokja thought about making an account so he could join the chat, but found himself hesitating. He had trouble parsing the chat’s terminology and emote usage, and Yoo Joonghyuk didn’t seem to look at chat anyways. It wasn’t like he had much of value to say.

… Except that there was a special day creeping up. Considering Yoo Joonghyuk was no longer posting videos to the dem0nblade account, the yearly anniversary was somewhat pointless…

But then again, dem0nblade had hated the stupid little anniversary posts so much that he always responded to them. It would be a shame to let the opportunity pass by.

… Even if he'd have to pay money to get his message highlighted to ensure Yoo Joonghyuk would see it.

That really made him hesitate, but as he sensed Yoo Joonghyuk nearing the end of the day's stream and his chance about to vanish, he impulsively forked over the cash and sent the message.

By then he had created an account, so when the message popped up on screen, it said:

New Donation from DKOS3

It seems you have been gaming for thirteen whole years now. Congratulations on sticking with it. But are you happy with this job?

Kim Dokja had been expecting his usual reaction to paid messages—generally just a glare and a grumbled acknowledgement—but to his surprise, when Yoo Joonghyuk saw the message, he seemed to sit up.

After a moment's tense silence, he said, “DKOS3. Don’t waste your money on paid messages.”

The chat instantly lit up—for Yoo Joonghyuk to respond to a paid message was unusual. Feeling stupid but also somewhat emboldened, Kim Dokja typed into the chat: You still didn’t answer my question!

“Shut up,” Yoo Joonghyuk advised him. Kim Dokja felt the warm glow of acknowledgement undercut by the inescapable fact that Yoo Joonghyuk really was a jerk.

DKOS3: Big words for a sunfish bastard who dies so many times...

Kim Dokja was banned from the chat.

Thankfully, he was able to return for the following stream, forced by the tyrannical mods to try and keep his words civil. A few chat members noticed his return with a weird sense of humor—Hey, it's DKOS3, the guy who Supreme King insulted!

He made an effort to send more supportive messages, or at least couch his insults in polite language. Yoo Joonghyuk had told him to shut up live on stream, which was uncalled for.

DKOS3: Our Joonghyuk seems a little slow racking up kills today, is he feeling okay?

To Kim Dokja’s satisfaction, some of his messages, as they had in the old days, occasionally provoked responses.

“DKOS3. Shut up.”

It was more than he said to most people in the chat, so Kim Dokja considered it a victory.

As he tuned into streams and became a regular in the chat, he learned a bit more about Yoo Joonghyuk… or “Supreme King”, according to his tag (did he really choose that kind of a name himself?).

He was a popular esports player, by far the most popular on his team. It seemed his time must be eaten up a lot by his gaming job between the regular streams, competitions, and training.

The chat comprised a few different factions. Some were die-hard esports fans, some were casual fans who enjoyed the game, and there was a third faction that Kim Dokja could only describe as Supreme King fangirls. Maybe it was to be expected with his face, but wasn’t that sort of fan turned off by his terrible attitude?

Anyway, where had they all been for thirteen years while dem0nblade was religiously posting his playthroughs to a vanishingly small audience?

Part of Kim Dokja wanted to be proud of his old favorite for coming so far, but at the same time, he felt a little inkling of concern. The more he watched, the more he felt a difference between dem0nblade and the Supreme King. Dem0nblade chipped away at his speedruns because he wanted to, hadn’t he? The Supreme King did whatever the company told him with no choice in the matter.

Yoo Joonghyuk had not answered his question, but Kim Dokja was pretty sure he knew the answer.

 
***

SupremeBeef: I’m actually so pumped for this

Kuroi55: The chat regulars should wear something special so I know it’s you

Kuroi55: They should release Supreme King merch

Koroi55: I’d put it on my body in a second

SupremeBeef: Hey @DKOS3 are you coming to the event?

The chat was flying by in a haze of anticipation, though the stream was just more of the usual. Hiding in a corner in the break room at work, Kim Dokja tapped out a quick message to the person who had pinged him.

DKOS3: Which event?

SupremeBeef: WHAT DO YOU MEAN WHICH EVENT.

ItsMaia: FAKE FAN!!!!

ItsMaia: I booked my ticket a month ago!

Bemused, Kim Dokja gathered by the text flickering by the screen that it was competition season, and their Supreme King would soon be participating in a championship. It was one of the biggest of the year, taking place in a huge stadium with an expected fully booked audience.

If he were actually an esports fan, he would have already known about this, obviously.

Yoo Joonghyuk was silently playing the game, ignoring the buzzing chat.

DKOS3: Oh, that.

DKOS3: The price of the ticket is a little too much for me right now, so no.

SupremeBeef: That sucks!

ItsMaia: FAAAAAAKE

ItsMaia: Hey DKS is your username pronounced “dicks”

ItsMaia was banned from the chat.

Kil79a: <3 <3 <3 Supreme King FOREVUR

SupremeBeef: mods can you block the fangirls please

Kil79a: Block me yourself COWARD

… The chat, all told, was pretty annoying.

He kept one ear on the stream as it went on, half-paying attention to the sounds of animated violence. His attention was drawn back when Yoo Joonghyuk’s voice cut through the background noise.

“There is a giveaway for the chat,” he said. When Kim Dokja glanced down at the screen, Yoo Joonghyuk was simply staring at the camera with his usual flat expression. “Three people will be given a free ticket to the competition this weekend.”

That’s unusually generous of the company, Kim Dokja thought to himself, returning to his work without thinking much about it.

It was only later, when he went home and actually checked his notifications, that he discovered the unexpected: His username was at the top of the list of the three winners. A code had been sent to his inbox that would let him redeem the ticket.

A message had also been sent from Yoo Joonghyuk’s ‘Supreme King’ account that said: I hope to see you there. He knew it was only a message written by some manager, but Kim Dokja still stared at it for longer than he would ever admit.

***

Standing outside the stadium, he felt stupid. Entering and handing in his free pity ticket, he felt even more stupid. Going in to find his seat among the chaos of dozens of other people—mostly teenagers and young men—he felt even stupider.

He had come to the event alone, and it quickly became obvious that it was not his scene. He sat in his seat and ignored the excited chatter around him until the event itself began, the lights dimming as massive screens lit up with the game.

The players came out to the computer consoles on stage to applause. One of the screens zoomed in on a live feed of their faces… and there was Yoo Joonghyuk, sliding into his seat with a neutral expression.

Really, it was good that he'd made it so big, considering his humble beginnings. Kim Dokja reminded himself of that several times.

Maybe it was selfish to miss the dem0nblade days.

The event began and Kim Dokja stared dull-eyed at the screens, not able to follow the action very well. The announcer highlighting the plays of the game helped, but even by the conclusion of the first match, Kim Dokja could barely tell who had won. When the crowd cheered, he sheepishly clapped a couple of times.

Watching Yoo Joonghyuk play in person was a bit of a novel experience, at least. That scary face of his was even more intimidating blown up on the massive screen, hovering over the audience like a sinister god. Kim Dokja had to smile.

Around him, hundreds of other people were watching the same scene. They, Kim Dokja considered, had no real idea who Yoo Joonghyuk was.

But staring up at that impossible face, at the flicker of a smile that hit when he pulled off some complicated maneuver…

Despite having watched his videos for so long, Kim Dokja realized anew that he didn’t know this person, either.

What the hell was he even doing here? This whole thing was agonizingly parasocial. What, he had watched a few old videos and gotten replied to in chat a few times, and that made him think there was some sort of connection?

Thinking of it like that in plain terms, he wanted to laugh. He had come to a competition he didn’t even understand just because of this person. Yoo Joonghyuk didn’t know who he was, and they would never meet. Should never meet—It was pathetic. He could watch streams to keep himself company, but going this far was just ridiculous.

A strange thought passed through the back of his mind: I can never meet them again.

Abruptly, he stood to leave, weaving through the seats to head up towards the exit.

As he reached the top of the stadium, he paused to look back, wondering if he should at least see out the rest of the match. And—for some reason—the distant face of Yoo Joonghyuk, half hidden behind his computer screen, was staring directly up at him.

Great, he was already drawing attention for leaving in the middle of the match. It seemed that the damage was done. He turned again for the door.

As he did, there was some kind of commotion onstage. Something clattered to the ground; someone shouted. Kim Dokja looked over his shoulder and saw Yoo Joonghyuk hurtling up the stairs toward him.

It was such a shock he could do nothing but stand frozen. Yoo Joonghyuk had apparently scrambled off the stage, throwing his headset to the ground right in the middle of a match. Several of his teammates, and his coach, were shouting after him.

Before Kim Dokja could fully register the situation, Yoo Joonghyuk reached him and grabbed his hand.

For a second, they both just stared at each other. Kim Dokja seemed to have lost the ability to form coherent thoughts. The real, physical Yoo Joonghyuk was right in front of him, and his warm hand was gripping Kim Dokja's own hand tightly, as if to prevent him from going anywhere.

His face looked… intense. Anticipatory, like now that he had grabbed hold of Kim Dokja, something was supposed to happen.

But, of course, nothing did. After a moment, the look on Yoo Joonghyuk's face turned to confusion. He looked down at his own hand gripping Kim Dokja's and, as if startled, released him.

“What… are you doing?” Kim Dokja managed to ask.

“I…” Whatever manic energy had propelled Yoo Joonghyuk up the stairs after him seemed to vanish. He clenched his fist with a blank face. “Tell me who you are.”

“What?” Kim Dokja asked weakly. As he registered the chaos blooming around them—agitated spectators, the coach and team climbing off the stage to follow Yoo Joonghyuk, the match left hanging—he realized that it was time to go. “… It’s none of your business who I am. Why do you go around grabbing someone's hand like that? I don’t know you.”

The words flowed very easily from his mouth. Yoo Joonghyuk looked weirdly pathetic, now glaring daggers at him.

After a moment, “I must have… mistaken you… for someone else.”

Of course he had. One of Yoo Joonghyuk’s teammates reached him on the stairs and grabbed his arm, demanding to know what was wrong. When Yoo Joonghyuk turned to acknowledge his teammate, Kim Dokja quickly backed through the door and left.

As he hurried out of the venue, he could still feel the heat of Yoo Joonghyuk’s hand on his skin.

***

The full consequences of the weirdest event of his life became clear the following morning.

He sat in his apartment with his head in his hands and an article from a gaming website open on his phone.

Championship match disrupted by lover’s quarrel? Was the headline one particular publication had chosen to run with. To Kim Dokja’s horror, someone had even caught a snapshot of Yoo Joonghyuk reaching up to grab his hand. Kim Dokja’s face was a little blurry in the photo, but not as blurry as he would like.

That was… actually really bad, wasn’t it?

There were reasons he really needed to stay out of the public eye. The last thing he wanted was anyone putting two and two together, this blurry picture of him and whatever information was still out there regarding him and  ▪ ▪—

News stories, flashbulbs, the unending spectacle of it all. How funny. He hadn’t thought about that incident in years somehow, but now the trauma seemed to all slam back.

… Well, esports was kind of a niche interest, wasn’t it? It wasn’t like there would be paparazzi at anyone’s door because of this. It was just an esports tournament. The fans would laugh about it and then move on.

But Kim Dokja’s stomach gradually began to drop as he continued reading the article.

Since he’d dropped the match out of nowhere, the article claimed that Yoo Joonghyuk was in danger of losing his job. Though he’d done absolutely nothing to deserve any of this, Kim Dokja felt a faint inkling of guilt. Also…

Once he got to the bottom of the page, the comments were an absolute trash fire.

Esports may have been a niche interest, but Yoo Joonghyuk, Kim Dokja had to remember, was also a popular streamer.

Fans were clearly upset at the possibility of him being fired. Some of those blamed Kim Dokja for the incident, and virulently—whoever that random ugly guy is, it’s clearly all his fault! Others took the opportunity of open speculation regarding Yoo Joonghyuk’s relationship status to be homophobic. Still others were more upset about the outcome of the match, arguing with the Supreme King fans that Yoo Joonghyuk should be fired.

Just looking at it all was giving Kim Dokja a headache… and these people didn’t even know who he was. If they could track him down by name, how much worse could this situation get?

Why the hell had Yoo Joonghyuk done something like this in the first place? Whoever he had mistaken Kim Dokja for, it had been so important for him to meet that person that he had thrown the match and even his career into jeopardy.

One way or the other, Kim Dokja was going to have to do something about this.

Steeling himself, he navigated to Yoo Joonghyuk's public social media account. It was clearly operated by a manager, as the posts were all professional in tone and consisted of reminders and updates about events.

There were a lot of stupid comments in his recent posts, that was for sure. Hopefully Yoo Joonghyuk never actually checked the account himself.

Navigating to the DMs, he was glad to see that they were open, though likely would not remain so if the harassment continued.

… He really didn’t want to make a big deal about this event, and he did feel bad for Yoo Joonghyuk, but he needed to find a way to protect himself somehow. He took a breath and started typing.

Kim Dokja

Hey. My name is Kim Dokja. I'm the one who was grabbed trying to leave the stadium yesterday.

I want you to try and keep my face out of these articles. I don’t have anything to do with this.

Technically grabbing a random person is an assault, you know.

I should at least get some kind of compensation for getting dragged into this.

… The last was a toothless threat—Kim Dokja had no intention of pulling any more attention to the situation—but he figured a vague legal threat would make whoever was managing the social media sit up and notice.

The message, however, remained unread for most of the day. Maybe nobody actually checked those DMs, and he would need to try and contact someone else at the company.

Before he could settle on a course of action, he was bemused to see a stream notification pop up from the Supreme King himself. It looked like, no matter the situation, the streaming schedule would be kept.

Though he couldn’t deny some apprehension, Kim Dokja opened up the stream.

Yoo Joonghyuk looked the same as he always did, just playing with a blank face. The chat, on the other hand, was both much larger than usual and very chaotic.

ForReal491: It was totally crazy. I was there, can confirm Supreme King just jumped off the stage…

PastelGrn: SUPREME KING R U GAY

ItsMaia: Grabbing someone doesn’t mean you’re gay. You're all so stupid.

ItsMaia: They were certainly fighting. Supreme King must have an enemy in real life.

SupremeBeef: Did you lose the match on purpose??

Geten1998: Does anyone know who that ugly guy was?

Kim Dokja was typing before he could stop himself.

DKOS3: I can’t believe this is all chat is talking about today.

DKOS3: What is your problem, anyway? His personal life has nothing to do with the game.

SupremeBeef: He could get fired! We are being supportive.

DKOS3: You’re being invasive. He isn’t your personal friend. He is an entertainer.

SupremeBeef: What do you know, @DKOS3? Is he YOUR personal friend?

DKOS3: Obviously not. He's not any of our friend. You should all stop acting like kids.

The argument continued, as well as the wild speculation about the events of the previous night. With an annoyed sigh, Kim Dokja closed the chat window and just left the stream running in the background.

Yoo Joonghyuk, chipping away at match after match without saying a word, looked tired.

Later, Kim Dokja was getting ready to go to bed when he was surprised to see a reply to his mildly threatening DM.

Supreme King Yoo Joonghyuk

If you insist, we can meet and discuss.

***

Kim Dokja had been more or less prepared to face a manager or someone working for the company doing PR. What he hadn’t expected was to see Yoo Joonghyuk himself, seated alone at the meeting spot that had been decided on over social media.

Very nearly, Kim Dokja turned around to just leave.

This was only going to lead to more problems. Them living on the other side of a pair of screens was the ideal. That was safer; that was how it was supposed to be.

But at that moment, Yoo Joonghyuk looked up at him. They locked eyes. Yoo Joonghyuk still looked very tired.

Kim Dokja crossed the distance and sat down. The proposed meeting spot had been a café. For a moment he found his gaze lingering at the counter, as if he expected to see someone working there, but of course he saw no one he recognized. He didn’t know any baristas.

“I didn’t think it would actually be you who came here,” Kim Dokja said, looking back at Yoo Joonghyuk. “… Was there some sort of reason you came instead of a manager?”

Yoo Joonghyuk scowled. “You messaged my personal account. Who else would come?”

“You operate that account personally?”

Yoo Joonghyuk stared back at him blankly. “…Yes.”

“I didn’t realize that.”

… Was it possible for this interaction to get any more awkward? Well, Kim Dokja had a job to do. It was best to put aside everything else.

“In any case,” he continued, “I don’t actually want to complain or anything. I just want to ask if there is any way you can keep my photo out of these stupid articles that are going up.”

“Your photo?” Yoo Joonghyuk repeated.

Damn, of course this guy hadn’t seen any of the actual news. This was going to be annoying. “Uh, yes. Ignore the headline, it’s stupid. But there is a photo.”

Somewhat sheepishly, he showed Yoo Joonghyuk the offending article on his phone. A dark shadow seemed to pass through Yoo Joonghyuk’s expression that made him look even scarier than usual.

… Yeah, being accused of being Kim Dokja’s “lover” would naturally cause that reaction.

“There might be a way,” he said after a moment. “I can talk to the company.”

“But aren’t you at risk for being fired?” Kim Dokja asked. “Will the company help, or would they just fire you?”

Rather than answer, Yoo Joonghyuk stared ahead with a cool expression. Kim Dokja sighed.

“Why… did you grab me, anyway?” he asked. “I really looked like someone else to you?”

“I think so.”

“You think so?”

“I happened to look up and saw you at the top of the stairs,” Yoo Joonghyuk said stiffly. “I had a strong conviction that I knew you and needed to stop you from leaving. But, now… I can’t remember why I would have such a conviction.”

Though he had tried not to dwell on it too much—for many reasons—Kim Dokja could clearly still remember the look on Yoo Joonghyuk’s face right as he had grabbed him, before the confusion took over.

Actually, something similar seemed to be rising in his eyes again. “Tell me. Do we really not know each other?”

“We are certainly strangers,” Kim Dokja assured him.

“You were in the audience. You knew who I was.”

“I don’t actually know anything about esports, or any of the popular players,” Kim Dokja admitted, determined to keep Yoo Joonghyuk off balance. “I was there because I got a spare ticket off someone, not because I meant to go.”

“Hm.” Yoo Joonghyuk seemed unconvinced.

“‘Supreme King’” Kim Dokja said, watching Yoo Joonghyuk stiffen. “That’s your tag, right? Did you really choose that for yourself? It seems a bit self important, doesn’t it?”

“Kim Dokja,” Yoo Joonghyuk growled by way of warning. Actually, it was highly novel to hear his own name said out loud by the personality he'd been watching online for half his life, and not just the random assortment of letters he’d chosen for his username on a whim.

“Maybe the company chose it?” Kim Dokja continued with a smile. “It comes off weird, either way. I wasn’t a Supreme King fan, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

… I was actually a dem0nblade fan. The only one.

“… What compensation was it you were looking for,” Yoo Joonghyuk bit out after a moment.

Ah… right. Thinking he was talking to a manager, Kim Dokja hadn’t been shy about trying to get something out of the situation. “…Well, since you might be fired, now probably isn't the best time to discuss that. Once it all blows over, we can talk again. For now, I really just want you to try and keep that photo from going around. Okay?”

Yoo Joonghyuk blinked. “Why is it so important to you?”

“Who wants their face connected to something like this?” Kim Dokja retorted immediately. “Your fans are completely vicious. Everyone thinks you losing the competition was my fault—the rumors are going crazy.”

“Hm.”

What he saw in Yoo Joonghyuk’s expression made him pause. “Wait, do you also think it was my fault? How could it be my fault if you suddenly stand up and grab me for no reason?”

“You aren’t telling me the whole truth,” said Yoo Joonghyuk.

That guy, he is deceiving you.

Why that sentence passed through his head, Kim Dokja could not say. His throat felt a bit constricted.

“I have my reasons,” he finally said, which sounded lame. The lies didn’t seem to want to form on his tongue. “Anyway, we don’t know each other, so it’s none of your business. Maybe we should just hope this just blows over.”

“It will,” Yoo Joonghyuk said with a disdainful sneer. “These people who watch. They only care if something is new and interesting. Whatever their inane gossiping is about, it will soon turn to a new topic.”

… This was definitely not the time to admit he was a loyal stream viewer. “Do you think they might actually fire you for something like this?”

When Yoo Joonghyuk only stared back, he added, “I only ask because you being fired pretty much ruins my chance of getting any compensation. At that point they don’t care to protect you from a lawsuit, so.”

A scary look came into Yoo Joonghyuk’s eye. “You would file a lawsuit?”

“Ah, well,” Kim Dokja hedged, “That really depends.”

“It depends on if you can get away with it. And what is this compensation? You would take advantage of this that much for money?”

“Hang on,” Kim Dokja objected. “I'm not just here to chase after money, I wanted…”

Yoo Joonghyuk stood. “I will see about having the photo removed.”

Before Kim Dokja could say another word, he stormed out of the café and vanished.

***

The meeting had not been ideal.

Maybe after a meeting like that, Kim Dokja should have stayed away from the stream for a bit, but he couldn’t resist the urge to at least check in.

Anyway, this was through his account DKOS3, which Yoo Joonghyuk would have no reason to suspect. Though the deception felt a little strange, it didn’t bother Kim Dokja enough to contemplate not tuning in.

The chat was still very much fixated on the incident, to Kim Dokja’s dismay—they had not yet found something else to, as Yoo Joonghyuk had put it, gossip about.

The ‘Supreme King’ himself was completely silent. Something like a sullen, murderous rage seemed to come through in his playing as he landed head shot after head shot.

DKOS3: I see everyone is still talking about boring things.

DKOS3: Focus on the game. I think our Joonghyuk is about to beat his record of consecutive head shots.

To Kim Dokja’s satisfaction, that managed to provoke a short response: “This is nowhere near my record.”

DKOS3: Not with an attitude like that.

SupremeBeef: Like you even know what the record is, @DKOS3?

DKOS3: What, am I being accused of being a fake fan again?

DKOS3: I’m the biggest Yoo Joonghyuk fan that there is.

DKOS3: Right, Supreme King?

Yoo Joonghyuk’s eyes narrowed in the direction of chat. “Shut up.”

Kim Dokja felt himself relaxing a little as the stream went on. As his final match was wrapping up, Yoo Joonghyuk spoke suddenly: “I will be streaming again on Saturday.”

HKA11: Really, Saturday? Isn’t the next match on Saturday?

ItsMaia: Yeah, I already have my ticket to it.

ItsMaia: Does that mean Supreme King won’t be there? Lame.

Yoo Joonghyuk just muttered, “I may not return to competitions for the rest of the season.”

In the abrupt blackness of Yoo Joonghyuk switching off the stream, Kim Dokja saw the reflection of his own face and frowned.

… That wasn’t a good sign. Maybe the company really was considering firing him. If they were doing this in the middle of a season, they must be serious.

He found himself pulling up Yoo Joonghyuk’s DMs where he’d initially asked for a meeting, relieved to see that he had not yet been blocked.

Kim Dokja

Our conversation ended on a weird note, so let me be clear. I wouldn’t sue for something stupid like this, especially since drawing attention to myself is the last thing I want.

I just wanted to pressure your company, that’s all. I won’t make additional trouble for you.

Not to pester, but was there any update about getting my photo taken down?

He went to close the window, thinking Yoo Joonghyuk would take a long time to respond, but was surprised when he saw the dancing “typing” animation pop up. It seemed to go on for longer than necessary before the message finally came through.

Yoo Joonghyuk

I asked. The manager doesn’t want to hear anything from me right now.

Kim Dokja

Isn’t there some way we can pressure them more?

You’re one of their star players, how can they hold a grudge like this anyway? It was obviously a mistake.

Yoo Joonghyuk

I am easily replaceable.

Kim Dokja stared at that message.

Kim Dokja

That can’t be true. They’re just acting like that so they can feel comfortable threatening and disciplining you.

Who else on your team works as hard as you do? If they lose you, they’ll regret it.

We can use that to our advantage somehow.

Yoo Joonghyuk

Don’t be stupid.

Kim Dokja

So what, you’ll just let them walk all over you and do as they please?

You’ve got a ton of fans, right? If the fans make it a big deal, the company will have to recognize your value at least.

Yoo Joonghyuk

Just stay out of this.

It will blow over.

Kim Dokja found himself frowning at the chat. Sure, maybe his problem with the photo would go away if everyone got bored of the drama… but what about Yoo Joonghyuk’s job?

There had to be something more he could do, even if Yoo Joonghyuk had made it abundantly clear that he wanted nothing of Kim Dokja’s help.

… He had said nothing of a stream viewer called “DKOS3” getting involved.

***

Kim Dokja read a lot of books. It was a habit trained into him from youth.

Though he rarely had money to spend on his hobbies, he often found himself in a small bookstore near his apartment, especially when he was trying to think through a tricky problem like the one he had before him now. Being surrounded by books was a comforting experience, and it was usually dead in the shop, meaning he could freely walk the shelves and look at all the books he wanted unobserved.

Whenever he wandered those stacks, he found himself looking for something. The details of what that thing was, exactly, escaped him. A book that he had read when he was young, he thought. The problem was, he couldn’t remember the title, plot, characters, or author… only the feeling of reading it, which was completely unconducive to finding it again. Obviously, he’d never managed to track it down.

Kim Dokja’s wandering feet took him to a display that had been added to the shop very recently, a small shelf and table with print editions of popular webnovels. The cover of one of them, featuring a man in a black suit wielding a sword, rang oddly familiar, though he was sure he hadn’t read the book. Somewhat compelled, he popped it open to skim the first few pages.

… The writing was inoffensive enough, but the story and characters were completely unfamiliar. Another miss—oh, well. Whatever was causing that itch in his memory, it was unlikely he’d ever find it.

He accidentally got caught up in reading, compelled by a line of dialogue that seemed to suggest that the author planned make a surprising break from genre convention, and only remembered to put the book down after he’d read straight through the first chapter. Right, he was in a book shop, not a library.

Glancing up over the shelf as he replaced the book on its display, Kim Dokja saw the very last thing he had expected to see…

Standing in the front of the shop with the open door behind him, his silhouette blocked against the golden sunlight, was none other than Yoo Joonghyuk. Yoo Joonghyuk was looking at him like he’d been watching for some time.

For a second, Kim Dokja’s brain just bluescreened. By the time he’d recovered his mental faculty, Yoo Joonghyuk had already turned on his heel to leave.

“Hey!” he called, weaving around the shelf to give chase. The shop owner, as ever, didn’t look up from her book. “Yoo Joonghyuk? What are you doing here?”

Yoo Joonghyuk kept walking, striding out of the store to the chime of the bell. Kim Dokja slipped through the door after him to grab his wrist.

Yoo Joonghyuk did stop, but gave Kim Dokja such a furious look that he immediately withdrew his hand, smiling sheepishly. What the hell—look at how badly this guy reacted to getting grabbed out of the blue, considering their whole situation.

“Are you following me or something?” Kim Dokja asked, mostly joking.

“No,” Yoo Joonghyuk said shortly. “It was a coincidence. I was going to buy a book.”

“You read?” Kim Dokja asked, realizing too late how insulting the question sounded. Well—it was just that reading books as a hobby didn’t fit at all with his perception of Yoo Joonghyuk’s character. He felt a prickle of discomfort. “Er… well, that aside, do you really mean to say you just happened to wander into the one bookshop that I go to, out of all the bookstores in Seoul?”

“… Yes.”

“It’s a hell of a coincidence,” Kim Dokja hedged. Really, the probability—

Ow. This whole situation was giving him a headache already.

Yoo Joonghyuk seemed plainly aware of the unlikelihood of running into Kim Dokja this way, and was scowling heavily, at a complete loss of how to defend himself. Seeing that he seemed a bit miserable, Kim Dokja was suddenly pretty sure that Yoo Joonghyuk hadn’t been following him after all.

Now that he had released Yoo Joonghyuk’s wrist, they were both standing awkwardly outside the storefront. “Well, I guess stranger things have happened, all considered. Don’t run out of the store just because I was there, go buy your book. What do you read?”

While Yoo Joonghyuk still seemed antsy, he did re-enter the store alongside Kim Dokja. It would look too much like he was running away, Kim Dokja figured, if Yoo Joonghyuk just left. The store owner still didn’t look up, just turned a page.

“… I don’t know,” Yoo Joonghyuk said.

Kim Dokja turned back to him, mystified. “You… don’t know what you read? Are you just trying to annoy me now?”

“I don’t normally read a lot of books,” Yoo Joonghyuk clarified, which was more along the lines of what Kim Dokja had expected. “However, I had a feeling just recently that I should start.”

“Really.” Kim Dokja appraised Yoo Joonghyuk’s blank expression. “So, you want to get started reading, but don’t know what. There must be some genre you like, or something you want to learn about?”

“I am not sure.”

“You’re not sure of much, are you?” Kim Dokja said, pleased when Yoo Joonghyuk began to look more annoyed than uncomfortable. “Relax, I come here all the time, I can probably make some suggestions for you.”

Kim Dokja had expected for Yoo Joonghyuk to grumble some inane excuse to escape the situation as soon as possible, but surprisingly, he consented to be led around the store and talked at about various books.

… To be honest, Kim Dokja didn’t have much actual advice for anything outside of genre fiction. He’d read a bit more widely when he was younger, but these days he had his favorites and stuck to them. Still, to someone who didn’t read for fun like Yoo Joonghyuk, he thought that he could appear knowledgeable enough.

Yoo Joonghyuk was utterly uninterested in biographical works—fair enough, so was Kim Dokja. Self-help and guidebooks, in that they were attempting to offer him advice, seemed to offend him (just how arrogant was this guy exactly?). Most of the available nonfiction didn’t interest him, though he reluctantly looked at a couple of pop history books.

The only area where he seemed to perk up was, to Kim Dokja’s surprise, the store’s small selection of cookbooks.

“I don’t know that cookbooks really count as recreational reading,” he observed when Yoo Joonghyuk popped one off the shelf to flip through.

“Many are written by and for amateurs,” Yoo Joonghyuk said, ignoring his criticism.

Kim Dokja blinked. “You’re that into cooking?”

Yoo Joonghyuk evidently didn’t consider the question worth a response, but Kim Dokja could tell well enough by the critical eye he was employing to scan the cookbook that he must take it seriously.

Learning this sort of thing about him… it felt surreal. Wrong, almost. Like something that wasn’t really supposed to happen.

Yoo Joonghyuk was scowling disapprovingly at the book, so Kim Dokja took it out of his hands and slotted it back on the shelf. “Okay, if you already read cookbooks, this isn’t expanding your horizons. You have to give something else a chance.”

“What do you read?”

“Huh?”

Yoo Joonghyuk’s face was inscrutable. “I am asking what you like to read. It seems you haven’t shown me any of that.”

Kim Dokja opened and closed his mouth. His first impulse, developed from years of people dismissing the type of fiction he liked as childish or trashy, was to deflect. Then again, if Yoo Joonghyuk was approaching this from an outside perspective, he may not have the impulse to immediately call it trashy.

… It wasn’t like Yoo Joonghyuk hadn’t seen him hovering over the shelf of the webnovels, anyway. Maybe he should just give it a try.

When led around the science fiction and fantasy sections, Yoo Joonghyuk didn’t react in any other way than he had for the rest of the tour, though he did hesitantly reach out to investigate a few titles. Emboldened, Kim Dokja kept talking about which series he had read, the merits of various subgenres, and the differences between traditional publishing and webnovels.

Actually, now that he had started talking, he couldn’t seem to stop. He hadn’t had anyone to talk to about books in a very long time.

“Maybe you’d like this one,” he said abruptly, lifting the first book in a long series. “It’s sort of a play on your traditional sword-and-sorcery novel, though with a lot of modern convention added in. I wouldn’t say it’s objectively a good novel… there’s a lot to criticized… but it’s enjoyable. There are some great ideas. Actually, it reminds me a bit of that game—”

He cut himself off. He had been about to say that game you used to speedrun—but of course, Kim Dokja wasn’t supposed to know about that, or even be one of Yoo Joonghyuk’s stream viewers. Yoo Joonghyuk waited for the end of the sentence, eyes marginally narrowed.

“What was it called,” he said, trying to cover up his hesitation. “I’m not sure if you know it, it’s really old one.”

When he did name the game, Yoo Joonghyuk showed no visible reaction, but did pick up the book.

Once they’d been around the whole store and Yoo Joonghyuk was carrying a small stack of books under one arm, Yoo Joonghyuk stopped.

He nodded at the small shelf where he’d caught Kim Dokja reading earlier. “That book you were reading. Was it good?”

“Oh, uh. I’m not sure. It definitely had some interesting hooks. If I finish it sometime, I’ll have to let you know.”

“You’re not buying it?”

Kim Dokja shrugged, smiling. “Maybe next paycheck.”

Wordlessly, Yoo Joonghyuk slid the book onto his own stack. Kim Dokja chuckled. “Or, you tell me if it’s worth picking up, in that case.”

Yoo Joonghyuk glared at him like he was stupid (really, even after he’d gone through the trouble of taking him through the whole bookstore) and then went to pay. The shopkeeper, as usual, kept a perfectly blank face while speaking in a cheery, polite register as she processed the payment. The moment Yoo Joonghyuk’s purchases were in his hands, her gaze dropped again to her own book.

As they left the shop and emerged back into the evening sunlight, Kim Dokja began to feel awkward again. The magic of having someone to rant to about subjects no one normally cared about had been broken. “…Well, uh. I’ll head out. I hope you find an interesting book in there somewhere.”

Wordlessly, Yoo Joonghyuk reached inside his bag, pulled out the novel Kim Dokja had been reading earlier, and slapped it into Kim Dokja’s hands.

“Uh—?” Before he could process anything about this, Yoo Joonghyuk just turned and left. “Hey, hang on a second!”

If anything, Yoo Joonghyuk walked away faster. What the hell was this guy’s problem? Rather than chase after him, Kim Dokja just laughed under his breath, turning the book around in his hands.

… Did Yoo Joonghyuk really have money to spend like this, considering he might be losing his job soon? This guy liked to act tough, but he was kind of adorable, randomly buying a book for someone he’d just met.

Well, hopefully he wouldn’t lose that job, not if DKOS3 had anything to say about it. He had an idea.

***

His victory was announced by way of a single social media post, written in the same detached and professional tone that had caused Kim Dokja to assume the account was run by a manager:

The planned stream for Saturday will be canceled, as I will instead be participating in the competition.

He recognized a few of the accounts celebrating in the comments of that post, though didn’t participate himself—he didn’t have an account on this site that wasn’t tied to his real name. But it was satisfying enough to know that his plan had worked out.

Coverage of the championship seemed to indicate that Yoo Joonghyuk’s team had performed very well. When the next scheduled stream date rolled around, chat was celebrating.

ItsMaia: Can you believe it worked? I wonder how many complaints they really got?

SupremeBeef: It must have been a lot, for them to reverse their position like this.

HKA11: Was it really us who did it, or was it just a coincidence?

DKOS3: Who knows… but I’m happy our Supreme King seems to be getting back into the swing of things.

SupremeBeef: It was a good idea, @DKOS3. Thanks for getting everyone in line.

Yoo Joonghyuk kept focusing on the game, giving no indication he was watching what was going on in chat.

… It wasn’t like Kim Dokja had really done that much, anyway. He’d just messaged the chat regulars, putting special focus on those with large social media presences, and convinced them to all either place a complaint to the company for suspending Yoo Joonghyuk, or cancel their tickets on the condition that Yoo Joonghyuk be allowed to participate again.

He hadn’t been sure whether the company would capitulate to such demands, but he’d also underestimated the Supreme King fanbase. With the esports fans, casual fans, and fangirls combined, it was a pretty significant force. They had managed to turn it into a story of “unfair treatment of a fan favorite player”, which wasn’t the sort of PR the company wanted mid-season.

Once you controlled the public story, you controlled the outcome… that was all there was to it.

ItsMaia: Supreme King, are you happy to be back?

For a long time, Yoo Joonghyuk played silently. Eventually, he spoke up: “Chat should mind its own business. The company made the decision on its own.”

Getting talked down to made half the chat annoyed and half the chat excited. Kim Dokja had to smile—personally, he had a feeling that their little campaign had had something to do with the reinstatement.

Except… had Yoo Joonghyuk really wanted to be reinstated?

Because he had been involved in Yoo Joonghyuk’s suspension, Kim Dokja had felt the need to fix the problem. In retrospect, Yoo Joonghyuk’s actual feelings on the matter hadn’t come into the picture at all.

DKOS3: The company made its own decisions, and so can Yoo Joonghyuk.

When he later turned off the stream and checked his social media, he was surprised to find a message waiting for him.

***

They met up a second time at the café where their first discussion had gone so badly. Kim Dokja was charmed to see that, while Yoo Joonghyuk had been waiting, he had been reading the fantasy book that Kim Dokja had recommended to him.

“Is it to your taste at all?” he asked as he slid into the opposite seat.

Yoo Joonghyuk glanced up, then shut the book and set it aside. “I am not sure yet. I don’t feel a strong connection to the story.”

“You can only get out of a book what you put into it,” Kim Dokja pointed out with a shrug. “Maybe it will surprise you if you give it a chance.”

“They can have your photo taken down,” Yoo Joonghyuk said, bluntly changing the subject. “They do not want it floating around anyway, since they have decided to keep me on the team. I was told it would be taken care of.”

“Oh,” Kim Dokja said, almost having forgotten about the photos. “That’s a relief. Thank you.”

An awkward silence stretched between them, which Kim Dokja rushed to fill. “… was that all you wanted to talk to be about? Couldn’t you say that much over DM?”

Yoo Joonghyuk shifted in his seat. “I had other questions to ask you.”

“… Okay?” When the questions were not forthcoming, Kim Dokja sighed. “Should we get coffee? They’ll probably kick us out if we don’t buy anything.”

The coffee didn’t make it significantly less awkward, though it did help. As they sat back down, Kim Dokja couldn’t help that notice that, behind the sullen silence, Yoo Joonghyuk seemed… troubled.

“Is something wrong?” he asked, unsure how to approach such a situation.

“Kim Dokja,” Yoo Joonghyuk said. “I’ve asked you this before. I want you to think. Don’t we know each other?”

Had he clued in about DKOS3? For some reason, Kim Dokja found himself at a loss for words. “… No?”

“There is…” he ran a hand back through his hair before looking beseechingly back at Kim Dokja. “We are forgetting something.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You don’t?” Yoo Joonghyuk asked. “You haven’t had any odd memories. You haven’t had any dreams.”

For some reason, his heart started pounding. All he could do was repeat, “I don’t know what you mean.”

There was a moment of tense silence before Yoo Joonghyuk let out a long breath. “… Never mind.”

Yoo Joonghyuk looked as if he were contemplating getting up and leaving, so Kim Dokja quickly changed the subject. “So, they’re keeping you on the team… are you happy about that?”

“I am not sure how to feel about it.”

“… Why not? You don’t like the job?”

“No,” Yoo Joonghyuk replied in a matter-of-fact way that made Kim Dokja’s heart sink. “I don’t enjoy it, but it is what I’m good at.”

“… You don’t like gaming?”

“What does it matter?”

“It doesn’t matter to you if you’re unhappy?” Kim Dokja asked disbelievingly. Didn’t dem0nblade play that game so much because he enjoyed it? Or…

Yoo Joonghyuk frowned. “… It’s not that I’m unhappy. It’s just that I’m not happy, either. I feel that I exist in this world, but I’m not sure why.”

“People don’t exist for a particular reason,” Kim Dokja returned immediately. “I don’t know the reason for my existence, either.”

Yoo Joonghyuk’s expression turned thoughtful. He sipped at his drink. “Maybe not… But I believe that there is a reason. And I want to find it.”

“… Why did you get into gaming in the first place, if you didn’t like it?”

“I used to find satisfaction in it,” he said. “Back when I played a different game. I found it meditative. But I achieved my best run of the game, and was happy with it. I didn’t feel the need to keep going.”

“You stopped because you were happy with it?” Kim Dokja repeated, dumbstruck. But the record…

“Yes.” Yoo Joonghyuk took a slow sip of coffee. “… I was recruited to play esports shortly afterward. That I did in order to make a living based on what skills I had. My own happiness didn’t factor in.”

They sat in silence for a bit. Kim Dokja shook his head with a sheepish laugh. “…There has to be something less depressing we can talk about. Hey, the fact that you still have your job, even if you don’t like it, is worth celebrating. It means I can rely on you to buy me another book.”

The life came back into Yoo Joonghyuk’s eyes in the form of a glare. “Why would I do that?”

“What, suddenly your generosity is at an end? That book you got me is only the first in a series.” Rapid-fire, he listed off all the plot points and interesting ideas in the book. “… but then they left the volume on a cliffhanger. I suppose I could just read the web edition, but apparently it changed a lot, so I feel like I’d be reading two different stories at that point.”

“You already finished it?”

“Not everyone is as slow a reader as you are,” Kim Dokja said, indicating the book Yoo Joonghyuk appeared to be about 20% of the way through. Well, to be honest, he’d sacrificed an unhealthy amount of sleep to finish his own book, so his reading speed was not normal.

“Hm.” Was he imagining it, or did Yoo Joonghyuk seem weirdly satisfied?

Their conversation wandered onto other topics. Kim Dokja asked Yoo Joonghyuk what cookbooks he did recommend just to hear him rant.

They learned a bit more about each other. Both lived alone. Both didn’t get out much (which was surprising to Kim Dokja, considering Yoo Joonghyuk was famous and all). Yoo Joonghyuk tolerated Kim Dokja’s endless chatter on the subject of books and was tersely opinionated when it came to his own hobbies.

Dem0nblade, the “Supreme King”… these were both personas with little to do with the man before him. Kim Dokja was coming to understand he’d only ever known a tiny fraction of Yoo Joonghyuk’s thoughts and feelings. That dem0nblade had been happy with his final run—even though it hadn’t broken the world record—was not something that would ever have occurred to him.

In retrospect, maybe it had only been Kim Dokja who had been thinking about the world record. Had the whole story of dogged persistence against the cruel constraints of the game, the world all against him, been a projection of Kim Dokja’s to begin with? Dem0nblade—no, Yoo Joonghyuk—could have wanted something else entirely.

The idea made him feel faintly ill, but it was hard to keep dwelling on his own stupidity with Yoo Joonghyuk seated right across from him.

As they finished their drinks and it was coming time that Kim Dokja had to leave, he found he was reluctant to say so. After all, they would have no excuse to meet again after this. The photo issue would be resolved, and there probably wouldn’t be another accidental bookstore run-in.

“Do you…” he almost started to ask, want to meet up again, but what the hell, was he stupid? “Ah, uh, never mind. Sorry, but it’s about time for me to go.”

To his utter shock, when he went to stand up, Yoo Joonghyuk’s hand shot out to grab his. For a moment, all he could think to do was make a joke about this being the third time, but Yoo Joonghyuk spoke before he could diffuse the situation.

“Let’s meet again,” he said. “If you want to.”

Now, this—this, by any stretch of anyone’s imagination, was not something that would really happen to Kim Dokja. He felt the pulse of a migraine beginning behind his eye. He should snatch his hand away first before it became abundantly clear that this was some kind of cruel joke being played on him.

Deep down in his mind, something was resisting that impulse. It evaporated like a puff of smoke when he tried to grasp onto it with real understanding, but…

This is going to be your last chance, that small voice in his mind seemed to say.

So instead of running away, which was all he wanted to do, he squeezed the hand back, just a little. A bit of a test, to see if this was really okay. “… Sure. If you want to.”

And then, the next least believable thing in the universe happened: Yoo Joonghyuk smiled.

It was the smile of a person Kim Dokja didn’t know. Genuine and simple. “Give me your phone.”

Blindsided into stupidity by the smile, Kim Dokja wordlessly handed over his phone and watched Yoo Joonghyuk type his own number in. “This will be easier. I don’t check my messages on social media often.”

“… Okay. Sounds good.”

That night…

He should have been happy. He wasn’t in so much denial that he couldn’t acknowledge that he liked Yoo Joonghyuk, despite everything. He was glad to have the phone number. He would certainly go meet with Yoo Joonghyuk again, if invited.

So, why…? He couldn’t shake a headache.

We are forgetting something.

He tried to put it out of his mind, but his sleep was troubled that night.

He saw scenes he didn’t have words for. The type of things he read in books, the events and settings all confused and blended together.

There was a woman with a bob cut. She sat alone on a subway, alone in a café, and alone at her house. When he tried to approach her, it was like a thick glass wall prevented him. He could watch but not reach out, nor say a word.

An unfamiliar thought rang in his head.

This was what I chose. And obviously, being able to watch is far better than not being able to.

… But he felt, he felt… like his own soul was being clawed out. Like the reality he had chosen, where he lived separated from everything, was everything he deserved… and it was intolerable.

He beat his hands against the glass until they bled, but no one saw or heard him in his agony. And the woman on the other side, who he was trying to call out to… she, too, was trapped somewhere all alone.

It’s too easy, a voice sighed in his mind. When he turned to look, no one was there—only his own reflection in the glass. I can’t sustain it if it happens like this…

***

He woke the next morning to… way too many notifications.

At first he just put down his phone and groaned into his pillow, but when it was clear he would not fall back asleep and whatever this was would have to be dealt with, he reluctantly started flipping through everything.

First was a text message from Yoo Joonghyuk which read, ominously: Sorry.

The hundreds of other notifications seemed to be from social media accounts, and they… What the hell was all this?

It took him a little bit to work out the chain of events, still hunched over his phone in bed, but eventually he pieced it all together.

First: a photo that someone had snapped of he and Yoo Joonghyuk in the café, Yoo Joonghyuk’s hand overtop Kim Dokja’s. A nosy fan had evidently happened to be nearby, had recognized both Yoo Joonghyuk and Kim Dokja, and had snapped the photo. It had then been shared on social media in order to speculate about the private life of their favourite streamer.

Second: Someone had made that connection. The reason why his accounts were blowing up with messages was that someone, somewhere had noticed the similarity between this much clearer photograph of his face and a certain kid whose mother had ▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪ ▪▪▪—

It was suddenly very difficult to breathe. An unfamiliar, inescapable pressure seemed to press down on him from above.

Please don’t remember that here.

When he had recovered enough to keep going, he resumed scrolling.

Third: People were being incredibly invasive and antagonistic towards Yoo Joonghyuk because of this. Some of it was garden-variety homophobia, as many seemed to have interpreted the picture as having been a date (had it? He had to put that idea out of his mind). Some was the cyber-bullying version of harassment he had gotten as a child.

When he waded through all the notifications to glance at Yoo Joonghyuk’s official account, the message there made his stomach sink even further.

I will no longer be streaming or participating in esports. Thanks for your support.

… No. Was it because of this? Just because of just being associated with Kim Dokja? That just wasn’t acceptable.

Shakily, Kim Dokja pulled up Yoo Joonghyuk in his text message contacts. So far, their conversation only had the one message: Sorry.

Kim Dokja

Hey. You’re quitting your job? Is it because of all of this?

You bastard, what the hell are you thinking? You just got reinstated!

Shockingly, Yoo Joonghyuk replied quickly.

Yoo Joonghyuk

That was my own decision to make.

Kim Dokja

So you’re saying it has nothing to do with his shitstorm that’s happening on social media right now?

Because someone got that photo of us?

People need to mind their business. What a huge invasion of privacy.

… I thought that first photo of me was going to be taken down.

Yoo Joonghyuk

It was in the process of being taken down. The timing of this was very bad.

Kim Dokja

Yeah, I believe you, I just

You can’t quit, okay?

Yoo Joonghyuk

I can do what I wish.

Kim Dokja

Where are you right now??

… Demanding to meet with Yoo Joonghyuk seemed like a terrible idea immediately after he sent the message. But to his simultaneous dread and relief, Yoo Joonghyuk replied: he was at home. If Kim Dokja wanted to talk so badly, he could go there.

As he left his apartment, the strange sense of pressure he’d felt before seemed to keep looming down on him. He felt like he was fleeing something: that it was right on his tail, whatever it was, eating up the streets behind him and chasing the subway car as it rattled through its tunnel.

He was sure of it: if he could just reach Yoo Joonghyuk and convince him not to do it, everything would be all right.

When he finally reached the door and Yoo Joonghyuk opened it, though… his convictions evaporated. Whatever had propelled him here so urgently seemed to vanish. They were just two people standing on the opposite sides of a threshold.

If he realized that Kim Dokja was behaving like a maniac, Yoo Joonghyuk gave no sign of it. He seemed a little off-balance himself, with visible circles under his eyes. “… You can come in.”

“Oh. Right.” Standing frozen out front of the apartment was also a weird thing to do, but it felt like this… this easy access into Yoo Joonghyuk’s life, his home, was also deeply improbable.

But Yoo Joonghyuk stepped aside, Kim Dokja moved inside, and the world didn’t yet end.

Yoo Joonghyuk’s home was… spare. It didn’t seem like he owned much furniture or personal items. It gave the impression that he’d moved in only recently, though a lack of boxes made it more likely that he simply lived like this. It was a space that felt like it was missing something. For a few moments, Kim Dokja just looked around, puzzled.

“I didn’t expect it to happen this way,” Yoo Joonghyuk said. “If I knew in advance, I would have pressured the company to take the photo down sooner.”

Right. The photo. How was it he kept forgetting about the most urgent problem in his own life?

Kim Dokja sighed. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. Somebody would have saved and reuploaded it… once this stuff takes on a life of its own, there’s no stopping it. They’ll never leave you alone.”

“Hm.”

“Yoo Joonghyuk,” Kim Dokja said, tearing his eyes away from the walls of the apartment. “Why are you quitting?”

His gaze, despite the situation, was steady and clear. “I decided to.”

“You can’t,” was all the argument that Kim Dokja could think to muster.

A flash of anger crossed Yoo Joonghyuk’s face. “What—I should go back? Keep performing for these people like I am a trained animal?”

“I…”

“Being controlled, gawked at, judged … these are things I despise the most,” Yoo Joonghyuk continued. “You must feel similarly. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have been so determined to avoid having your face associated with mine.”

“… It is something like that,” Kim Dokja admitted. Now that everything was online for the debate and amusement of the public, Yoo Joonghyuk had certainly been made aware of Kim Dokja’s history. He supposed he should muster some kernel of gratefulness that Yoo Joonghyuk wasn’t being weird about it. “But, quitting… won’t it be a problem for you?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Yoo Joonghyuk said. “The job is irrelevant. This world… There is someone I want to find. That’s more important.”

That caught Kim Dokja off guard entirely. “Who the hell could you possibly need to find?”

“I think, in this world, it’s someone who goes by the screen name of ‘DKOS3’.”

After a moment of shocked silence, Kim Dokja barked a laugh. “You have to be kidding me. What are you talking about now? You have to find someone’s screen name, and that’s why you’re quitting your job?”

“You don’t understand—”

“I’m DKOS3!” he exclaimed. A jolt of pain went through his head. “And I, I’m the one who…”

… He was the one who what? Watched his videos? No, that wasn’t it. He’d done something else entirely. The unnamed pressure returned, seizing around his lungs.

Yoo Joonghyuk stepped closer—too close, but Kim Dokja didn’t back away. “I know.”

“You know?” Kim Dokja demanded weakly.

“Of course. You don’t lie as well as you think you do, Kim Dokja.”

So… all this time he’d known and didn’t care? Kim Dokja struggled to find the words. “I… I’m just someone who watched videos online. You hate your viewers. Why would you want to find me?”

“It is time to stop lying,” Yoo Joonghyuk demanded. “Didn’t you create this world in the first place? Every obstacle being thrown in our way—you are doing it yourself.”

“That’s not it.”

“I am trying to understand.” Yoo Joonghyuk took Kim Dokja’s hands in his own. “Look at me. Who am I to you?”

 When their eyes locked, Kim Dokja felt a concussive blast of emotion, breaking through a wall he had laid down with all his strength.

It was… too much, all at once. Frustration, admiration, sorrow, love. Despair, loneliness, hands bloodied against a wall.

His mouth was dry. “Someone I can never meet again.”

“But I am here, now. Didn’t you call me?”

“I don’t know.” His throat started to close up and he paused to cough. “If I did, then why did you come? How did you come?”

“I can’t remember how,” Yoo Joonghyuk said. “But I know that I wanted to speak with you. I wanted to understand these feelings that have been coming to me, through all these abandoned memories. Tell me. Is this it?”

He came even closer. Tilted up Kim Dokja’s chin. Inexplicably, Kim Dokja’s eyes welled with tears.

“This is only the smallest fraction of it,” he said, but when Yoo Joonghyuk’s face leaned in, almost like a challenge, he dared to press a light, hesitant kiss to his lips.

 Yoo Joonghyuk kissed back—also gently, barely more than a brush. With that contact, memories began to spark back to life.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. They were not in their original worldline. They had left those stories far behind them.

[L… ife and Dea..th… Co…pan…ions… is……. ing….]

But in a way, that was good. In this world, one of them didn’t need to kill the other. One of them didn’t need to cause the other’s suffering. The craggy and uneven ground beneath their feet, the betrayals and the violence and the inescapable chains of fate, had been smoothed flat. The world they lived in now was one big question they were asking each other.

Kim Dokja initiated another kiss with purpose, feeling a thrill when Yoo Joonghyuk responded in kind. His hand rose to Kim Dokja’s face, the side of his thumb sliding from his jaw to behind his ear.

For a moment, he was able to forget all about everything. He pushed Yoo Joonghyuk back against a wall and Yoo Joonghyuk let him, with a soft noise of surprise.

With every touch, more memories started to bubble up. That world where they had fought together couldn’t be abandoned so easily.

When Kim Dokja tugged at the collar of Yoo Joonghyuk’s sweater, he felt a twin sensation of pulling another Yoo Joonghyuk, broken and scarred after 1863 regression turns, to his feet. When Yoo Joonghyuk’s hand ghosted across his back, he recalled a surprisingly similar embrace in the Dark Castle, while he was dying from a stab through the heart.

[Life and Death… ions…. t..rying……]

He broke away with a sudden clarity of mind. “I’m sorry. You don’t really want this from me, do you?”

“Shut up,” Yoo Joonghyuk growled. His hand on Kim Dokja’s arm prevented him from fleeing. “Let me decide that for myself.”

“You…” a little unsteadily, Kim Dokja raised his hand to Yoo Joonghyuk’s cheek. The absence of scars on his smooth skin was striking. “Tell me, which Yoo Joonghyuk are you?”

“How many do you know?”

He laughed, somewhat bitterly. “At this point, it must be all of them.”

“In that case, I don’t see how it matters.” When Yoo Joonghyuk pulled him close again, Kim Dokja was unable to do anything but reach out in return. At the first questing press of Yoo Joonghyuk’s lips, Kim Dokja kissed back hard, certainly too forceful and clumsy, but unable to hold himself back.

Yoo Joonghyuk was so close. Before coherent thoughts could catch up with Kim Dokja, he found himself slipping a hand under Yoo Joonghyuk’s shirt. Okay, wow, this was honestly just unrealistic, why was he this impossibly cut?

Kim Dokja hesitated briefly, but that moment apparently gave Yoo Joonghyuk free reign to grab him, tip him back over the couch a few feet away, and pin him down through the simple press of body weight.

Yoo Joonghyuk pressed a trail of kisses into his skin, starting at the jawline and ending down at the collarbone, zeroing in on his most sensitive areas. Kim Dokja hissed in a breath, hand bunching against Yoo Joonghyuk’s back.

This was… it still didn’t make sense to him, that Yoo Joonghyuk actually did want this. Was enjoying it. Could touch someone like Kim Dokja like this, so gently.

With an effort of will, Kim Dokja lashed down all his struggling memories and buried them. The more he remembered, the less time this would last—that much he was certain of.

They were breathing heavily, pressed close together. With all his brainpower flowing south, it was actually pretty easy to ignore his own memories. His body had much better ideas of what to focus on right now.

He forgot the building tickle in his lungs when Yoo Joonghyuk experimentally dipped a hand under his waistline.

Apparently noticing Kim Dokja’s complete lack of mental coherence caused by that single touch, Yoo Joonghyuk actually smirked. “This is okay, then?”

Once he managed to recall human speech, he managed a “Yes.” Barely letting Kim Dokja move at all under his weight, Yoo Joonghyuk resumed what he was doing.

This was so impossible. Even the degree to which he liked this seemed impossible. In the end, it could be so horribly, devastatingly simple. Forget “fate”, forget “regressions”, forget everything.

They could be happy like this.

His lungs seized instantly, making him jerk to the side with a hoarse cough. Looking somewhat adorably alarmed with his tousled hair and disarrayed clothes, Yoo Joonghyuk withdrew immediately and helped Kim Dokja get into a seated position. They hadn’t actually gotten that far—still mostly clothed. “What’s happening?”

“Sorry,” Kim Dokja wheezed once he got his breath back. Suffocating half to death on stories sure killed the mood. “I just remembered more than I’m allowed to. We don’t have long now. We had better talk.”

… Even if he’d actually much rather be doing something else.

“I don’t understand.”

 “You said we were missing something earlier. Do you remember yet? It wasn’t just you and I, in that other world… there were others.”

Their names still slid out of his grip, but he recalled their faces. People he loved living their lives in a world without him. And, urgently… the face of Han Sooyoung, trapped behind a glass wall in his dream.

Or had it been him trapped behind the wall, and her walking free on the other side?

Confusion passed over Yoo Joonghyuk’s face. “I’m not sure…”

“This world we’re living in, where you’re a streamer and I watched your videos. It’s not a real worldline,” Kim Dokja said. “You said as much. You said I created it. But… I don’t think I did. I think I ended up here by accident.”

The corner of Yoo Joonghyuk’s mouth twitched. “Who else but you would imagine such a ridiculous world?”

“Okay, this is not the time to make fun of me,” Kim Dokja complained. “This isn’t the only world I’ve been to recently. The first I remember, it was you, myself, and one other person who found each other because we were having dreams of our original worldline. Do you remember that?”

After a moment, his eyes sharpened. “I… Yes. I remember that. I remember her. Han Sooyoung.”

Han Sooyoung, with a self-satisfied grin on her face. Black flames threatening to consume her body as she threw herself into danger to protect those she claimed she didn’t care for. A lemon-flavored candy slotted into his mouth.

An avatar, forging her own story with bloodied hands.

Kim Dokja tried to ford off the memories as he coughed—he needed to explain more to Yoo Joonghyuk before it all fell apart. He could see the fragments already beginning to rise from his body.

The more he remembered, the less he could accept this world—Maybe that was why. Thinking that he could be happy might be what he could accept the least of anything.

“After that,” he said, his voice rasping, “there was another world. One where Han Sooyoung and I existed, but you did not. At that time, what happened to you?”

“I was… alone,” Yoo Joonghyuk said after a moment. “I’m not sure how else to explain it.”

“I don’t know what’s happening to us,” Kim Dokja said. “These worlds might just keep cycling forever. She said—in the last one, Han Sooyoung seemed to think that if we could forget about our original worldline entirely, we could keep living here in peace without coming apart.”

Yoo Joonghyuk made a noise of disapproval. “Living in a dream rather than reality would be foolish.”

“But she also seemed to think it was the only way we could stay together,” Kim Dokja said, trying to suppress his rising dread. It was possible that these worlds would keep cycling forever, but he had the suspicion he’d dissolve away for good long before that happened.

A faint certainty pricked at the back of his mind: Something had happened to him in the real worldline. Something irrecoverable.

This world, be it dream or reality, might be the only place he could still exist.

… And apparently, sans their memories, they spent their existence doing stuff like this. Having coffee and meeting each other and everything else. He coughed through what nearly managed to be a laugh. The fragments of him—of his most precious stories—escaped helplessly from his lungs.

One whispered: [… If I had met you back in the normal world, I would never ever have become your friend.]

Yoo Joonghyuk frowned. “Kim Dokja.”

“What I’m saying is,” he said, grabbing Yoo Joonghyuk’s arm in his urgency, “is that there are three of us here, in this false worldline. Not one of us can be left behind. I can’t let that happen.”

Yoo Joonghyuk kneeled in front of the couch so that they were on a level. His arms wrapped carefully around Kim Dokja, as if trying to hold the splitting fragments together. “We will find each other—and get out together.”

Kim Dokja choked a laugh. The undecorated walls and nondescript furniture began to fade until it was just the two of them embracing in the snowy void. He leaned forward, resting his head on Yoo Joonghyuk’s shoulder, clinging back to him with shaking arms.

This guy would think of it that way—that they could “get out”.

“Yeah,” he said. “Together. I want to get out together.”

He held on as tight as he could, but Yoo Joonghyuk’s warmth soon vanished from his arms. There was a sensation of terrible cold, of separation. His last chance, he realized, had just passed him by.

What awaited him now was the only ending he knew.

Chapter Text

Han Sooyoung entered Yoo Joonghyuk’s trailer to tell him something about the script notes. Three minutes later, she was pinning him to a chair, kissing him while one of his hands moved through the hair on the back of her head.

She pulled back, attempting to focus as his other hand wandered to her stomach. “I did actually have something to talk to you about.”

“Hm,” Yoo Joonghyuk grunted, clearly disinterested.

“’Hm’ at me all you want, you giant log, but we do both have a job to do here.”

“You’re the one who started doing this instead.”

At the brush of a calloused thumb on her thigh, Han Sooyoung abruptly decided: actually, who cares about what she originally came here for. The script, with its crabbed bundles of annotations and colorful array of sticky notes, lay abandoned on the tiny table near the door.

There were… a few reasons why things ended up like this between them.

They weren’t in an actual relationship—hell no. Han Sooyoung had standards. The first of those was “can carry on an actual conversation” (Yoo Joonghyuk could not). The second was “recognizes her genius and respects her work” (Yoo Joonghyuk did not).

Unfortunately, she had other standards that were very well met.

After they had been making out for a while, she started grinding against him with a purpose. He let out a small noise of disapproval, even as he pulled her closer. “… I do have to be on set soon.”

“You’re the star. They can wait.”

“They can… hh.” Too bad for this guy, by this point Han Sooyoung knew exactly how to drive him crazy. “Han Sooyoung.”

“Would you rather talk script notes?” she sighed, pausing her movements to attempt to look as hot as possible. Admittedly, her schlubby 18-hour-workday outfits weren’t exactly the best she could do in that department, but Yoo Joonghyuk never seemed to mind much.

“We have time for one or the other,” Yoo Joonghyuk said.

“Ugh, fine. Then you’re reading.” After a moment’s indecision, Han Sooyoung wiggled off of him and reached for the annotated script. “We’re shooting the warehouse scene today, look it over.”

For a few minutes, Yoo Joonghyuk silently reviewed the layers of scribbled notes. Han Sooyoung had crossed out notes left by others.

“… You aren’t supposed to be giving me script notes,” he observed. “Much less those that contradict the director’s.”

“Whatever,” Han Sooyoung snapped. “The director’s an idiot. This is exactly what he needs, he just doesn’t understand that it’s what he needs.”

“And you’ll pile all the work on me to make up the difference.”

“You can handle it,” Han Sooyoung said blithely. “C’mon, your talents are being wasted on this disaster of a production. Try a little. Make it count. Then, maybe, in the end…”

She stared up at the ceiling, letting her sentence trail off.

Maybe, in the end, just a tiny fraction of something she herself had put into this story would come through. When she glanced back down, Yoo Joonghyuk was looking at her.

“If you insist,” he said, and kept reading.

***

It was a doomed production, doomed from the start. Han Sooyoung hadn’t had much say about the rights to her book being sold to make a film adaptation. She hadn’t had a say in the director, production teams, or casting.

She was permitted to be on-site because having the writer on hand made the director feel good about himself. Their discussions consisted of him cajoling her into advertising to her audience on social media. The only reason she’d agreed to the rights being sold was that she had been promised she’d be allowed on-set as a consultant…

Unfortunately, that turned out to be worth less than nothing.

The only redeeming feature of the production was the casting of the protagonist. Everything else was a disaster—the script had little to do with the original story, the costuming was terrible, the set design was way off—but if someone had given Han Sooyoung all the freedom in the world to choose someone to play her protagonist, it would certainly still be Yoo Joonghyuk.

That said, the guy was annoying as hell to work with.

His blunt and disagreeable attitude made interactions with his coworkers unpleasant. His arrogance made him resent being told what to do, which as an actor being perpetually directed off a script, was a bad personality trait to have.

Finally, and perhaps most annoyingly: he never complained about anything.

While actor Yoo Joonghyuk wasn’t exactly a household name, he did have popularity in certain circles after his roles in recent action dramas. He was known for doing a lot of his own stunts and being willing to take on punishing roles most actors would balk at.

While that did contribute to his popularity and made things convenient for the showrunners, it also resulted in Yoo Joonghyuk being worked to the bone. He didn’t complain about the physical strain, the long hours, or the laissez-faire safety conditions on set… and, as Han Sooyoung discovered one evening, neither would he complain about outright injury.

It was a scene that didn’t exist in the original novel. In order to add a twist of dramatic conflict to a sequence, the script called for the protagonist to blithely walk into a trap, set in a warehouse. He would realize he had been betrayed, then get in a fight where he’d take down the entire group of his opponents one by one. There was some fast-paced choreography involved.

To begin the scene, Yoo Joonghyuk would say a couple of lines, strike the person he was talking to, then rush towards his next target by vaulting over a box. This was where the accident happened: the box, which should have been sturdy enough to brace his weight against, caved in. He went down.

Han Sooyoung, who was tucked away behind the camera with the production assistants, noticed instantly that Yoo Joonghyuk did not get up as quickly as he should have. When he did get back to his feet, there was a pinched quality to his face.

“Cut,” the director said, sounding annoyed. “What was that?”

“… The box broke.”

“All right, let’s forget the vault, then. Just run around the box for the next take.”

“What the fuck?” Han Sooyoung muttered. “Is no one even going to check if he’s hurt or not?”

“He hates that,” one of the production assistants observed, sounding a bit snippy. “Nearly bit the production manager’s head off the first time. It’s best to just let him be.”

Well, he could be an asshole, but still. The production manager wasn’t exactly the most competent of people on set. Even now, she didn’t seem to have noticed that the fall had taken place. It was probably just that Yoo Joonghyuk didn’t like dealing with her specifically…

Even so, he should speak up if he were injured, right? But instead, he just ran the scene again, stunts and all.

It wasn’t good enough, either. “It was too slow that time. You need to deliver the line, then immediately take off in that direction…”

Take after take crawled by with no one even suggesting a break. Shooting had run late, and some people had been on set for upwards of twelve hours by that point. Suggesting a break would just drag things on even longer.

Even so, Han Sooyoung was feeling antsy. Was she the only one capable of seeing that Yoo Joonghyuk was getting paler? Why the hell wasn’t he speaking up? He was an adult man fully capable of saying he needed to take a break to go see a doctor. It wasn’t any of Han Sooyoung’s god-damned business if he couldn’t do that much for himself.

The continued passage of minutes gradually drove her more and more insane. Eventually, she found herself standing up as the director called for yet another take.

“Hey! Why are we still running takes on this scene, anyway? There must be enough footage by now to make it look good.”

“Han Sooyoung-ssi,” the director said in his fake-cheerful voice that meant, stop interfering in the business of real professionals. “I’m sure you’re tired, why don’t you head out while we finish the scene? There’s no need for you to sit in this late.”

Yes, sitting in! Because she was just an outside observer here as a favor and had nothing to do whatsoever with the actual creation of this film. “I actually need to talk to you about something, Director-nim, before I leave today. It’s about licensing issues…”

“Talk to anyone on the production staff,” the director said dismissively. “I’m sure you can see we’re in the middle of something here.”

“But it’s really very urgent,” Han Sooyoung pointed out, inviting herself into the director’s personal space. This guy liked to talk like he was hot shit, but it wasn’t like he was exactly a household name, either. No one on this production was. He had no real business acting like a such a perfectionist, to the point where this scene had to be redone so many times. “I don’t think anyone else could have the knowledge to deal with this. Anyway, the scene looked perfect to me the last three times.”

The director continued to try and put her off; Han Sooyoung stuck to him like glue, making it clear she’d let him get no more work done today regardless. Maybe people didn’t exactly find her charming, but she could out-stubborn almost anyone when she put her mind to it.

Finally, with a defeated sigh, the director said to everyone, “Why don’t we wrap for the day.” The annoyed look in his eye suggested that if the annoying author pulled a few more stunts like this, she’d get kicked off-set for good.

A few of the staff shot relieved looks in Han Sooyoung’s direction for finally ending the hell of repeating takes. Yoo Joonghyuk was not one of them. As soon as he was free to go, he vanished in the direction of his trailer.

Han Sooyoung harassed the director with irrelevant things just long enough to justify forcing production to wrap, then quickly headed off in pursuit.

It had been long enough that Yoo Joonghyuk was settled inside the trailer with the door shut—not, Han Sooyoung observed, doing anything to seek out a medical professional.

“Hey,” she called, banging on the door at full strength. “I need to talk to you.”

After some shuffling within, the door cracked open. “What.”

“Did you hurt yourself just now?”

She could pretty much only see his eye and a sliver of bare chest. The eye narrowed. “Why.”

“What do you mean why? Are you stupid, running a billion takes on an injury? Open the damned door, I don’t want to stand here in the open yelling at you all night.”

With an annoyed exhalation of air, he opened the door. “If you insist.”

The trailer’s single tiny table surface had a first-aid kit open on it, and as Yoo Joonghyuk turned back towards it, Han Sooyoung saw the injury in full clarity. A nasty, purplish-red bruise was forming all over the muscle above his left shoulder blade, accompanied by patches of blood where the skin had torn.

She blinked. “How did you hurt yourself that badly from one fall?”

“I hit something on the floor,” Yoo Joonghyuk said. “A tool or something.”

“What a safety hazard! Why is everyone running this production so incompetent?”

 “It’s not that uncommon as film productions of this level go,” Yoo Joonghyuk informed her. “… If you’re here to pick up where we left off last time, I am not exactly in the mood.”

… Well, just because that was usually why she came to Yoo Joonghyuk’s trailer didn’t mean that was her goal every time. “Who said that’s why I came? I was going to yell at you to see a doctor.”

“That’s not necessary.” Staunchly ignoring her presence, Yoo Joonghyuk sat back down with a cotton pad and disinfectant.

She watched him make several awkward attempts to reach the injury without actually moving his arm before she sighed dramatically. “… This is painful to watch. Let me do that.”

Yoo Joonghyuk flashed her a strange look. For a moment, Han Sooyoung was sure he was about to kick her out for being so presumptuous. But what the hell, they had literally had sex and he was drawing the line at dabbing a cotton pad on his skin?

After a second, though, he acquiesced. “Fine.”

She leaned over him and poked at the injury, feeling him flinch. “This is going to turn some fantastic colors before it goes away. You don’t have any shirtless scenes coming up, do you?”

“Just disinfect it.”

“Fine, fine,” she sighed, snatching up the required implements.

After saturating the cotton pad with disinfectant, she pressed it along the bloody areas. It really was kind of nasty. Not the sort of injury a normal person would tolerate for hours of additional shooting, that was certain.

Yoo Joonghyuk’s back twitched as she got into the worst of it. “You can just dab it. Don’t drag it, you’re irritating the broken skin. There is also too much disinfectant on the pad.”

“Sorry for not being a medical professional,” Han Sooyoung muttered, though she did make an attempt to fix her technique. “One of those would actually know what they were doing—Just a thought for next time.”

“As I said, it’s not necessary. I’ve had worse.”

“You can’t even reach up here on your own, how were you going to deal with it yourself?”

“I would have managed. Taking the day off to see a doctor would not have been permitted, anyway.”

“Hm.” Han Sooyoung unintentionally pressed the wound harder than she needed to. A muscle in Yoo Joonghyuk’s jaw twitched in response. “… Sorry. This seems disinfected enough, what now?”

“Apply gauze to the bleeding areas,” Yoo Joonghyuk said.

“Oh, I can handle that,” Han Sooyoung assured him, despite having no real basis for her confidence.

“… I think you are the only one capable of making the injury worse through medical care.”

“Oh, shut up. Hand over the gauze. You really think you can apply it yourself like this?”

Despite his complaints, the gauze was handed over.

“So,” Han Sooyoung continued conversationally, “do those bastards really not give you a day off to see a doctor?”

“It’s easier to sleep it off.”

It wasn’t like she actually cared that much personally about Yoo Joonghyuk, but, well… this whole project was basically her fault, for letting the rights to her story be sold off to this shitty production company. She couldn’t escape responsibility for this, right? “… Why do you work for these people if they treat you like this?”

“I am under contract,” Yoo Joonghyuk said. “I have very little choice.”

Han Sooyoung paused in the middle of trying to affix the gauze. Yoo Joonghyuk spoke without much inflection, but his eyes were dark with fury.

Rather than make her uneasy, she found it was almost a relief. She had been nursing that same impotent rage lately, thoroughly fed up with a world that had disregarded her and pushed her around and given her no good choices.

She said, “get out of your contract, then.”

“Breaking it counts as a breach,” Yoo Joonghyuk said. “I can’t afford to get out unless they let me out—and they won’t.”

“Not unless it were more profitable for them to do so.”

He frowned, turning slightly towards her. “What exactly are you saying?”

“Hey, did I say I was done?” she snapped, turning his head back around. “Stay still.”

“You are taking a long time to apply gauze.”

“Did I not just say I’m not an expert? You can’t complain about getting incompetent help if you won’t go get real help.”

She worked in silence for a bit before saying, “What I mean is… this whole production is a fucking nightmare. I’d rather my work never get adapted at all if it’s going to get adapted like this. But like you, I’m also under contract now that the rights have been sold.”

“… you also want out.”

“Tell you what, Yoo Joonghyuk,” she said, drawing back to admire her handiwork with the gauze. If anything, she’d made it look worse, but it should at least stop him from bleeding all over his clothes. “Why don’t we burn this whole thing to the fucking ground?”

***

There were some people who were never, ever happy, no matter what.

If this person achieved their goal, they would immediately start reaching for the next one, as if the initial goal had always meant nothing. If they received praise for their work, they resented it. If they achieved fame and fortune, they would only want more—always chasing the level that would provide them with some elusive “happiness”.

As if this sort of person would ever understand happiness, even if they got their hands on it.

Fuck it, she used to be fine designing her stories to maximize profit and increase her readership. Hadn’t that been her original goal, to write popular stories? The film would be great for sales, so why the hell was she so hung up on this?

Sometimes it felt like she’d lived her entire life heartbroken. She had had something, lost it, and now couldn’t remember what it was or even how it had felt to have it. Her normal priorities when it came to writing had begun to ring hollow. She wanted to dig deep and write something else. It was important for her to write something else.

In the end, she had poured all of those feelings into this story. That was probably why the original book, without a string of egregious script changes, wasn’t very “marketable”.

***

Despite what she had told Yoo Joonghyuk, literally burning the production to the ground, while tempting, would be considered arson. Han Sooyoung had ideas that were less illegal.

… Less illegal, but way more painful.

“I want to apologize for being so persistent yesterday,” she told the director when they next met, flashing him her most winning smile to hide the fact that she’d rather be biting her own fingers off. “When I thought about it later, I realized I’d been a bit pushy with my timing. I should trust the professionals.”

The director looked at her with suspicion until she opened her phone and flipped to her author social media page. “Also, I’ll start advertising the production online now, like you asked. I’ll be sure to include something about your work, too. What kind of behind-the-scenes photos am I allowed to share, again?”

He brightened, and soon enough Han Sooyoung was through the distasteful task of sucking up to him and had him pretty much wrapped around her little finger. What their esteemed director really wanted was attention, and Han Sooyoung now had reason to ensure he got it.

… It wasn’t going to be something he’d thank her for later, though.

Aside from the attention, he also very much liked being in control. That was why he’d fixate on a scene and make everyone run through it so many times, long past the point of having decent takes. Han Sooyoung was pretty sure he just liked making everyone run around at his whims—and valued the ‘authenticity’ of his actors looking tired and stressed.

And so: she and Yoo Joonghyuk decided to see just so far that would stretch.

Yoo Joonghyuk began to act on Han Sooyoung’s advice, ignoring the preferences of the director. When corrected, he continued to not quite deliver the correct performance. Always just a little off.

It became a contest of endurance between Yoo Joonghyuk and the director, one that Han Sooyoung was sure the director was not going to win. If they ran the same scene a hundred times, Yoo Joonghyuk was still implacable. The staff, other actors, and production manager, however, found it a little more difficult.

“We really need to move on to the next scene we’re shooting today,” the production manager finally said at one point, belatedly remembering to do her job as the schedule began to escape her control. “We’re already behind schedule.”

Han Sooyoung saw in the director’s eyes that he was faltering.

“Can we really just give up on this take so soon?” Han Sooyoung asked, blinking with surprise at the hapless production manager. “This scene is so pivotal for the story. My audience is really looking for it to be done well, I mentioned today online how hard our director was working on it.”

“There must have been several useable takes…” The production manager said helplessly, but it was a losing battle.

“Yoo Joonghyuk, surely you can run at least one more take? You’ve almost got it down, right?” Han Sooyoung asked with a grin.

“The next one will surely be correct,” Yoo Joonghyuk said, meeting her gaze. They managed to drag it out several more hours.

It wasn’t long before the production was catastrophically behind schedule. Han Sooyoung’s social media posts were doing even better than she’d hoped—it seemed the fans of her novel had been starved for content, and anything involving Yoo Joonghyuk’s mug seemed to do doubly well. It was too bad that, if this movie really did come out, they were all sure to despise it.

It was a bit satisfying to cause problems like this, but it wasn’t quite enough. As the days crawled by, a pressure seemed to build on Han Sooyoung’s shoulders, pushing down harder on her by the hour. She needed to do something—end this permanently—get the fuck out of this place.

I’m not supposed to be here.

That thought reoccurred to her daily, but shit, it wasn’t like she had anywhere else to go.

The only time that pressure even nominally reduced was when she went to see Yoo Joonghyuk.

It wasn’t like she was starting to care about him or anything. They were just working together for the same goal, and happened to have a bit of chemistry outside of that. So what?

So what if one day he looked at her like he understood something, and asked, “Your story. What is it really about?”

“Why do you care?” she asked immediately, deflecting.

They were standing outside in a nook behind the trailers, smoking. Han Sooyoung had picked up a smoking habit at some point, and the longer days she spent on this cursed set the more she leaned on it. She hadn’t thought Yoo Joonghyuk smoked—he was clearly a little obsessive about his health—but to her shock one day he’d wordlessly bummed a smoke and stood there with her.

… In retrospect, maybe she’d accidentally gotten him into the habit? That was a funny thought.

“It’s important to you,” he observed.

She waited for further elaboration, which was not forthcoming. “… And why do you care if it’s important to me? Don’t stick your nose into other people’s business.”

He released a stream of smoke, scowling at her. “… Then don’t tell me.”

“Okay, fine,” she sighed, staring out at the picturesque landscape of concrete parking lot and dingy trailers. Could this be the first time anyone had ever asked that question? “My opinion as the author doesn’t mean that much anyway. It could be ‘about’ something else to a reader. But when I wrote it, it was a story about self-determination. About trying to become a different person.”

“Hm.”

“Your character—the protagonist—is defined by loss. That’s what no one else seems to understand about him,” Han Sooyoung continued, gesturing vaguely with the cigarette still smoking in her hand. “I know people see this type of story as shallow, but I was setting out to say something with it regardless. He sets that loss aside to try and live as a new person.”

“…But even so, he can’t escape it. The conclusion you reach is that it’s not possible to become a new person.”

 Han Sooyoung flashed him a suspicious look. “You haven’t read the novel, have you?”

“Not the whole thing,” Yoo Joonghyuk said. “I am just thinking about your notes.”

Han Sooyoung sighed. “Yeah, well. It’s something like that. He can become a new person in some ways and in others it’s impossible. Even when he comes out on top, there’s an empty space at the heart of him. There’s something haunting him forever he won’t escape. I guess that’s what it’s about.”

“A cheerful story. It’s surprising that the production company didn’t want to include that aspect.”

She looked up at him, affronted by the light hint of a smile in his eyes. Sarcasm from Yoo Joonghyuk? The world was turning inside-out. “What the hell, you’re the one who asked!”

“If we manage what we’re doing, it won’t get adapted again after this,” Yoo Joonghyuk pointed out.

“I’m well aware. The whole adaptation idea was a nightmare anyway,” Han Sooyoung muttered, shook the last of the ash off the cigarette, then dropped the butt to extinguish with her shoe. She immediately wanted to light up another, but found she was out. “I don’t care anymore.”

Seeing her reach for the carton and not find anything, Yoo Joonghyuk frowned at her. “Chain smoking is a bad habit.”

“I’ll let you criticize me when you also aren’t standing there smoking,” Han Sooyoung grumbled.

“I don’t need to,” he claimed, holding out his own cigarette, not even halfway through it. “In fact, I’d better think of my health and stop here.”

… She’d given him the damned cigarette in the first place, anyway. Wordlessly, she took it back and slipped it between her lips. When she glanced back at Yoo Joonghyuk, he was watching the sky with an oddly soft expression.

“Sometimes I really can’t stand you,” she said conversationally.

“I’m aware.”

They stood together a little longer in the parking lot, the white trail of smoke rising between them and up into the featureless grey sky.

***

The day everything finally went to shit started with the usual. The scene was dragging on longer than intended. By this point the production manager clearly realized that something was up, but in the face of the director’s dogged stupidity, could do nothing to stop it.

It was a special day—they had a big name producer visiting on set. It was the perfect time to spark the powder keg and prove to everyone that this production would never be completed.

As yet another take dragged on excessively, Han Sooyoung abruptly stood. “Yoo Joonghyuk. Are you even fucking trying?”

The sharp tone of her voice seemed to catch everyone off guard except for him. “I am acting. You’re only here as a guest, so don’t criticize me.”

The production manager tried to speak up to get everyone to calm down, but Han Sooyoung cheerfully steamrolled over her words. “You call this acting? You’re going to be responsible for making this whole production fall to pieces.”

“Don't you get tired of hanging around set and trying to boss everybody around?” he asked. There was a dangerous, resentful look in his eye. “You’ve been disrupting this production from the start. You should be removed from set.”

He looked toward the director, who winced. “Well… Han Sooyoung-ssi is…”

“I won’t be kicked off set,” Han Sooyoung said with a grin, moving toward Yoo Joonghyuk. He had been shooting a solo scene, and though the audio and camera crew was crowded in a loose circle around him, it was mostly just him standing alone in the center of the room. The harsh lighting still directed at him seemed to outline his body in pure white. “Actually, I think it’s you who should be fired off this production. Not only are you useless as an actor, but you’re trying to tank this thing on purpose.”

“I’m not the one who is trying to bring the production down,” Yoo Joonghyuk said, voice dropping. “It’s too late to reshoot my scenes anyway. Any commotion you make won’t change anything. We’re both in this hell together until it’s over.”

“You’re not as important as you seem to think you are,” she said, stepping into his personal space.

“I’m not important,” he said, his voice flat. “Neither are you. That’s why you are so miserable.”

The argument was staged, but that was a little personal. “Want to run that one by me again?”

“I understand now why you hate me,” he continued. His voice had dropped a little, no longer carrying out to reach everyone in the room. “You don’t really want to burn this production down, despite what you say. You still want to save it. You resent me for not being willing to save it for you.”

Of course this guy only now got bit by the ability to speak multiple sentences in a row. She found herself giving him a genuine warning. “Hey, Yoo Joonghyuk, shut the fuck up.”

“I was your last hope at making this story the way you wanted it,” he said. “I refused. There is nothing of value to save.”

Han Sooyoung felt suddenly that she was losing her mind.

“Fuck you!” she exclaimed, rushing at him. She forgot the lights, the crew crowded all around, that everyone was supposed to be on their best behavior for the visiting producer. A commotion would have been enough, was what they had been aiming for, but instead she went for a full-body tackle.

Sure, she probably weighed only half of that musclebound freak’s body weight, but throwing all of it at him with complete abandon was enough to knock him back.

This stupid, doomed production she’d wasted so much of her life on—that inescapable sense that something was missing—she had never felt this way before this man had shuffled disagreeably into her life. If only he wasn’t so perfect at being her protagonist, she could have moved away from this with no regrets, abandoned the production to being mediocre and kept in good humor about it. Lots of adaptations sucked. Most of them, even. Good for sales either way!

But no, he’d made her want something better, the asshole. Dangled the possibility in front of her, even though she should have known better.

The overwhelming rage pounding through her body hardly even seemed like hers.

No value in it! The worst part was that he was right.

Yoo Joonghyuk’s foot hit a light fixture and they both went down. Han Sooyoung had never been in a real fight before, but some unknown instinct was driving her. It was like she was possessed. Yoo Joonghyuk struggled to throw her off and she wrenched his wrists away.

Whatever was possessing her filled her muscles with a completely unfamiliar strength. She could do it, she realized abruptly. If she wanted to, she could kill him right now, and he couldn’t stop her. There was no way for them to be this physically evenly matched, and yet…

He growled up at her, “Hit me with everything you’ve got, Han Sooyoung.”

And…

"Screw you! You've never, ever done what I wanted from you, so what the hell!"

The world and all its stories screaming, clashing, like the implosion of stars. They lay beside each other panting for breath and covered in wounds.

She wanted to hit him one last time—had to do it, had to vent that roiling, desperate anger somehow. She had to crawl to do it, her body half-destroyed.

This idiot. He had come here wanting her to kill him. As if she would ever give him that satisfaction.

Reality snapped back into place.

That scene—that memory—or whatever it was began to fade almost immediately, its details going fuzzy as she sat there frozen. Someone was pulling her back off of Yoo Joonghyuk. She came back to life and struggled, kicking wildly.

For just a second, she and Yoo Joonghyuk’s eyes locked. Then, the chaos that they had so carefully engineered finally boiled over.

***

To summarize a long series of events which Han Sooyoung had not been fully privy to: the production was on hold.

Between the schedule, whatever liabilities were involved in the physical fight they’d had on set, and Han Sooyoung’s social media audience throwing a huge fit when Han Sooyoung was removed from set, the producers panicked and brought the whole thing to a halt.

“On hold” didn’t mean “over”, but it may as well have. What, like they were going to keep bleeding money in order to restart this production? While possibly needing to recast the lead role and reshoot nearly everything? No one was going to sign off on that, Han Sooyoung was confident.

When she got the notice informing her the production was on indefinite hold, she went shopping and then headed out to see Yoo Joonghyuk.

It felt strange to be going to his actual apartment instead of squeezing into his trailer while they were both on set. It did seem possible that he’d get annoyed and try to turn her out, though she was fairly confident she could bully him into inviting her in should he try it.

When he cracked the door open to see who had knocked, the look on his face was unreadable. “… Han Sooyoung.”

“Yoo Joonghyuk,” she said with a raised eyebrow, choosing to ignore the fact that the last time they had seen each other, she had been trying to beat the shit out of him. She raised the bag in her left hand, which contained an array of alcohol—from a fancy champagne to cheap soju. She had no idea what he would be more inclined to drink, and she had purchased it all in something of a blind stupor. “We brought down the beast. You’re going to celebrate with me.”

He looked at her warily. “Han Sooyoung—what is it you’re doing?”

“Trying to get you to drink with me, obviously.”

“Why.”

“Because!” she snapped. “Everyone else wants to act like this is the end of the world, but all I want to do is celebrate. And I need to talk to you about something.”

His face didn’t change, but he did open the door and let her in.

Yoo Joonghyuk’s apartment was… sparse. Really sparse. She had barely stepped inside before she was struck by an overwhelming feeling that something vital was missing from the space. It was empty. Unlived in.

Though, when she forced herself to really look… there was furniture, and simple decorations, and signs enough that someone had lived there for some time. The overwhelming sense of emptiness was separate from the apartment itself. For a moment, she stood there dumbfounded.

Yoo Joonghyuk frowned at her. He was wearing casual clothes: sweatpants and a sweater, clearly not having anticipated company. “What?”

“Nothing. Your sense of interior design is bad.”

“How is it bad?”

She opened and closed her mouth for a few moments, unable to identify any specific thing to criticize. It was tidy. The colours were hardly any more mismatched than those at her own place. “… Never mind.”

The other most notable thing, after she’d adjusted to the inexplicable sense of nothingness, was that the apartment… smelled delicious? The reason for this became clear as Yoo Joonghyuk drifted towards his rather small but neat-looking kitchenette.

“You’re cooking?” she asked, a little dumbfounded.

He didn’t dignify that with a response, just approached the stove and expertly flipped whatever he had in the pan.

… Well, in retrospect, it was almost nine, a perfectly reasonable time for reasonable people to eat dinner. Her schedule had been so thoroughly fucked by the film production that she’d gotten into the habit of eating either past midnight, or not at all. She knew well enough Yoo Joonghyuk hadn’t been able to eat at a normal time, either. It seemed he had adjusted to a normal schedule immediately.

She followed him into the kitchen, placing her bag on the small table tucked against the wall there. Among her collection was a fairly expensive bottle of champagne, which was one of two things she was aiming to crack open tonight. “Well! How did everything go with your contract, then? I heard that they cancelled it.”

“They did,” Yoo Joonghyuk said.

She frowned, noticing how stiff his expression still was. “What, aren’t you happy about it, then? This is exactly what we wanted, right? Your contract over, the stupid production shut down. We won.”

“We won,” he agreed, still not looking happy. She didn’t feel too happy either, come to think of it. For a while, the only sound in the apartment was the hissing and spitting of food in the pan.

Han Sooyoung pushed away the inexplicable sense of dread that was starting to fill the silence. “All right. Drink with me, then.”

“I’m busy.”

“You can drink and cook, I know you’re capable of multitasking.”

“Just wait until I’m finished.”

By the time she’d finished arguing with him, the food was already done: he neatly flipped a stack of scallion patties onto a couple of plates, then went to the table, sitting down opposite to her. “There was extra.”

“… Really?” she stared at the extra plate.

“Take it or don’t,” he muttered.

… Well, she wasn’t going to ask twice. It seemed like a bit of a ‘throw together whatever you have left in your fridge’ type of meal, but despite that it was absolutely delicious… perfectly cooked and spiced.

“I had no idea you could cook this well,” she said, though she found she wasn’t actually that surprised. It suited him somehow.

“I do it when I have time.”

“Guess you’ll have more of that going forward,” she pointed out. “So, are you… going to find other work? Try to keep working as an actor? What’s the plan?”

“There’s no plan,” he admitted, methodically eating as if this situation were an everyday occurrence.

“No plan?” she repeated. “You’re kidding. You wanted to end your contract and destroy your career only to be unemployed, with nowhere to go?”

He took a bite, started to say something, then cut himself off, instead saying: “I’m tired.”

“Of what?” Han Sooyoung snapped. She did not like the character of the silence that stretched after that question. “Who isn’t tired? That doesn’t matter. You’re going to have a great night drinking with me and then you’re going to have to wake up tomorrow and find something to do.”

 Rather than snap at her, as she had expected, he just looked at her with something like confusion. “Han Sooyoung, why are you really here?”

“I already told you.” The food being so good had actually distracted her from her main goal of the night. She reached for the champagne. “We accomplished what we wanted to and probably fucked that idiot director’s career forever! My agent and everyone else I know is furious with me, but I want to celebrate. You’re the only one who would get it.”

He watched her start to wrestle the bottle open, seemingly about to say something, then just stood and went to retrieve some glasses. Plainly he didn’t have actual champagne glasses, though Han Sooyoung wasn’t feeling particularly picky. As he placed them back down on the table, she finally managed to twist the cork free.

… And the champagne exploded, the cork popping out of her grip and bouncing so hard against the wall that it flew back and hit Yoo Joonghyuk in the shoulder.

“Oh, shit,” she said, trying to save at least some of the champagne from spilling.

Yoo Joonghyuk matter-of-factly placed a dish towel down on the resulting mess. “You are supposed to chill champagne before serving it.”

“As if you have the right to be picky.” She filled up the glasses, satisfied that there was enough still in the bottle to at least get tipsy on, then raised hers towards Yoo Joonghyuk. “To fucking everything up spectacularly.”

He clinked her glass, and they both took a drink.

It didn’t take long for Han Sooyoung to get through several glasses, a pleasant haze settling over her. “See. It’s good even if it’s not chilled.”

“If you are going to spend that much money on alcohol, you should drink it properly.”

“You’re so stuck up sometimes,” she grinned, half leaning on her arms. “Where did you even pick up that habit? It’s annoying, but also weirdly cute.”

“It’s a matter of making the most of what you have,” he grumbled. “If you’re cooking and have a particularly fresh ingredient, you make the most of it. You don’t cook it down too far and make it lose flavor. It is the same principle.”

“You get talkative with booze.”

“I don’t.”

“Have more and prove it.”

He watched her top off his glass and frowned. “… Han Sooyoung. What will you do after this? You were shocked I had no plan—so what is yours?”

She sighed. The heat of the alcohol in her stomach had worn away a lot of her habitual defensiveness. “I don't have one either. I guess I’ll just keep writing, but nothing I write lately feels like what I’m supposed to be writing. Does that make any sense?”

“No.”

“I guess you wouldn’t get it since you’re not a writer.” She sipped somewhat moodily. “Hey. When you said that my work had no value…”

“That isn’t what I said.”

“No, I heard it from your mouth. No value. That was a really shitty thing to say, by the way.”

“I meant…” He seemed to struggle for words for a moment, glaring at his drink as if it had done him personal harm. Han Sooyoung tapped on the rim of her glass as she waited for him to recall language. “It would be worse to have a small part of the production be good while the rest was terrible. You would always think about what you could have done better to fix the rest of it. You would want to try again, but would be unable to. The original work had more value than that.”

“Shut up, what do you know,” she said, automatically insulting him to hide the fact that she was starting to get teary-eyed. “You are stupid and your way of phrasing things is stupid.”

He made a disapproving noise. “Do something other than writing, if it distresses you so much.”

“… Honestly, doing anything feels intolerable,” she admitted. “I thought once we took care of this, I could stop feeling so trapped.”

Yoo Joonghyuk’s face briefly contracted, like he was struggling through a sudden headache. “There’s something… keeping us here.”

She blinked lazily, trying to fit those words together in a way that made sense. “What?”

He seemed to struggle for another few seconds before whatever it was passed. “… Never mind, I don’t know… Forget it.”

“You really can’t hold your alcohol at all,” she said cheerily. “Do you think I could drink you under the table? Considering the difference in our metabolisms that seems crazy, but if you’re that much of a lightweight I’m starting to think I can do it.”

“Han Sooyoung,” he said in a tone of warning, though either he was too tipsy to make it sound sharp or she was too tipsy to take it seriously.

“Prove me otherwise?” she said, raising an eyebrow.

For a second, he was silent—then, he flashed her an unexpected smile and took a drink.

Oh, fuck. Him smiling like that should be illegal. Maybe it was the alcohol talking, but she really was starting to actually like this weirdo.

Against all odds, Yoo Joonghyuk humoured her rather than kick her out of his apartment. Though he seemed incapable of expressing it, Han Sooyoung had to wonder… maybe he was also lonely. Maybe that emptiness was coming from him.

In any case, he was receptive when she pulled him in for a kiss.

Maybe this was actually best. They could be honest with each other without speaking: exchanges in the simple terms of I want to touch you and I want you to touch me. They hadn’t displayed much inhibition with each other to begin with, and going through a bottle of champagne certainly hadn’t changed that.

He kissed her back hard, needy. As if something inside her snapped, she found herself digging in, biting his lip and then turning to mark up the side of his neck with her teeth. She knew he liked that—felt his breath catch satisfyingly. Without the annoyance of him having to appear on camera the next day, she could chew him up as much as she wanted.

Without another day of filming looming on the horizon, it felt like tomorrow would never come.

Making out in the kitchen quickly became awkward, so they relocated to the bedroom, another unremarkable space that somehow seemed to ache of loneliness. Han Sooyoung was far less focused on the room, anyway, than she was on the insistent press of Yoo Joonghyuk’s body, his hand ghosting over her back and coming to rest on her ass.

Throughout the night, Han Sooyoung’s sense of having forgotten something was only getting stronger. She tried to shove the feeling away, to lose herself in the moment until it stopped bothering her—but the more she tried to focus only on physical sensations, the more intense it became.

I’m tired, Yoo Joonghyuk had said. Somehow, that resonated. Of course he was tired… tired beyond imagining, beyond humanity. There was a reason she could not let herself actually like him, because…

No… no, whatever that was, she wasn’t going to be remembering it right now.

She gracelessly wiggled out of her pants, and Yoo Joonghyuk’s hand darting between her legs gave her exactly what she needed to banish that and all other thoughts from her mind.

Later, having fucked each other stupid in varying configurations with very little reprieve, they lay beside each other sweaty and exhausted. The combination of lingering tipsiness and a post-orgasmic haze would probably normally have been enough to knock her unconscious, but instead of letting herself drop off into oblivion, she turned her head to look at Yoo Joonghyuk.

Yeah, no doubt he was a beautiful guy, especially right now. This relationship of theirs had only begun because he was so much her type for it to be almost embarrassing. Her own quintessential idea of what an attractive man looked like.

It was supposed to be a purely physical thing. She didn’t consider herself to be the type of person who caught feelings accidentally, and yet…

He looked back at her, clearly also sleepy. “… What?”

She opened her mouth to answer, nothing. But then, looking into the darkness of his eyes, open and vulnerable…

God help her, she remembered.

It all came back so suddenly, so intensely, it was like a spike being driven behind her eye. The dreamy exhaustion vanished instantly; she sat up with a violent gasp. Yoo Joonghyuk flinched, reaching out to her halfway before he stopped himself.

“Oh, fuck,” she muttered, resting her head in both hands. “What the hell are we doing right now?”

“Exactly what you wanted?” Yoo Joonghyuk observed, voice mild.

She whirled to look at him. She couldn’t fully banish the sudden feeling that she should put clothes on, but also… he’d seen everything enough times already by this point, so getting shy was completely stupid. “Forget what I want. We’re not supposed to be here at all.”

He just blinked. “You came to my apartment yourself.”

“No, no. Think. Force yourself to remember,” she said. “Just now, when we were drinking. You said we had forgotten something. Back on set, when we were fighting. We saw something. Remember it.”

His eyes faded into the distance, clouded. She reached forward and grabbed his chin, forcing him to look her in the eyes.

“I’m an avatar created by Han Sooyoung,” she said, her voice coming out unintentionally soft. “She gave too much of herself to me, and instead of becoming an extension of her will, I became my own person and left. You should remember me well.”

Yes… that was the beginning of it, buried in the mess of her memories. Many of the memories crowding her consciousness, she realized, weren’t exactly hers—they belonged to the original Han Sooyoung, the one she had run away from. She had been… picking up those memories, somehow.

Thinking about that, about how she had ended up wherever the hell she was right now, made her head hurt, so she tried to make herself return to the beginning. “I made an outer world contract and was sent to the 1863^rd regression turn. There, it became my goal to kill you.”

His gaze had focused somewhat. She could see it was coming back to him.

“Why?” he asked.

“You don’t remember that yet, huh?” She let out a low, bitter laugh, suddenly desperate for a cigarette. Oh, hell, it wasn’t like Yoo Joonghyuk could object to her getting smoke in his fake room in a fake worldline. She released his face and started to dig around for her coat, which she had thrown down nearby. “1863 regressions. What do you think that means, for someone like you? To live that many lives and to never reach the ending you were fighting for. For that ending to not even exist.”

“A hell of eternity,” he muttered.

“Right. An inescapable, eternal hell.” Thank god, she found her cigarettes and lighter and quickly lit up. Yoo Joonghyuk’s expression said he disapproved, but couldn’t justify telling her to stop. “It wasn’t something I decided to do arbitrarily. You asked for my help. I said I would kill you, but first: I made you the villain of your own story. I took all your companions and friends from you. And in return I painstakingly crafted the perfect ending for that story. An ending that didn’t need you at all.”

“So, that was your solution.”

“One you agreed to. The only one that was possible.” She smoked in silence for a bit. “… Until that idiot showed up and ruined everything.”

Yoo Joonghyuk spoke a name into the dim room, crossed with trails of smoke: “Kim Dokja.”

At that, more memories seemed to suddenly focus into clarity. “Right. Kim Dokja. He got to go back to his own worldline and keep working for his own perfect ending, but he left me alone in the absolute wreckage he’d made of the 1863^rd round. I had to reevaluate everything and find a new path forward. One where I could no longer use you.”

A strange look passed over Yoo Joonghyuk’s face. “So, I finally died?”

“Something like that.” If he didn’t remember that, explaining it would do fuck all good. “I reached an end of my own making after a long and bitter struggle, alone. Getting into the details is pointless. I want to know—what do you remember?”

She leaned back again and looked at him. His head was close by her elbow and she was struck by the impulse to play with his hair—stupid, after everything she’d just remembered, but she was doing it before she could stop herself. Some stupid impulse from whoever she had been in this world, freed of all her memories. And he just let her.

“I… Lived in the world of the Star Stream,” he said. “I overcame many challenges. I was given a lot of help by a Constellation who had asked to be my sponsor, but I rejected him.”

Han Sooyoung’s hand stopped moving. “… What?”

“This Constellation revealed many things about the world, hidden pieces that led me to victory again and again. In the end, I reached an ending I was content with. Those who I cared for survived, and we rebuilt a world to live in happily. My lifespan had been shortened to make all of that possible, but before I died… I finally spoke to him directly.”

Han Sooyoung frantically searched her memories for any of this. “Wait a second, are you saying…?”

“When I asked, that Constellation… the Demon King of Salvation… told me that I could find out who I really was. That I could meet him, as well. But only in the far future. After an infinite degree of suffering. When I died, he would always bring me back. I would regress.”

Oh, fuck. There’s no way.

“The Demon King of Salvation is Kim Dokja, isn’t he?” Yoo Joonghyuk finally finished. “The person who sponsored me.”

Han Sooyoung felt a sudden wave of nausea. Of all possibilities, this was not the one she had seen coming.

“Oh, my god,” she muttered, wrapping her arm tightly around the hapless Yoo Joonghyuk’s skull. “You’re… you’re just a baby. Nothing’s even happened to you yet. Turn zero. What the fuck.”

“I’m twenty-eight years old,” Yoo Joonghyuk said, voice muffled by her elbow.

“You’re a twenty-eight-year-old baby,” Han Sooyoung said, despairing. “In the future, you…”

Yoo Joonghyuk extracted his head from her grip. His eyes were expansively dark, like she was peering into a void, something infinitely deep and inhuman. This was a person she should know in his entirety and yet did not, at that moment, understand at all.

A person she had cut out of her own heart. Someone she had never written about.

“I came here because I wanted answers,” Yoo Joonghyuk said. “I wanted to meet Kim Dokja and find the answers he might have for me. But the real question I came to ask was why I existed. Who caused that existence.”

She looked away. Her damn cigarette was going to burn her fingertips if she didn’t put it out soon, but she couldn’t seem to make herself move.

“Through the memories I absorbed since coming here, I realized it,” he said. “You were the one who created this life for me in the first place.”

Han Sooyoung gave herself three seconds to bite down on her own tongue hard enough to draw blood. Her voice came out cold when she said, “Yes.”

From across that void, he asked her, “Why?”

Han Sooyoung closed her eyes and leaned back. The cloud over her memories had fully dispersed, revealing the whole long trail of fragments.

From this false worldline, she, the avatar, could resonate with the memories Han Sooyoung from other worldlines. Pieces of her called out from all different points in the timeline, their faint voices not unlike the perpetual chorus of Predictive Plagiarism.

That was why she’d been experiencing memories from all over the timeline… why she’d had such a tough time remembering just who she was. She was all Han Sooyoungs and none of them at once. It was something that should have been confusing, but given her long experience with the Avatar skill, she found she was oddly used to a fragmentary sense of identity.

In the same way, this man beside her was not simply the Yoo Joonghyuk of round zero. He had been absorbing memories from across the entire timeline of Yoo Joonghyuk, which in his case comprised an incomprehensible breadth of time. It was unfair to view him as someone who knew nothing, or was coming to this fresh.

“… Before I, the avatar, was created, the world’s shittiest novel, Three Ways to Survive a Ruined World, became a reality,” she said. “The original Han Sooyoung met you and Kim Dokja in that reality. We fought and disagreed. In the end, I think we tried to understand each other a little.”

Yoo Joonghyuk just listened silently.

“It wasn’t really good enough,” she admitted. “The, uh. The understanding. But we did try. Later on, after I reached the ending of my own story in the 1863^rd turn, I found myself going back in time. I wanted to check on the creation of Ways of Survival, to find out who that damned author was who caused us so much agony. At first, I really thought it was Kim Dokja himself.”

Yoo Joonghyuk let out a huff of air that might have been amusement. Han Sooyoung chose to ignore that—it had been a more than reasonable assumption.

“But that was when I realized… that author didn’t exist in the past. Someone else had to do it, to create the Star Stream and the Constellations and everything else, or Kim Dokja... well, he couldn’t survive. For thirteen years, I wrote that novel, until I dissolved away. Afterwards, I found myself here. Well, in the first of these false worlds, anyway. I didn’t keep any of my memories.”

“… I found myself here after dying,” Yoo Joonghyuk said. “I assume I was headed for my first regression turn, but instead I got stuck here. Or maybe this is the part of me that never made it to the first regression. The memories he took away.”

“But what is this place, exactly?” Han Sooyoung demanded. She put out the cigarette butt on Yoo Joonghyuk’s side table, which again he clearly didn’t like but couldn’t object to. “These worlds we’ve been walking through, one after the other. False realities we can only live in if we don’t remember our real lives.”

“Kim Dokja created it,” Yoo Joonghyuk said matter-of-factly.

Han Sooyoung turned to raise an eyebrow at him. “What makes you say that?”

“These worlds must be things he wanted to see, or experience. I ended up here because I was also curious. The same must be true for you.”

She did have a faint memory of something like that. Of throwing herself into the false world with abandon, wanting to know what would happen, wanting to touch and be touched even after the end of everything. She was dead, anyway, and so unbearably alone. What did she have to lose?

“But we don’t know for sure he created it,” she pointed out. “He’s also confused. He doesn’t know any better than we do why we’re here.”

“That doesn’t disprove it,” Yoo Joonghyuk pointed out. “If anything, him lying to himself that much makes it seem more likely.”

Han Sooyoung sighed. “You could be right. Well, here’s the big question, then: Where the hell is Kim Dokja right now?”

In the silence that stretched between them, it became clear that neither of them knew. Han Sooyoung decided to light another cigarette.

“And another thing,” she continued. “Why haven’t we both dissolved into nothing by now? In the other false worlds, the moment we regained too many memories, everything fell to pieces.”

“Not exactly,” Yoo Joonghyuk observed. “It was when Kim Dokja regained too many memories that everything fell to pieces.”

She thought back to past worlds, to him dissolving into story fragments through her own hands. She felt a concerning tug of memory. He’d come back both times, but somehow it worried her. Like his dissolving was something they could only delay and not prevent. “Huh. You’re right.”

“If you’re going to keep smoking, at least open a window.”

“Living a normal life really gives you a tendency to nag,” Han Sooyoung observed, but hopped up to get the window anyway, still naked.

Outside, the world was as normal as it had ever been. A cool air wafted inside and streetlights swept in a long trail below the window. It was Seoul, the same as she had always known it, unaffected by the apocalyptic setting of the novel.

She sighed and turned around. “We’ve got to find him.”

Yoo Joonghyuk sat up. “How?”

“I created the damned Star Stream from nothing,” she muttered. “Some shoddy worldline like this isn’t going to misdirect me. I’ll find his fragments, wherever they are.”

She reached out and found it: the powers of a Constellation, hovering as they always had been, just out of her perception. Waiting for her to remember who she was.

[Constellation, 'Architect of the False Last Act', is revealing her Status!]

It was a pitiful imitation of what she could have done in a world governed by the Star Stream. But even here, her power could not be denied.

She was the very last person who could ever be subdued by a world like this.

When she focused, she could sense them: the shards of the stories they had created together. [Torch that swallowed the Myth]. [Demon Realm’s Spring]. They were Kim Dokja’s stories, but she had her shares, and moreover she had created the very basis for their existence. In a way she knew them far better than he did.

“Maybe you should put on clothes first,” Yoo Joonghyuk suggested.

“Shut up.”

A quick cleanup and set of clothes later, they were both rushing through the dark streets, Han Sooyoung chasing the pull of memories leading her on.

Whatever the truth of this world was, she had come here willingly. The life that she had lived as Han Sooyoung’s avatar had been such a terribly lonely one. She had never been able to let herself acknowledge that, fearing the loss of momentum it would cause.

She had moved people like characters, blessed and cursed them according to her carefully written plot. How could a person like that let herself love those around her and be loved in turn? The ‘Captain’ that her companions had seen, guiding them through the scenarios... that person was a façade, as an avatar always was. A façade with nothing behind its mask. There was a wall there that was impossible to break through.

But she, even she, got to come here and live in these worlds. She was understanding now how such a world could be created. Couldn’t it spring from that desire—to forget about creating the perfect ending, to forget about all the unforgiveable things they had done, and just meet each other? To have coffee and to laugh in the rain and to come together and apart in ways that hadn’t been possible in the real worldline?

The Star Stream loved to label her endings false, her directorship inherently flawed, contrary to the designs of the universe.

But this world passed no judgement on her. If she and Yoo Joonghyuk had wanted to, they could have decided to stay together in this place. The memories would even fade again in time, so they would never even know what they had lost.

Neither of them had considered it.

She started to run faster. Yoo Joonghyuk matched her pace, neither of them caring when people stared at them both dashing down the street. From the corner of her eye, Han Sooyoung began to see for herself just what those people living in this false world really were.

It didn’t matter. She only had one goal—one thing she needed to see in this world. Even if she was already dead. Even if all of them were. Even if this foolish desire of hers unravelled the world around them.

She wouldn’t accept anything less than all three of them facing that end together.

Chapter Text

Kim Dokja yawned.

He was standing on the subway in the early morning, travelling to work among the press of other commuters. He had his phone in his hand, but the screen had gone black from inactivity.

It was an agonizingly familiar scene. His life was a repeating pattern with very little that changed or interested him. An existence with no reprieve—but then, he was used to it. That was just what living was.

Kim Dokja lived unremarkably. He was twenty-eight, scraped out a living working in the QA department of a software company, and came home every night to a cramped, empty apartment.

It was… huh. He tried to blink the bleariness out his eyes, feeling like he was in danger of falling asleep standing up. Though he took the exact same commute every single day, with very little differences, an oddly intense sense of déjà vu was creeping up on him.

The car rattled. The other commuters were absorbed in their own phones or staring blankly ahead, the vain attempt of hundreds of packed-in strangers trying to stay out of each others’ business. That was kind of the blessing of city life. Even if you were trapped in a tiny area with strangers, people tried to give each other space. To build up little walls and live inside of them. To live otherwise was pretty much intolerable.

The sense of déjà vu only built, making him feel restless. Of course, he’d been here before—he had probably taken this exact subway car plenty of times. It wasn’t odd at all to feel like it was familiar. Even so, he couldn’t shake the sense that he was missing something—that this specific moment, on this specific day, had been lived once before already.

He lifted his eyes from his black phone and tried looking out the windows. Since they were underground, there wasn’t much to see… Just a dark, endless flickering.

That was only making it worse. There was supposed to be something in those windows—something he needed to watch. Something he’d burn himself up like a candle for.

Disoriented, Kim Dokja stared at the windows until his vision darkened. He was heading to work, but… no, he hadn’t been to work in a long time… no, he had been recently, but then he’d started having these dreams about…

These dreams about…

Kim Dokja lurched forward involuntarily. He should have bowled right into the man who had been standing in front of him, but didn’t make contact. When he whirled around, off-balance, the subway car was abandoned. It was as if there had never been anyone there at all.

No, that wasn’t quite right… there was still one other person. He was seated some distance away, looking fairly relaxed, watching the flickering darkness of the window across from him.

There was something very strange about him. Kim Dokja’s eyes seemed to not quite want to settle on his face—and when he looked away, the man seemed to vanish from his peripheral vision, becoming only a shadow on the seat. When Kim Dokja refocused on him, the person’s silhouette became even stranger. Horns sprang from his head, and a pair of black wings spread out on either side of him.

Finally, the face resolved. Kim Dokja recognized it well, though seeing it in front of him and not looking from the other side of a mirror was an impossibly strange experience.

“There you are,” said the other Kim Dokja. Well, not just Kim Dokja—Sitting there in front of him was the version of Kim Dokja who, at the end of the 1864^th turn’s worldline, became The Oldest Dream.

… How did he even know that? Mystified, Kim Dokja slowly approached. “What’s going on right now?”

The Oldest Dream smiled. “That’s a question I don’t even know where to begin answering. This conversation probably shouldn’t be able to happen in the first place.”

Kim Dokja frowned. His memories were still struggling to fill in, but… he was starting to recall bits and pieces.

He had seen this person’s face in his bathroom mirror and in the reflection of a shop window. He believed it was this Oldest Dream’s words he had seen scrawled in blood and typed in his phone.

Don’t remember, he had been told.

“Well,” Kim Dokja said, “I couldn’t forget. You probably should have seen that coming.”

“I guess I can’t let things go that easily,” the Oldest Dream remarked. He still had a wry smile on, but something else could be seen in his eyes, the same as Kim Dokja’s own… an uneasiness. Maybe a kind of grief. “It was worth a shot. I couldn’t do much from here to stop this thing falling apart. I really tried anyway.”

Kim Dokja winced. “… I think I know who you are. Which Kim Dokja am I?”

“I can’t be sure,” the Oldest Dream admitted. “I thought at first you might be my 49% avatar, but I no longer believe that. It turns out that you’re actually more of Kim Dokja than I am… but you’re not from any point I’m aware of in the 1864^th worldline. That really only leaves one possibility.”

“That means…”

“You’re the last Kim Dokja,” the Oldest Dream confirmed. “My future. The last moment that I exist, when I can no longer hold onto this form.”

Kim Dokja stood still for a moment, then sat down in the row of seats opposite to the Oldest Dream. The Oldest Dream seemed unbothered—rather than looking back at Kim Dokja, his gaze stayed fixed on the window over his shoulder.

“Right,” said Kim Dokja. “I’m starting to remember a little.”

For a few moments the two Kim Dokjas just sat in the achingly familiar hum and rattle of the subway car, riding the line that no longer travelled through any earthly city.

When the Oldest Dream remained silent, Kim Dokja cleared his throat. “In that case… How are we communicating across two different points in our own timeline?”

“I tried to tell you as much, while you were living in those worlds,” the Oldest Dream said, sounding a little sheepish. “That place you found yourself in—Very much like the real world, but just a bit off… That was my daydream.”

“… If I’m you from the future, shouldn’t I remember that?”

“I’ll spend a lot of time on this subway,” the Oldest Dream said. “Eternity, even. Do you think I’m going to remember my every last idle dream by the time I become you?”

Kim Dokja shifted, saying nothing.

“Moreover, this conversation, right now… I think you would call it lucid dreaming. It’s a toss up whether I’ll remember much of this when I wake up.”

… Kim Dokja could really say some stupid things with a straight face. Actually, he was beginning to pity his companions a little. “Can you explain everything you understand about this situation right now?”

“Sure. We’ve got time.” The Oldest Dream leaned back, readjusting his wings against the seats. “You know the story well enough of how I came to be here on this subway. There wasn’t another choice, so I split myself in two. If I watched, the universe would continue and the others could live happily.”

Kim Dokja nodded. His memories shrank back from that moment, but he knew well enough that he had done it. Had lived with it.

“Well… I was a bit lonely,” the Oldest Dream continued. “At this point it’s been thousands of years. Recently, I was daydreaming that there could be a world where we could exist outside the Star Stream. I wished I could meet them again in an ordinary way. I just wondered what it would be like.”

Given that it could never come to pass, it would be a painful kind of daydream—putting his hand on a stove repeatedly. Kim Dokja wished he didn’t know it so well.

“Maybe we ran into each other on the subway, or in a coffee shop,” the Oldest Dream continued, a little wistful. “Maybe I got to meet a famous pro gamer, or my childhood friend turned out to be a writer. I wanted to imagine that we could have reasons to meet like that, in a world where we didn’t have to fight. Myself and everyone. This isn’t the first time that I dreamed about it.”

Kim Dokja tried not to cringe, making the Oldest Dream smile. “I know, it’s embarrassing, but I’ll admit it freely to myself, at least. It seems that my well-worn daydreams collected somewhere in the dark beyond the Star Stream. It was accidental, but… I actually created something. And out there in the space beyond the story, you found that dream and got stuck there.”

Kim Dokja could almost remember it. There was had been a sense of dissolving into infinite pieces, his consciousness giving way to an eternal sleep. If a few pieces of him had passed by that daydream, still clinging to that desperate wish to be with the others again…

Of course he would go there. It was a story he treasured above all others.

“I think you also wanted to see what would happen in that world,” the Oldest Dream continued. “But even then, you couldn’t really visualize meeting them in a normal way. The “probability” didn’t work out, making it impossible for you to keep hold of your memory. You were living in the dream alone and couldn’t remember why you came.”

Kim Dokja let out a short, bitter laugh. “That sounds right. I came to find them and then couldn’t figure out how.”

“I’m sure you would have drifted away soon enough,” the Oldest Dream said. “But others found the dream, too. Like you, they were pieces of greater stories, travelling through the outer darkness on their way to other worldlines. They also became stuck on this dream.”

“Why?” Kim Dokja said, dumbfounded. “Those two, why would they come here?”

The Oldest Dream shrugged. “They also wanted to see what would happen. It couldn’t exist otherwise… we all had to shape it together for it to work.”

Kim Dokja slowly lowered his head into his hands. For reasons he couldn’t quite explain, he was shaking. “Then—what happened? Why couldn’t we just live like that and meet each other, since that was what we came for?”

“Would you meet them?” The Oldest Dream asked.

“Aren’t you saying that’s the only reason I’m here?”

“By the premise of the daydream—If you didn’t know who they were, if you passed by each other in the street, or happened to all sit on this subway car, even side by side. If there was no Ways of Survival. Would you even speak to them?”

Kim Dokja wanted to say he would. There had to be a world where they could meet like that and still find a path to the big house he had dreamed of, with everyone there.

He tried to imagine that scene: himself and Han Sooyoung and Yoo Joonghyuk, strangers seated on a subway. People he didn’t know, far outside his walls.

He couldn’t say a word.

“The problem was really me,” the Oldest Dream admitted. “I couldn’t hold onto my suspension of disbelief. I realized that world could never exist, and so its internal reality weakened. It lacked enough probability to sustain itself. Your original memories started to leak through.”

“Even with the memories…”

“The more real memories I saw, the further my suspension of disbelief broke. I’m dreaming right now, remember. The more aware I become of that, the closer I come to waking up.”

Kim Dokja looked up. “When you do wake up…”

“The dream will disappear,” the Oldest Dream confirmed. “Our timelines will resume. Those two will get reabsorbed by their future selves. You… well, I don’t know for sure, but I can guess.”

They held a stretch of silence between them.

“I really wanted to enjoy this dream,” the Oldest Dream said. Earnestly, maybe a little panicked. “But I can’t maintain it much longer. Not unless… well, not unless the three of you remain separated.”

Kim Dokja put two and two together. “You changed the worlds so that only two of us could exist at a time?”

“It was my last-ditch attempt to preserve the dream,” said the Oldest Dream. “The probability constraints of this world are just going to keep increasing if all three of you keep meeting each other and uncovering memories. Too much of that would break my suspension of disbelief instantly. But keeping you apart delays it, makes it harder to remember—so that’s what I did. That’s the reason we can even talk to each other now.”

Kim Dokja leaned back in the seat of the subway car. “So that means, right now… those two are living together in the dream.”

“That’s right,” said the Oldest Dream. “I’m getting a little better at it now—suspension of disbelief requires obstacles, it requires a bit of strife. That’s what makes for a sustainable, sturdy dream. I can keep better control of it. Otherwise, Han Sooyoung’s plot is likely to take over, like the first time.”

Kim Dokja’s eyes flashed toward the Oldest Dream’s. “This is starting to sound a lot like the Star Stream we came here to escape.”

“The Star Stream exists because it was the only way to satisfy us,” the Oldest Dream shrugged. Kim Dokja recognized, with some chagrin, his own tendency of saying something that agonized him very casually. He didn’t hide it as well as he had thought he did. “Ironically, that traps us in its pattern as much as it traps anyone else. You and I can’t really criticize the Star Stream, can we?”

“I guess not.”

Silence. The humming subway car. Kim Dokja said, “What now?”

“I’ll keep dreaming for as long as I can manage it,” the Oldest Dream said. “Since we’re in the outskirts of the universe, time means a lot less. Maybe that means the dream will last forever, for you three at least.”

“But in that case, I…”

“You got to meet them again a few times. Isn’t that enough?”

Kim Dokja stood, his heart pounding hard. “You know it isn’t. I want—”

“Don’t be an idiot,” the Oldest Dream snapped, cutting him off. “There’s no way for us to get what we want. It will always end the way it always has.”

He spoke words he’d said before, under very different circumstances. “I can make the ending I want.”

As he spoke, the Oldest Dream’s body seemed to flicker. His voice was warped and faint as he called, “The more you fight it, the more you’ll break my suspension of disbelief… I don’t want it either, but—”

“Get the hell out of here!” Kim Dokja snapped, and the Oldest Dream vanished as if he had only ever been a trick of the light.

Damn it. Kim Dokja started rushing down the train cars, forcing open doors that led to other empty cars. After dashing through five, ten, twenty, it dawned on him that he had made no progress—he was entering the same car again and again, in an endless loop.

If he doesn’t watch, the world will come to a stop.

He lashed down his own traitorous memories, kept running even though he knew it was useless. He didn’t want to watch anymore. He’d had a taste of it again, damn it, of living in the real world, of tasting fresh air, of having another person stand next to him and listen to him and touch him. To end up back here after that was…

Staring at the world and dreaming endlessly… This was the weight the “Oldest Dream” had to bear.

He had lived to the end of his story, to the end of Kim Dokja, the end of the Oldest Dream. He had decided to sacrifice everything for his companions. His life, his consciousness, his memory, his body, his desires and his selfhood. They had begged him not to and he did it anyway, because nothing else would satisfy the universe he had caused to exist, and they at least should live happily.

It was the ending a person like him deserved.

But even so, at the end of everything, maybe he didn’t want to bear that weight anymore. Maybe he just wanted to be weak. To give up. To become something other than a fragment of the Oldest Dream.

He slowly staggered to a stop.

[Being able to watch was far better than not being able to.]

Of course, it wasn’t possible. Not even now.

Feeling completely numb, he moved back to his seat and sat down. For all his mad dash through the repeating train car, it remained completely unchanged. The subway rattled in its familiar tone. Other than that, there was no other sound.

He had known it deep down. A story could be reread as many times as one liked, but the ending of that story…

That didn’t change.

If he looked out the window, he could probably catch a glimpse of Han Sooyoung and Yoo Joonghyuk in whatever world the dream had finally settled on. Living happily in a world without him, without even remembering he existed.

He had already been through this once before, so it shouldn’t hurt too badly the second time. That was what he told himself, but even so, his body folded over against his will. His fingers clawed at his own scalp.

He remembered the end of Kim Dokja—the place from which his fragment had sprung. It should have been impossible, completely impossible, but still they had come after him. In a new regression turn, they had won a desperate fight to break through the Final Wall and find him.

It had seemed like it had almost worked, too. He recalled dissolving away, practically through Han Sooyoung’s reaching fingers. His fragments all swirling together, those of the avatar and those of the eternal Constellation, then lifting away to worlds unknown, abandoning their memories and stories.

Since he was just a collection of those fragments, he, too, should also dissolve away. He could either embrace that, or he could accept staying on the subway alone, so that the other two could keep on clinging to this dream. They could be happy there.

Why was it that the universe never presented him with any good options?

A noise came from one of the subway car’s sliding doors.

Kim Dokja slowly raised his head, sure he was hearing things. But no, there it was again: thump, thump. A fist pounding against the door.

Wait. Could it be them? In a daze, he stood. The door’s windows were dark, betraying nothing of what or who could be on the other side.

If it was them… that was bad. The three of them meeting would surely destroy the dream, separating them for good.

Kim Dokja should have sat back down and ignored them until they went away. Instead, he lurched toward the door and began pounding on the other side.

This had happened before, too—hands pounding on the subway door—and it hadn’t changed the ending then, either.

Kim Dokja found that he did not care.

He threw his fists against the door with increasing urgency. The lights in the subway flickered; the car seemed to rock unsteadily, though it wasn’t on a normal track to begin with. The sounds on the other side of the door also grew louder. Someone was trying to reach him, too.

One of the overhead lights burst in a spray of champagne-colored sparks. In the black screen of the window, Kim Dokja saw his own reflection, with horns and wings and an almost childish expression. Becoming smaller, smaller by the second.

“Is it really what you want?” the Oldest Dream asked him. “I… I want to keep dreaming here a little longer.”

“I’ve had enough of dreaming,” Kim Dokja rasped. “Just let me see them.”

“It will end, then. I hope that ending is to your taste.” The reflection flickered, vanished, and then—the doors flew open, dumping the two people who had been pressed right up against them inside.

The momentum took all three of them to the floor, knocking the back of Kim Dokja’s head against the grimy floor—not that he cared. He clung to them helplessly.

“Kim Dokja,” Han Sooyoung growled in his ear. “You’re stupid.”

“You are a fool,” Yoo Joonghyuk agreed.

Damn it, why could he not stop crying? The tears were flowing so endlessly it was like he’d been storing them up for years… in a way, maybe he had. He had to gasp for breath to make his words come out. “By coming here—you two—”

“The world’s going to end, right?” Han Sooyoung said. “You really think we came here without knowing that? Everything’s temporary, Kim Dokja.”

Yoo Joonghyuk drew up very slightly, enough to stop fully crushing Kim Dokja underneath him. He frowned, looking at Kim Dokja’s tear-stained face. “Are you injured?”

“No, I’m not hurt,” he stammered. Part of him wanted to add something about how his health might be a little improved without the two-hundred-pound man crushing him half to death, but if that made Yoo Joonghyuk stop touching him entirely he was going to regret it for however long they had left. The subway car’s movement had been silenced, but it made a few distant, ominous creaks.

 “Hm,” Yoo Joonghyuk said, and rolled off of him. “Get up.”

They got up—though to Kim Dokja’s relief, both of them stuck to him like glue. His legs were oddly shaky, too much to justify leaving the subway car, so they moved into a seated position by the door instead.

They remained huddled in a pile of bodies, much more comfortable this time with Yoo Joonghyuk at the bottom. Yoo Joonghyuk’s chin found its way to rest on Kim Dokja’s head, making him feel warm and grounded.

Kim Dokja tried in vain to steady his breathing. “This is all my fault.”

He tried to explain, to the best of his ability, about the daydream. What a stupid explanation for all this—he was lonely, and he dreamed of them.

“I’m sorry,” he said weakly. The strength was going out of him, and he felt there was very little he could hold back anymore. “It means this world will be destroyed, but I didn’t want to stay here alone.”

“Why do you think we came back for you, idiot?” Han Sooyoung muttered. “Do you really think there’s any point to this stupid world at all if you’re locked up in here?”

Yoo Joonghyuk silently leaned forward and pressed a kiss onto Kim Dokja’s eyelid. At such a gentle touch, his body started shaking uncontrollably.

When he finally got a hold of himself, he asked, “You two… how did you really come to be here? Are all of your memories back?”

“Pretty much,” Han Sooyoung said. “Now that you’ve stopped trying to suppress them.”

“That wasn’t me, exactly…”

“Well,” Han Sooyoung said, resting her chin on her arm, “In any case, I already explained it to you two worlds ago. I’m mostly that avatar, the one who tried to win the 1863^rd round. After everything, after writing the story until I’d worn my existence away to nothing… I guess I got stuck here because I still had some regrets.”

“Mostly?” Kim Dokja prompted. “You said that last time, too. What else are you?”

She scoffed, though given how cozily she was curled up, it didn’t come off as very aggressive. “Every time she creates an avatar, her memories get split off. It’s an incredibly foolish way to treat your own history, but that said, small pieces of her—of me—end up flying by out here all the time, while she’s creating and reabsorbing memories. Every single time one ended up near this dream, it immediately dove in.”

Kim Dokja snorted. “Wouldn’t you notice that a bunch of your memories weren’t coming back?”

Han Sooyoung shrugged. “Not my problem. Time behaving the way it does out here… it feels like we’ve lived multiple lifetimes, but these memories can probably re-enter the real worldline at any point.”

“I see.” He looked up at Yoo Joonghyuk. “And you… You’re really him, aren’t you. From turn zero.”

“Mostly,” Yoo Joonghyuk agreed.

“Here we go with the mostly again,” Kim Dokja complained. “I guess you’re going to say that outer space is also full of Yoo Joonghyuk fragments?”

“Of course,” he said. “I will regress 1865 times. All of those memories cannot be held in the mind at once. Many of them also temporarily sought shelter here. Those pieces of me thought I would find an answer here.”

“An answer?” Kim Dokja repeated.

“To a question I always asked.” He paused. “Why is it that I exist?”

Kim Dokja felt a shiver of recognition. “… That may be partly why I ended up here, too.”

“In my case, those who created my existence were here.” Yoo Joonghyuk looked at the both of them quietly. “I’ve heard Han Sooyoung’s answer to that question. But I want to ask it again. Why is it I exist?”

Kim Dokja’s mouth went dry. “You exist because…” Because I was too weak to go on living without you.

“Because of a loop,” Han Sooyoung interjected.

Kim Dokja looked at her blankly. “What?”

“It was a causal loop,” she said. “I met both of you in the Star Stream and started to care about you. Because I cared about Kim Dokja, I created the Star Stream to save him. Because I got to know Yoo Joonghyuk, I was able to write him into existence. It caused an infinite degree of suffering. But even so, it started from a causal loop like that.”

“I see,” Yoo Joonghyuk said softly.

For a moment, Kim Dokja was left in awe, looking into the depths of Han Sooyoung’s eyes. How many worlds had she written into existence, just for the sake of having loved? He suddenly felt as if he were facing an existence far and above anything he could ever experience or understand.

But then, those eyes started to become watery. She muttered her next words harshly so that they wouldn’t waver. “… I really didn’t think I would ever get to see either of you ever again.”

God of this universe or not, she was still only stubborn, defiant Han Sooyoung, who loved so cuttingly deep that it almost hurt to look at. Kim Dokja pulled her further into the center of their pile of bodies so he could hold her as tightly as possible.

He hadn’t thought so either—that any version of him anywhere could see them again.

… Han Sooyoung writing Yoo Joonghyuk into existence for the sake of love, as a causal loop. It was the same with Kim Dokja, if he wanted to think about his own existence that way. A wounded child had imagined a world where he could be happy. The adult Kim Dokja was a “character” of his, a person designed to achieve that happiness. Unable to embrace that happiness, he returned to his isolation and dreamed anew.

Wasn’t it all an eternal loop with no chance for escape? This was nothing more than a brief respite. They rested on some forgotten apex of the wheel they’d soon turn on again.

But, then again…

“So,” he said. “I guess we’re basically dead?”

“I’m very dead,” Han Sooyoung confirmed.

“I also died,” said Yoo Joonghyuk.

“I don’t know if that counts,” Kim Dokja complained, looking up at him. “You’ll wake up in a new regression turn.”

His stomach turned to think about it. As much as the blame for that rested on Kim Dokja’s own shoulders—as much as it had already happened—he wanted more than anything just to hold onto him here in the subway car and never let him begin that long, horrible loop. To be subjected to Kim Dokja’s own deeply inadequate reading of him. For them to meet like this—the beginning of Yoo Joonghyuk and the end of Kim Dokja—in that sense, it was absolutely agonizing.

“I don’t know,” Yoo Joonghyuk said quietly. “A certain person had to take my memories away. I might only be what’s left of those memories. In that case, I am certainly dead.”

“As an individual, maybe,” Kim Dokja said, his heart squeezing painfully. “But… both of your memories will return to the main timeline eventually. I’m sure of it. In that sense, you’ll be okay.”

Han Sooyoung, somewhat unexpectedly, cupped his face in a hand. “… You don’t have to find some way to justify it. We’re dead, but we came here anyway. It’s enough, Kim Dokja.”

It was so strange, that this could just happen. That they could touch each other freely, with the memories of all the lives they had spent both together and apart.

“I barely even feel like Kim Dokja anymore,” he admitted.

That was it. If they were dead, if they were really dead, that meant the “story” that had driven them this far was over. Maybe as a ghost, he could sidestep the fate of Kim Dokja.

They were really just collections of fragments and memories, forgotten in a back corner of the universe. Did such things have to worry about their ▪▪?

“I decided I don’t care about who we really are,” Han Sooyoung muttered. “Whether I’m the real Han Sooyoung or not, which pieces of which people we are from where, whether we’re alive or we’re dead.  We got to meet. We got to do things differently. We even tried out some whole new lives—Hell, a lot of people did.”

Kim Dokja blinked. “What do you mean by that…?”

“Can you see out the door?” Han Sooyoung asked, raising her head.

The subway doors were jarred open, stuck there after Han Sooyoung and Yoo Joonghyuk had tumbled through. Though it was dark, Kim Dokja could just about make out what looked like the subway station, people milling about outside.

No, not people… not exactly. When they moved through shadows, their bodies changed. Strange, unidentifiable shapes, tentacles, black silhouettes.

“Outer gods?” he asked hesitantly.

“We weren’t the only sad little fragments that got attracted to this daydream,” Han Sooyoung sighed. “Even they got to come here and live out multiple lives. Meet each other, experiment, test out new stories. Some of them really annoyed the hell out of us.”

“I guess that’s where the other people in those worlds came from, but never anyone else that I actually knew,” Kim Dokja said. A jolt of loss hit him. “I wish I could have seen the others again, one last time. I guess this world was pretty lonely, all told. No Yoo Sangah, no Jung Heewon, no Lee Hyunsung, none of the kids. At least you two will be able to go back and see them again, even if it’s only in the form of a few memories.”

Han Sooyoung’s grip tightened on his knee. “What makes you think you won’t?”

“I’m the end of Kim Dokja,” he said, trying to keep his voice light. “The last fragment before the end of his existence. My memories have nowhere to go after this.”

Han Sooyoung’s eyes flashed. “You’re wrong. I’ll make you go back.”

Kim Dokja laughed helplessly. “That’s crazy. You already did the impossible twice, chasing after me to my final point. There’s nothing left for you to try.”

“In that case, some version of me somewhere will certainly do something even more impossible,” she said. “Someday, in the far future, you’ll see.”

“I don’t care to speculate about the future,” Yoo Joonghyuk said quietly. “As far as I’m concerned, this, right now, is the world.”

“You’re right.” Kim Dokja repositioned himself in the haphazard pile, making sure he could wrap his arms around them both, feel the beating of their hearts, the warmth of their breath in the face of it all. “I… I’m glad I’m here with you.”

“The daydream made you really corny,” Han Sooyoung whispered. Yoo Joonghyuk let out a faint snort of air. Kim Dokja tried to defend himself, failed, then laughed and just held them both as tightly as he could. In the subway station beyond the door, a few more lights went out.

Like Han Sooyoung had said—it was all temporary. Soon enough, all three of them would fall apart. They were predestinated: Yoo Joonghyuk and Han Sooyoung would return as memories to their original selves; Kim Dokja would vanish into the unknown machinery of the universe.

But until that moment came, they were outside of the story and outside of the world. Outside of the loop. That being the case, how could a thing like “time” still hold them back? Could it really be said that their “time” together was ending?

He knew it well enough: Outside of the story, even a single moment could last for an eternity.

And in that moment, Kim Dokja was not alone.

***

I lurched awake, my heart pounding.

I had been slumped over on the subway seat, my neck stiff from where it had been awkwardly pressed against the wall. My body hurt all over. It felt like I’d been pouring probability into Yoo Joonghyuk’s regression turns again, but it had been a while since I’d sacrificed anything large, so that couldn’t be the case.

I clutched at my chest, my breath coming up short and gasping. There was an emotion clinging to my heart that I could not identify. “What happened?”

As always, the Fourth Wall was there to answer my questions. [Y ou  we re  d ream ing.]

“I… was?” I pinched the skin of my face. For some reason, my cheeks were wet. “I didn’t know I could still do that normally.”

[I did n’t either.]

Somehow, I felt regretful to come back to reality. Had the dream been nice? I tried to recall the details of what exactly I had seen, or why my eyes might have been watering, but it all slipped away. There was nothing—just a meaningless space in my head. I was left with a vast sense of emptiness.

[Ki m Dokja.]

“I know,” I sighed. I looked at the subway windows. Against the glass, the light and shadows of other worlds flickered on forever—all of it so far out of reach as to be beyond imagining. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. I’ll just get back to reading.”