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Chapter Text

     6. Stargaze on a rooftop.

“You know there’s no reason to carry around your sword anymore,” Dokja says to Joonghyuk one night when they’re sitting out on the rooftop. 

More than once Dokja had climbed up the winding staircase to the rooftop of their apartment complex by himself in an attempt to stargaze. In the wake of the apocalypse, Seoul’s skies were clear without the pollution of the city fog, stars and constellations that he’d recognized blinking at him. If he closed his eyes and listened, sometimes he could almost hear them whispering, beckoning him to come back.

You don’t belong there, they’d call, mourning. Come back and stay here. Stay with us. They don’t want you; we do. Come. Come. 

It was an odd side effect that had lingered since his days on the train. He didn’t tell anyone about it, of course; he wasn’t sure how. 

Dokja never got past the first few steps beyond the doorway of the roof. He’d always been stuck in place, not wanting to approach the railings and fences that had urged him over, the cityscape sprawling before him, hundreds of meters down on the unforgiving concrete. 

“I know,” Joonghyuk says. 

The only difference is that Joonghyuk is with him. It hadn’t been a planned rendezvous, but Dokja finds he’s still grateful for it because tonight, he’s able to appreciate the view enough to let the breeze sink into his skin, gazing out far into the horizon that’s an indistinguishable blur from the buildings gone dark, city lights a dim and gentle glow. 

They’re sitting together—not thigh-to-thigh, but close. Joonghyuk’s warmth is a steady presence. Dokja finds that it’s easy to tuck his legs into his chest and drop his head on his knees, craning his neck to look at Joonghyuk, who’s sitting with his legs crossed, ever present sword balanced on his knees, one hand laying on the hilt. 

“But you’re carrying it around anyway?” Dokja asks. 

Joonghyuk’s fingers tighten around the hilt, but only for a moment before they go loose like a sagging body. “Threats exist outside of the apocalypse, Kim Dokja.”

“I doubt there’s anything in this world that can threaten you enough that you’d still need a sword.”

”You don’t need your coat anymore, either.” 

“That’s different.”

“Is it?” Joonghyuk’s voice comes out too even, as if he’s trying to control his temper.

Dokja narrows his eyes. 

It’s… odd, to say the least. 

There’s been a few differences that he’s noticed about Joonghyuk since he’s returned. The grey hair, first of all. The strange new scars across his cheek, fading burn marks over his hands, and the strangely infinite patience that he seems to have acquired in Dokja’s absence. 

Well, that can’t do.

Dokja prods at his knee with a foot. “Hey,” he says, but Joonghyuk doesn’t even react to that aside from a brief, impassive look over. “I keep this coat for fashion purposes.”

“You should find another coat,” Joonghyuk says, mouth thinning. The classic expression of simmering disagreement. 

On the old Yoo Joonghyuk, this would’ve meant that Dokja had three minutes to run before Joonghyuk tried to run him through with a sword. Now, he’s not sure what it means. 

Something about that fact irritates him, and he kicks at Joonghyuk’s iron thighs harder, just to be an asshole. “I’m not a fragile snowflake,” he says, to which Joonghyuk snorts. It only makes Dokja’s blood boil more. “Hey. I mean it. Tell me what you’re really thinking.”

“I did.”

“Bullshit. Since when do you mince words to make me feel better?”

An ugly pause. “Since it became obvious you only wear that coat when you’re not happy,” Joonghyuk says. 

“What?”

“You haven’t noticed.” 

“No, that’s—I don’t—” Dokja splutters, flustered, but more importantly, incredulous. It’s simply not true. “I wear this coat all the time!” 

Joonghyuk shoots him a short side glance: That’s my point. 

Fucker. 

Maybe it’s because it’s late, but Dokja can’t think of any rebuttals, so instead he chooses to divert. “This isn’t about me,” he declares, to which Joonghyuk scoffs again, asshole. 

Nets him another kick—completely ineffectual, of course. 

“We were talking about you—“

"You were talking about me. I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re such a fucking liar, Yoo Joonghyuk, you go around bullshitting like that to everyone?” Dokja doesn’t wait for an answer before he demands, “Give me your sword.”

Joonghyuk blinks, but to Dokja’s surprise, hands it over obediently. 

He gauges the weight of it in his hands; heavier at the tip, but weighted well overall. It’s denser than his own sword, the one he’d left behind so many months—or years, or however the hell long it’s been—ago. All black steel. Befitting of a protagonist. 

Dokja tests his finger against the blade. The skin of his thumb splits open. 

Then Joonghyuk’s snatching the sword back from him before the pain of his cut thumb can even sink in, looking furious. “What the fuck are you doing?” he snaps. 

“Testing the blade, obviously.” He demonstrates his bleeding finger. “You still keep it that sharp?”

“It’s a sword, Kim Dokja.”

“A sword that’s not necessary anymore.”

“That’s your opinion.” Flawed, is the insinuation in the bitchy silence that ensues. 

Dokja rolls his eyes and swings himself up to his feet, heading to the edge of the rooftop. 

Joonghyuk’s voice, warning: “Kim Dokja—“

“Calm down, I just wanna feel the breeze for a bit.”

[‘Yoo Joonghyuk’ has used ‘Lie Detection Lv. 12.’]

Dokja whips around to stare at Joonghyuk. “Seriously?”

Joonghyuk stares back, unrepentant. 

[‘Lie Detection’ has confirmed ‘Kim Dokja’s words as truth.]

“Satisfied?” Dokja says, huffing and turning back to face the cityline. “God, you bastard.” 

Footsteps click behind him. “As if you wouldn’t do the same.”

“Well, I don’t have trust issues, unlike a certain someone.” A punctuated pause that tells Dokja that Joonghyuk’s refraining from using Lie Detection again; it’s really astounding how much Joonghyuk says with those fucking non-answers of his. “Okay, well fuck you.”

It’s a testament to how much Joonghyuk has changed that he doesn’t shove Dokja right over the edge, but instead, yanks his wrist to inspect Dokja’s sluggishly-bleeding finger like the murderous mother hen that he’s become. 

It’s a deeper cut than Dokja had thought. He’d only meant to give himself a nick. 

“There were other ways to test the sword,” is all Joonghyuk says, before he rummages in that coat of his and comes out with a band-aid, of all things. 

Dokja stares, disbelieving. A band-aid. “Who even are you?”

“Stay still.” Joonghyuk frowns down at the injury, the depth of the cut, like it’s inconveniencing him personally that Dokja has gone and wounded himself again. 

He takes the opportunity to squint at his finger. It’s oozing blood like a broken faucet. A band-aid probably won’t cut it. 

Joonghyuk seems to come to the same conclusion that he does and reaches into the pocket of infinity that he apparently enchanted into his coat, emerging with a roll of gauze and medicine. 

“You’re a walking hospital, aren’t you,” Dokja notes. For that, he gets a sharp flick to his forehead, and Dokja scowls. “I’m right. Did you rob a hospital’s storage closet or something?”

“I didn’t.”

“You sure? You’re pulling a lot out of that coat of yours.”

“Stop moving.”

“I’m just saying—“

Joonghyuk’s arm snaps out and he jerks Dokja’s other wrist towards him, nearly dislocating Dokja’s shoulder with the force of it. “I told you,” Joonghyuk growls, mouth contorted in a snarl, “to stay fucking still.”

Dokja’s mouth parts. 

His hand is a brand against Dokja’s skin. Scalding to the touch. His nails are digging into the edge of Dokja’s bleeding cut. He doesn’t move, even as his heart hammers in his throat, palms clammy with abrupt cold sweat. 

You’re hurting me, he wants to say, because it’d surprised him how easy Joonghyuk had done it, like they were strangers again. 

But he doesn’t. Instead, like he always seems to nowadays, he says, “Okay, okay. Sorry.”

Joonghyuk’s face evens out, a thunderstorm clearing. His eyes flick down to Dokja’s hand, and they watch together as he rolls the tiny piece of gauze around Dokja’s finger. 

“You’re done?” Dokja asks. Joonghyuk gives him a barely-there nod, but he still doesn’t move away. He swallows, extricates his hand from Joonghyuk’s loose grip, and holds his hand, the warmth from Joonghyuk’s palm tingling on his knuckles. “Alright. Thanks, Joonghyuk-ah.”

“Don’t be so stupid next time,” Joonghyuk says. Now he sounds back to his normal self: scornful, annoyed, but mostly tired. 

Dokja laughs. “Alright, alright. You can head back first if you want to, but I’m gonna stand here for a little longer.”

“Do what you want,” Joonghyuk says, but again, he doesn’t move. He stands there beside Dokja. Not facing the city or the night, but turned towards him, quiet and calm and just… looking.

Dokja swallows, throat dry, and he spins on his heel to pace the edge of the rooftop, feeling—antsy. Off-balance. Something about the way Joonghyuk looks at him, it unnerves him, except “unnerves” isn’t the right word. 

Scares, maybe. 

“What are you doing?” comes Joonghyuk’s voice behind him. 

“I don’t know! Stop being weird, Yoo Joonghyuk!”

He doesn’t even have to turn to know Joonghyuk’s staring swords and daggers and—whatever arsenal of weapons he’s got stored away in those forty belts of his—into Dokja’s head. “I’m the one being weird,” Joonghyuk says, flat. 

“Yeah, you are,” Dokja says, stalking back to Joonghyuk to punch him in the arm or shove dirt into that fucking mouth or something, “you’re acting so—“

Standing behind Joonghyuk, the Oldest Dream is staring at him. Dokja falters. 

In that moment time seems to suspend, stretched taut like a rope on the verge of snapping. 

The Oldest Dream is just as Dokja remembers him. He’s got those ratty, beat-up sneakers that will never get a replacement for the rest of his school years; the brown uniform pants, ripped at the hems and splattered with muddy water from being pushed into the dirt; his fingertips torn, scratched bloody, nails bitten short. 

Dokja’s gaze lifts. He’s face to face with himself: paler, scrawnier, painfully fifteen. He looks like a reflection in the mirror with all the emphasis on the wrong edges, warped in a way he can’t identify. 

It’s unnerving. It’s awful. It makes Dokja step back, only for someone to shove hard against his arm. His stomach lurches, his inhale cut short, and his feet lose their balance, and he’s going over. 

Do you think you deserve to be happy? he sees the Oldest Dream mouth at him. 

“—Dokja!”

A distinct pop rings in his ears as his shoulder snaps out of its socket. The pain doesn’t register. He just goes numb. Gravity yanking at his ankles. He can’t do anything but stare, wide-eyed, at Joonghyuk whose hand gripping his own is the only thing keeping Dokja from plummeting thirteen stories. 

The wind is whistling in his ears. Come back to us. Let go. 

“Don’t you dare fucking move,” Joonghyuk snarls.

Dokja’s hand jerks, surprised, slips again. Joonghyuk lunges for him before he can fall, shouting, “Kim Dokja!”

But Dokja’s not looking at him anymore. 

The Oldest Dream is leaning over the edge to peer at him, his fingers clutching at the railing. Blood is oozing into the stone. The ends of his unkempt hair fall over his shadowed face. Like this, Dokja can’t make out anything about his expression except for the horrible whites of his eyes. 

They’re so close he can feel the Oldest Dream’s breath on his face when he opens his mouth to whisper again, “Do you deserve this ending?”

It’s not scary. But his face rattles Dokja so badly that he’s frozen still. Joonghyuk uses the timing to heft Dokja back up to the rooftop, and his feet scrabble against the railing. His balance shifts. They collapse into the floor, crumpled together in a heap. 

The heat of Joonghyuk’s hands seeps into the small of his back. Dokja stays there for a moment, braced against Joonghyuk’s chest, body shuddering involuntarily. 

Joonghyuk’s staring at him, looking almost as scared as he feels. 

I’m sorry, Dokja wants to say. For making you worry like that, for putting you in danger. For falling when I— 

Footsteps retreat. 

Dokja’s head snaps back up. The Oldest Dream is nowhere to be seen. He scrambles up, searching, but this time the Oldest Dream is gone for good, vanished—again—without so much as a breath. 

Warm fingers circle around his wrist. Joonghyuk’s using his hand to sit up, but he doesn’t let go after he’s up. 

Touchy bastard. 

“You said I was acting weird,” Joonghyuk says, in the silence. 

Dokja can’t help it. He blinks at Joonghyuk, speechless, before the laughter bubbles out of him. 

He doesn’t know how long he goes on, but when the laughter ends, he’s shivering, back on the ground. His knees had given out, sometime through the fit. It’s like his bones are trying to shake out of his skin, tear through all the muscle and blood and flesh to land at his feet. He’s lost a shoe, he realizes belatedly. 

There's a fwump of rustling fabric. Dokja feels out with blind fingers; Joonghyuk’s coat is draped against his back. 

“You were surprised,” Joonghyuk says. 

Dokja’s whole face is numb. “What?”

“When you fell. You looked surprised.”

Instantly he knows what Joonghyuk’s getting at. “I didn’t fall on purpose,” he says, trying to be irritated, but feeling—exhausted, mostly. “I wouldn’t try to kill myself like that.”

A pause. “‘Like that?’” 

Frustration cracks inside him. “You know what I mean. I’m not—shit, Joonghyuk, I finally got back to everyone, what makes you think I’m trying to ruin it? I’m not. I’m not trying to do anything.” He exhales, pinches at the bridge of his nose, then recoils. 

Wrong hand. There’s wet blood sludging through the gauze, smeared cold against one side of his nose. 

“Kim Dokja.” Dokja closes his eyes as Joonghyuk’s thumb rubs at the streak, wipes it away. He keeps his palm cupped against Dokja’s cheek, a gentle pressure. “You’re not ruining anything,” Joonghyuk says. 

“I know. That’s… that’s not what I meant.”

Joonghyuk nods and pulls his hand back, but Dokja grabs it before he can retreat completely. Joonghyuk goes statue-still. 

“Just for a minute,” he says, quiet. “Like this.”

Joonghyuk doesn’t say okay, but he doesn’t pull away either. 

**

The first time Dokja hallucinated Joonghyuk’s presence, it was six months into being the Oldest Dream. What Dokja remembers thinking back then was that it was cold inside the train. For all his power, he didn’t have even the strength to imagine a portable heater or another coat for himself. 

By then he’d been huddled against the door long enough that his bones ached if he tried to move. 

That was when Joonghyuk appeared. His hand, touching Dokja’s cheek, was as calloused and warm as Dokja had remembered it. 

“You’re being pathetic,” he said, gentle tone at odds with his words. “This isn’t the Kim Dokja I remember.”

Dokja barely remembered himself. When he spoke, his voice was unrecognizable to himself: hollow, like all the cold inside the train had scraped out his insides and left him rattling with the echoes of the person he used to be. “How are you here?” he said. 

“I’m Yoo Joonghyuk.”

A laughably arrogant answer. But it was something Dokja could believe in. He sighed, turned his face into Joonghyuk’s palm and pressed his mouth against the throbbing space of skin above Joonghyuk’s pulse. 

He wanted to ask how they’d found out about his avatar; why they came to collect him; if they knew of an alternative to this existence as the fraying thread that kept the universe together. 

But instead, all that came out of his mouth was a hopeful, “Is Yoo Joonghyuk here to save me then?”

“No,” Joonghyuk said. 

Dokja’s eyes opened. 

It was the first time he saw the coward named the Oldest Dream. The kid who’d clung onto Yoo Joonghyuk like a leech, absorbing his struggles and conflicts, pretending he could be even half as strong. 

That Oldest Dream was staring at him, and so was Joonghyuk, his hand still cupping Dokja’s cheek, nails beginning to dig in. 

The Joonghyuk he knew never had long nails. 

“You’re not here,” he said in icy realization.

“No,” Joonghyuk said again. 

He expected Joonghyuk’s hand to lose the warmth, but he stayed exactly the same, as corporeal and solid as before, right down to those soft dark eyes, that full mouth. 

“You’re breaking my heart,” Dokja said, quietly honest for once. 

“I know,” Joonghyuk said. “You’ve always been like this.” 

“Like what?”

“Needy,” he said. Dokja flinched. “Latching onto me again. Running away because you can’t deal with reality on your own. How are you any different than you were before, Kim Dokja?” 

“I’m,” Dokja said, and then he trailed off because the Oldest Dream was starting to look at him with pity, like he wanted to help but couldn’t. It was sickening. “I’m not holding out hope for anyone to save me,” he said, and that was true. “I know I’ll die here. And I know you’re going to live your life without me. That’s okay.”

“It’s not. You’re only doing it because you have no other choice. That still makes you a coward.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“How noble,” Joonghyuk said, mocking, and when Dokja blinked, he was gone. 

**

     5. Go to the amusement park. 

Dokja has to admit that there’s nothing funnier than the sight of Yoo Joonghyuk—thirty-three years old, retired terrorist, 184 centimeters tall and at least 50 centimeters wide—trying to cram himself into the tiny teacup rides that were certainly never meant for men his size. 

Even on a weekday, the amusement park has a fair number of visitors, especially considering the fantastic weather they’d managed to land themselves in. It’s no surprise that the park is bursting with the noise of the chattering visitors, the excited shrieks of the children running around, the merry jingling themes of the other attractions. 

But Dokja doesn’t mind it. If it’s a dream that he’s surrounded by every one of his senses with the essence of summer—from the ocean blues of the humid midday sky to the lingering sweetness of the cotton candy he devoured just an hour earlier—then it’s a dream that he’d repeat, anyday. 

Joonghyuk seems to disagree, though. 

His knees are tucked into chest because his legs are too long to fit comfortably within the confines of the small ruby teacup, and his shoulders are hunched around his ears, as if he’s attempting to make himself smaller by receding like a little porcupine. 

“When will this be over?” Joonghyuk grits out.

Dokja can’t help but grin, spinning them around faster with the wheel.

Around them are the other kids on the teacups, but they’re not going nearly as fast as Joonghyuk and Dokja are. 

Within a few moments their surroundings blur. The buildings melt together, the wind whipping in Dokja’s face. 

He closes his eyes, lets himself sink into the sensation of it all. His ears pop. He hears a whisper. An indistinguishable sound. And by the time he opens his eyes, the colors of the amusement park are bleeding away. 

In its place a sprawling mess of black wriggles over the scenery, like a toxic oil spill. 

That’s when he hears them again. The stars, calling him home.

You’re not supposed to be here. 

The sound vanishes. What’s left behind is the unnerving silence, until: the rattling noise of a machine, solidifying into the high-pitched whines of a train coming to a stop. 

Dokja jerks his hands away. The teacup slows, stills. The ride is over, and Joonghyuk’s hands are on his, leading him away from the train and back into reality. 

“Kim Dokja,” he says. His hands are warm, a comforting weight draped over Dokja’s knuckles. “I told you that you were going too fast.”

Dokja forces a laugh and pulls his hands back to push himself up from the teacup. He stumbles, but Joonghyuk is there with an arm around his waist, steadying. He pushes Joonghyuk away before he can rely on it. “Sorry, sorry. Give me a second, and then we can go…” He trails off. 

The noise of the train won’t leave; it’s messing with his thoughts.

Thankfully Joonghyuk doesn’t comment on it. “Go where?” he asks. 

“I don’t know. Someplace cool.” Changing locations might be a faster method of getting rid of the train that keeps following him. “It’s getting hot, isn’t it?”

“I know somewhere we can go,” Joonghyuk says, instead of pointing out the fact that it’s barely twenty-one degrees. 

No doubt it’s him indulging Dokja again. He’s taken to doing that more often, ever since Dokja returned—not that he’ll say anything about it. “Then lead the way, Joonghyuk-ssi,” he says.

With the power of Joonghyuk’s objectively menacing build and his murder strut, the crowd makes way for them easily. He brushes shoulders against the other visitors in the wake of Joonghyuk’s path, but Dokja focuses on the anchor of Joonghyuk’s hand on his wrist. 

The train clatters away, and in what feels like no time at all, Joonghyuk has guided them to an ornate building, looming above them like the gates of a castle. 

Over the doorway, the blocky font reads, Mirror Maze. 

Dokja peers into the doorway, but there’s only darkness up ahead. “Well,” he says, hesitant for a reason he can’t pinpoint, “it does look nice.”

“You’re not going in?”

Joonghyuk says it like he knows what Dokja is capable of, and he’s already considering alternative places to visit, such as a nice cafe for the elderly or the waterpark rides meant to cool off hyperactive children. 

Dokja is having none of it. “I never said that,” he says, sniffing, and marches on in.

He’s greeted by glowing high arches, shifting colors so slowly that it’s difficult to tell if they’re even changing at all. He stands there for a long moment, fixated. 

He snaps out of it, though, when Joonghyuk’s gruff voice tells him, “Go inside already.”

Impatient bastard. 

“I’m going, I’m going.” 

As the name of the attraction suggests, the paths are lined with mirrors on both sides, branching out into multiple walkways, filling the halls with the same muted colors of blues and purples blending into the darkness. No mirror is exactly the same. It’s hard to catch the dimensions of the building like this, so Dokja focuses on spacing out each of his steps equally as he walks forward, passing his warped reflections along the way. 

“Are you going to follow me while we walk through, like a little creeper?” Dokja asks, when the forward march of Joonghyuk’s boots continue to echo behind him.

The sound of Joonghyuk’s footsteps pauses. “Do you want to split up?”

“Well, is it any fun following me like this?”

“Answer my question first.” 

Dokja sighs and swivels around to face him. Joonghyuk’s face looks odd in the neon lights, emphasizing the rise of his high cheekbones and the sweep of his eyelashes. He looks handsome. Relaxed, like something about this lighting is a river washing all of his worries and letting them drift away and into the shadows of the maze. 

“I don’t care either way,” Dokja says, after a moment. “But I mean, it is a maze. We could race each other.”

“And you’d lose,” Joonghyuk retorts, but he doesn’t refute Dokja and instead moves past him and into the path to Dokja’s left, pausing before he vanishes into the turn of the mirrors. “I’ll meet you at the entrance after this,” he says. “If you take longer than half an hour, I’m coming after you.”

“Mother hen,” Dokja says, rolling his eyes, and heads into the hall on the right. 

Without Joonghyuk’s footsteps to ground him, all that’s left is the noise of his own clicking against the dark floor, and the strange hum of the mirror lights, interrupted only by an occasional echo of children laughing outside. It’s eerie, but that’s part of the attraction of a place like this, he supposes. Something to transport you into another world and make you feel untethered from reality for a short time.

Not that Dokja needs any help in that regard.

He stops when his foot hits a dead end. “Strange,” he murmurs to himself, and reaches out to touch the mirror that doesn’t seem to hold a reflection. 

Somehow they’ve set up the mirrors against each other to give the illusion of a continuing path. It’s a brilliant trick.

Dokja turns around to retrace his steps—perhaps he’d made a wrong turn by going left instead of right, a few minutes ago—but he stops when he’s faced with his reflections on all sides. 

Each reflection is different from the last. One stretches his body to impossible thinness, with his legs spindly and on the verge of snapping. Another makes him so wide that all he can make out is the navy-cast of light on his white shirt. 

The others follow in a similar vein. A mirror blurs his face like a half-erased drawing. The one beside it contorts some parts of his limbs but not others. Across from that one, his reflection has blown up his head to wobble on his shoulders. 

Dokja doesn’t even enjoy looking at his reflection on most days, but looking at himself in these mirrors makes him feel so out of place that he can’t help but swallow, his palms breaking out into a nervous sweat.

Footsteps approach behind him. 

There’s only the dead end behind him, but Dokja turns to that reflectionless mirror, expecting the halls to stretch out endlessly before him— 

Only to come face to face with the Oldest Dream, extending his fingers toward him from behind the mirror. 

He’s different from the last time Dokja saw him. He doesn’t look like a real child, a real human. 

Dokja knows that this building—and the mirrors that occupy it—have strange dimensions, but space probably isn’t supposed to contort like this. It doesn’t explain the way the Oldest Dream’s fingers seem to twist and warp, resembling unfurling tree branches. His joints are elongated too long. His skin appears to stretch over his bones without any of the extra material, and beneath the flesh Dokja can see his veins pulse with blood, the speckles of red muscle close to bursting underneath the surface. 

It’s not just the mirror. The Oldest Dream himself is unraveling, one story at a time, his body being pulled loose, string by string like the threads of an old sweater. 

The longer Dokja looks at him, the more horrifying he becomes. Looming taller, thinner, deadlier. 

“Not this way,” the Oldest Dream tells him. When he speaks, his voice hisses with probability sparks. “Go back. Where you came from.”

He sounds identical to the stars, urging Dokja home. 

It hurts his ears to listen to him—yet Dokja can’t shut him out. 

“Turn around,” the Oldest Dream continues. “Head right, then left. Walk forward until you can see another dead end, and then keep walking; it’s a trick.” 

As if to demonstrate, the Oldest Dream steps out of the mirror, and Dokja stumbles back, but the Oldest Dream continues to approach until his scraggly fingers drag across Dokja’s cheek and past him, pointing behind him. 

“Turn around now,” he whispers. “You’re going to lose yourself here otherwise.”

“You can’t tell me what to do,” is all Dokja can say.

The Oldest Dream smiles at that. Even his mouth is distorted on his face, too red and wide, ready to swallow Dokja whole. “It’s up to you to listen or not. But do you think you’d be happy if you stayed?”

Dokja, unable to answer, turns on his heel and begins walking, feeling the weight of the Oldest Dream’s ancient gaze on him the entire time.

He thinks about disobeying the Oldest Dream. Heading left instead of right. But when he tries, his ankles grow heavier until he’s leaning on the walls to walk, and it’s at that point that his feet don’t listen to him. He can only stumble along, helpless, as he walks the path outlined by the Oldest Dream, feeling like a puppet inside his own body. 

A pain-filled haze takes over him. His vision blurs, his fingers dragging across the mirrors, catching against the burning sting of the lights. 

He meets no one in the maze the entire time. 

When he finally emerges from the building, the sunlight is so blinding that it stings Dokja’s eyes. He squeezes them shut, not even opening them after he feels a warm hand touching his cheek. 

“How long was I in there?” he asks Joonghyuk, voice run raw.

Joonghyuk’s answer is quiet. “Twenty minutes exactly.”

It felt longer. Another small eternity trapping him. 

Dokja opens his eyes to find Joonghyuk’s gaze trained on him, brows drawn into a worried line. But every part of him is achingly familiar. It’s the sight of him that makes Dokja exhale, the pain and nausea trickling off into nothing. 

He’s home. He’s fine. 

Here, the Oldest Dream can’t touch him.

“Well, you won,” Dokja says, stepping back, and Joonghyuk’s hand falls away from his cheek. He tells himself that he doesn’t miss the touch and continues, “What do you want as a reward?”

A blink. “Since when was a reward in the question?” 

“Even the little victories deserve a reward,” Dokja tells him, fake knowing, and Joonghyuk huffs out the tiniest laugh.

Finally, the strange atmosphere lifts.

**

When Dokja first woke up, he didn't know where he was or even who he was. Being the Oldest Dream was a cold existence. Detached. After a certain point it had become difficult to remember that he was Kim Dokja, and everything that entailed. 

Joonghyuk was the first thing he saw after he opened his eyes. Seeing him again was—remembering himself. Remembering how much he’d missed Joonghyuk, and how much he’d missed by not being there. 

Joonghyuk was familiar but new. Grey hair. A new scar, pale and faded, on his cheek. Broader, more tired. 

“I’m not sure if you’re real,” Dokja murmured, when he was awake enough to speak. 

Behind Joonghyuk, the Oldest Dream was slinging his arms over Joonghyuk’s shoulders, face half-hidden in his lovely neck. 

“Why wouldn’t I be real?” Joonghyuk asked him. 

It was an easy answer: “Because I wanted you to be. You never were.”

He didn’t stay awake long enough to hear Joonghyuk’s response, but by the time Dokja was strong enough to stay awake for extended periods of time, Joonghyuk was a rare, fleeting sight, just as frequent of a visitor as the Oldest Dream. 

Days passed. Dokja didn’t know what to make of the interaction, much less if it was real or imagined, and he never brought it up. 

The day before he was set to be discharged from the hospital, still shaky and weak from his coma, Joonghyuk had found him sitting by the windowsill of his hospital room. Their eyes met in the dark.

Quietly, as if Joonghyuk didn’t want to destroy the fragile peace that they’d created by tiptoeing past all the wreckage between them, he closed the door behind him with a muted click. 

“You’re not supposed to be here,” Dokja said; he wasn’t sure why he said it. He was bitter, maybe, at how Joonghyuk never seemed to be around enough to feel certain. 

“I know,” was all Joonghyuk said.

“So why are you?”

“I wanted to.” A pause, and then, clarifying, “I wanted to see you.”

Unexplainable anger bubbled under Dokja’s skin, and he turned away, but not before he caught the flicker of the Oldest Dream in the corner of his eyes; the ghost that wouldn’t stop haunting. 

“You could’ve visited another day,” he said pointedly. “Like yesterday. Or the day before. Or even the day before.”

“I did visit,” Joonghyuk said after a short pause, coming to sit beside Dokja. 

“Sure you did.”

“I did. Every day.”

That didn’t sound real. He whipped his head around to check for the lie, but he only found Joonghyuk gazing back at him, unshakeable. 

“Every day?” he asked. 

“Every day,” Joonghyuk confirmed. 

“Why…” When Dokja swallowed, his mouth was dry. “Why would you do that?”

It didn’t make sense. They were companions, but Dokja had always known that his and Joonghyuk’s relationship had always been one based on bare necessity rather than genuine love, or even like. He could’ve counted on one hand the moments when Joonghyuk wasn’t furious, or irritated, or planning his early demise. 

Joonghyuk didn’t seem angry, though. He didn’t even seem capable of it anymore, wrung out as he was. He just looked tired. Decades older than he was. “If you don’t know, then you really are a fool, Kim Dokja,” he said. 

“What’s that supposed to mea—“

“Get some rest,” Joonghyuk interrupted. Before Dokja’s brain could process any of that, he stood up and headed for the door, pausing briefly to touch Dokja’s wrist. “Don’t push yourself.”

And then he was gone, leaving Dokja’s head spinning, scrambling to figure out what the fuck happened. 

**

In hindsight, that was the first clue. 

**

As they step away from the mirror maze, Joonghyuk informs him that he chooses the ferris wheel as his reward. 

“Like, you want the ferris wheel?” Dokja asks, bewildered, squinting at it in the not-so-far distance. He tries to gauge the size and plan out how he’d even proceed with dismantling the thing and taking it home to their tiny two-bedroom apartment, never mind convincing the park to hand it over to them. He could use his status as a constellation-god, but that seems like cheating, somehow.

Joonghyuk gives him an incredulous glance. “No. I want to go,” he says, as if Dokja was somehow supposed to know. “With you.”

“You could have another reward,” Dokja says, because it seems like a fairly small reward, especially when considering the fact that he probably would’ve gone anyway without Joonghyuk asking.

“I said what I wanted. Are you going to give it to me or not?”

“And if I said no?”

“Then you’re a liar, Kim Dokja.”

“Big baby,” Dokja says, laughing, and they head off for the ferris wheel together. He imagines that if Joonghyuk had been carrying around his sword—left behind at their apartment, in exchange for several knives Joonghyuk has hidden on his person somewhere—he’d be dragging the tip of it on the pavement, exuding sheer satisfaction the way he is.  

The line moves fast, luckily. They board the ferris wheel, and contrary to the small visual size of the cart, it’s not an uncomfortable fit. The seats are clean and cool against the fabric of Dokja’s jeans, and there’s some strange sticky residue clinging to the handlebars, but other than that, it’s fine. 

The ascent is slow. The heat of Joonghyuk’s body is like an open fire, all the more noticeable by the dying sunlight. He’s so solid that it’s hard to doubt his presence even as he says nothing. 

It dawns on Dokja when they’re halfway up that summer is ending soon. Already the leaves are beginning to change color, and even from the view above, this park isn’t as crowded as it could be. 

It’s been four months since he’s woken up. In that time, he’s managed to make a list, clear half of the activities on it, chase after his happiness with absolutely certainty, and— 

The Oldest Dream’s icy fingers are pressed against his. 

“Fuck,” he mutters aloud, despite himself. 

He braces himself with two deep breaths. The Oldest Dream has no power here, Dokja reminds himself, before looking up.

There: the Oldest Dream is gripping onto the handlebars of the ferris wheel cart with a white-knuckled grip. There’s an odd scent coming from him that clashes with the sugar-sweetness of the park. It’s putrid, sickly, like a bowl of apples set out to rot until they’ve gone soggy and grey. 

In the cruel light of the sun, his stretched out body looks more gruesome than before. His skin is too pale, tinged a sickly green. The pads of his fingers pressed to Dokja’s knuckles give too easily. They’re sponge-like, on the edge of decomposing. Bits of skin flake off onto the handlebars before disappearing down into the dozens of feet of freefall.

Dokja feels something inside of him ripple just looking at him, like a ringing in his ears after a screech of dissonance. Nothing tangible but still present. Harsh enough to echo. It’s nauseating. 

Throughout all of this, the Oldest Dream’s glassy eyes are wide and scared—from what, Dokja doesn’t know. 

“What is it?” Joonghyuk asks. 

“Nothing.” Dokja wonders how he can pry the Oldest Dream’s fingers off the handle without Joonghyuk noticing, but his options are limited. It hasn’t escaped his notice that Joonghyuk, despite the end of the apocalypse having passed four years ago, is nonetheless defined by his experiences during it. 

“You’re lying.”

Unfortunately, that includes hyperawareness. 

It leaves one choice, then. Dokja inhales and replaces his hold on the bars to dig his nails into the Oldest Dream’s knuckles, pressing until he can feel the skin split, thick blood seeping between his fingernails like spilled syrup. 

The Oldest Dream whimpers. But Dokja doesn’t let go. 

“Would you believe me if I said I was scared of heights?” he asks, turning to smile at Joonghyuk. 

“Let go,” he hears the Oldest Dream whispering. “Can you let go? It hurts. It hurts. It hurts.” 

Blood bursts under Dokja’s fingernails, worms under his skin. It itches like something is crawling under him and trying to carve him from the inside out. More blood is dripping onto his knuckles, and the handlebar is now slick with blood, getting harder to hold onto. 

“Stop it,” the Oldest Dream pleads, wailing. 

But Dokja doesn’t stop. He just presses harder. Shadow veins begin to writhe over the Oldest Dream’s skin like a second suit of flesh. 

“I’ve always been scared of heights, I guess,” Dokja continues. His grip tightens—there’s a pained cry, a distinct shift in the grip underneath his palms and a sickening crunch of snapped bone as the Oldest Dream’s hold slackens. Dokja exhales, his breath coming out unsteady. “When you strangled me over that bridge, I was really scared then, you know?”

“You keep,” Joonghyuk says, before his body goes stiff and tense. “Kim Dokja,” he says urgently. “You’re bleeding.”

“What?” 

He looks down, surprised. 

It’s true, though. He hadn’t felt anything, yet there’s little nail marks in the spots where he’d tried to get the Oldest Dream to fall, the skin of his knuckles split and oozing. 

The Oldest Dream is nowhere to be seen now. The only trace of him are the handlebars are soaked with blood and the iron tang of it that lingers in the air, haunting. 

“I don’t know how I got that,” Dokja says, numb. 

Without another word, Joonghyuk brings out those ever-present bandages from his pocket and begins wrapping Dokja’s knuckles. When he finishes, he pauses, then wraps the bandages around the tips of Dokja’s fingers until he’s wearing the world’s tiniest finger gloves in summer. 

Dokja tears his eyes away from Joonghyuk’s scarred hands to look at the handlebar again. 

Clean. 

“You’re too careless with yourself,” Joonghyuk says.

It snaps Dokja’s attention back to him. “Says you?” he says. 

“I know how to take care of myself.”

“Yes, because you’re very strong and macho, I know.”

“No. If I injure myself, it’s an unintentional mistake.”

There’s an unspoken unlike you that hangs in the air. Somehow, the statement irritates Dokja. “And you’re saying I’m different?” he demands. 

“You haven’t proved me wrong,” Joonghyuk points out—even more irritating, because Dokja has to admit that it’s a fair point. Not on the basis of it being actually true, but because he can’t think of any evidence that points to the contrary. 

Dokja isn’t going to take that lying down, though. It’s practically his life’s mission to knock this asshole down a peg or three. “What if I prove you wrong then?” he challenges. “Not now, but you know. In the future. You don’t know everything about me.” 

Joonghyuk’s gaze is heavy. “I know more about you than anyone else.”

Dokja blinks. He hadn’t expected that. 

“Like what?” he asks.

The reply is instant. “You hate tomatoes. You enjoy acting cool but only when you can stand the embarrassment. You tell yourself you’re not good with kids.”

“How do you know what I tell myself?”

“You always looked at Yoosung and Gilyoung the same way from the beginning.” Dokja tries to figure out what he means by that, but he doesn’t have to because Joonghyuk goes on, “You looked at them like you wanted to take care of them but at a distance. You tell yourself that you’re not good with them so you don’t hurt anyone when you’re inevitably right.”

It’s an uncomfortable level of insight that Dokja didn’t fully realize Joonghyuk was capable of, and he shifts, clearing his throat. “Well, that’s your opinion. Anyway, those are all—surface things.” They’re beginning to reach the peak of the ferris wheel now, the sunset spotting over the trees. “I bet I could say a million more things about you than you could say about me. And unlike you, it’d be meaningful.”

“Like what?”

“What?”

“The things you know about me,” Joonghyuk says calmly. “Tell me.”

None of this conversation is going where Dokja had thought it would. It’s the same no matter how many times Dokja tests him. Joonghyuk doesn’t get annoyed, try to kill him, or cut the conversation short to do his best impression of a murderous housecat. 

He’s different. 

But at the core, he’s still Yoo Joonghyuk. Dokja knows exactly who that is. 

“You’re trying to be better,” he finds himself saying. “You cook for everyone because no one else is better than you and you can’t stand eating food that isn’t up to your standards, but also because you feel—I don’t know, genuinely happy when you cook for them. Your favorite type of games are those calm ones, where you don’t have to fight. You… you love easy. If it happens, it happens.” 

He’s seen it before, the way Joonghyuk had fallen in love countless times, worldline after worldline. It wasn’t just romantic, either. It was familial, platonic. Seeing Joonghyuk love was the one constant in every regression; it was what kept him going, even after all he’d endured. 

It could’ve been simple to give up. But it was the love for his sister, his desire to see all of his companions alive and together, and by the 1864th regression, it was that desire to see a complete happy ending that pushed him forward. 

“Like a snap,” Dokja says quietly. “That’s how fast it is for you.”

Throughout the entire time Dokja speaks, Joonghyuk’s eyes don’t waver once. When he does say something, his voice comes out soft, a little hoarse. “Is that all?”

“No,” Dokja says and exhales, feeling like he’ll be swallowed up by that gaze. “But I don’t know if I should say it. You might kill me for it.”

“That depends on what you say.”

There’s a click as they reach the summit and stop there, caught in time. The wind is threading through Dokja’s hair, the spaces between his clothes, leaving him shivering. The waning sunlight falls on Joonghyuk’s face, and here, he looks lovely. Like he’s glowing from within. 

Dokja says, “I know you’re in love with me.”

**

The truth was that it was hard not to notice. He had spent most of his teenage years studying the ways Joonghyuk loved with an interest bordering on obsession, driven by the romance-fueled talk of his classmates. While they were chattering about getting girlfriends or boyfriends, going on dates, having their first kisses at the riverside over winter break, Dokja had sat by himself in the classroom. He was isolated, kept at a distance. 

He understood implicitly, with and without being told, that he would never be loved the way everyone else was. 

So he made up for it with his imagination. He took the perfect figure of Yoo Joonghyuk, and thought about the lonely and wretched life he’d led, and asked himself, How could someone like Yoo Joonghyuk fall in love? What would that be like? 

It was only a few days later that his love story with Lee Seolhwa dropped. 

tls123 hadn’t disappointed him. But Dokja still craved more, and as always, sent in his own comments and questions. 

I think Yoo Joonghyuk would actually be more reserved about the ways he showed affection as he falls in love, he wrote once, but once he accepted it, wouldn’t he be obvious about it? He should be touchy, because that’s something important to him that he wants to share with those he loves. 

And that—Dokja experienced it firsthand. Those fleeting touches when he was close enough to reach; the inner wrist, his hair, his cheek, like Joonghyuk was greedy for any opportunity to show him that he cared. 

Or maybe he would be into the acts of service thing, since he’s the type to take action rather than linger on words. 

He let Dokja live with him when he had nowhere else to go. He accompanied him on all of these stupid to-do list places, steady and there, without ever being asked. He’d visited Dokja in the hospital even when Dokja had never been awake to see it. 

Or—and I like this one a lot—he could spend time with them, and it’d be even better if he was content doing nothing with them. Like Yoo Joonghyuk, super cool protagonist who could be doing a million other things with his time, choosing to spend it with the one he loves. 

Can you imagine?

Dokja could. 

**

“You noticed,” Joonghyuk says, finally. 

When Joonghyuk reaches for Dokja’s cheek, just to press his hand there, curl his palm around Dokja’s jaw, he doesn’t move. His throat is so dry it almost hurts to swallow and breathe. “It was hard not to. You’re pretty obvious about it, Joonghyuk-ah.”

“I wasn’t trying to hide it.”

“You weren’t?”

“No point in trying,” Joonghyuk says. They’re so close now that he’s not even speaking, not really, he’s murmuring the words so low that it shouldn’t be audible over the whistling of the wind, or the noise of the park below them. 

But it is, and unfortunately, Dokja hears every word. He’s watching those lips move, red and full, and feels every syllable etch itself into his bones, the very essence of him. Time seems to bend and stretch. It narrows down to something very simple: Joonghyuk’s thumb tracing the curve of his bottom lip; their foreheads tilting together; the lovely flutter of Joonghyuk’s eyelashes when he closes his eyes. 

“You sure are close,” Dokja manages to say. 

“You speak too much,” Joonghyuk murmurs, and then he’s closing the distance to kiss him. 

It feels like a long time coming—so easy that Dokja can’t help but sink into it. He curls his hand around the nape of Joonghyuk’s neck and tugs him closer, breathing him in. There’s that delicious warmth, the sweetness of the cotton candy they’d shared earlier on his tongue, the sharp nips of his teeth against Dokja’s lip. He’s never been kissed like this before—not that he’s ever been kissed, ever—and right now, he’s almost grateful for that fact. 

Because from this moment onwards, the only kiss he’ll ever have engraved in his memory will be this very scene. In his memory it’ll just be Joonghyuk and him on this ferris wheel, caught in time; the rough, desperate noise he makes when Dokja presses their bodies together, the way he keeps his hand against Dokja’s cheek and holds him precious like spun sugar dissolving on the tip of his tongue. 

That’s how Joonghyuk kisses him: like he wants Dokja to remember this from now until he dies. Take the sensation of this kiss with you, Joonghyuk seems to say with every gentle brush of their mouths. Remember me. Remember me, and don’t let go. 

And Dokja will remember it. He’ll remember Joonghyuk’s mouth kissing him so gently. He’ll remember that he was happy; and he’ll remember that sitting here, at least for this one deafening heartbeat, he was undeniably alive, heart flying, fingers tingling, and that it was wonderful.

Joonghyuk, he thinks, Joonghyuk, Yoo Joonghyuk— 

**

Ice creaks over his limbs. It creeps down into the bone, seizes his heart, and strangles it dead. There’s a whistling in his ears, shrieking in its empty echoes. Inside he can feel how hollow he is, as if all of his intestines and blood and marrow have been scooped out clean with a silver spoon. He is nothing but raw, beaten flesh—and even that is cold. 

You don’t belong here. 

A train is coming for him.

Dread pools in his stomach. Dokja doesn’t want to get on. He hasn’t lived enough. He’s discovered only a morsel of happiness for a fleeting moment, and he wants so much that he’ll never have. His endless greed is eating him alive.  

Give me more time, he wants to beg, but his mouth won’t open. Out here, he knows, no one will hear him speak. Such things are an inevitability. 

**

When they separate, Dokja takes a few bracing inhales, the breaths trembling in his lungs. His head is spinning. 

It hadn’t been a long kiss by any means. 

But it was still real, tangible. Warm. 

It was a reminder of everything Dokja could never have. 

“Nothing to say?” Joonghyuk murmurs. His voice feels more intimate, gentled by their proximity, the way their breaths seem to blend together. “Kim Dokja.”

Dokja closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to look at him. His heart hurts as it is. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“I thought you were an expert on my thoughts,” Dokja says, trying for a joke, but only silence greets him. 

A hand curled against his jaw makes Dokja open his eyes. Joonghyuk is staring at him, serious. “I’m not a mind-reader,” he says. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

They’re almost to the ground now, Dokja notices. He’d barely seen the peak and the descent. Even now the scenery seems to blur in his eyes, because he can’t focus on everything around him when his head is crowded as it is. 

Dokja doesn’t know what to say. All of it seems inadequate in the face of the crushing weight of Joonghyuk’s emotions. 

But more than that: he doesn’t know what would be the correct way to respond. The memory of being inside the train, seeing the ghost of Yoo Joonghyuk day in and day out, still echoes in his skull, telling him, You don’t know how to live without relying on me. You’ve always used me for your own benefit. Do you know how selfish that is?

If Dokja said that he liked it, that it made him happy, wouldn’t that be another form of using Joonghyuk? 

Because he did like it. He liked it so much that all he wants to do in that moment is grab his collar and kiss him again until his mouth is too kiss-bruised to talk. 

But Dokja can’t use Joonghyuk again. Maybe it would be in a way that Joonghyuk would like, for all he knows, but it wouldn’t change the fact that fundamentally, at his core, Dokja would be using him all over again. 

He’d be no different from the pathetic kid curled up in the train station, brainwashing himself into believing he was Yoo Joonghyuk for a scrap of courage. 

And if Dokja rejected him—that’d be worse. It’d screw with Joonghyuk’s happiness. It’d screw up with how Dokja could deal with him, and then it’d screw up the entire group dynamic and the happy ending they’d all worked for. It’d be best if he said yes, but—he’d be using Joonghyuk for his own self-satisfaction. 

Back to square one. 

It’s hurting Dokja’s head to think about it. There’s no right answer here. The misery of the whole situation sinks into his gut, made all the worse by the tingling in his mouth, his body singing with the memory of their kiss. 

He wants to do it again and again and again. Kiss him, call Joonghyuk his.

But he can’t. 

There’s a click as the cart settles back down to the ground, and a hiss of the bars releasing and moving up. 

Joonghyuk catches his wrist before he can go. “Don’t run.” 

“I’m not—” He cuts off, blows a frustrated breath. “I don’t have anything to say. Let go.”

The workers are beginning to mill around, uncomfortable. Dokja tries to shake him off, but Joonghyuk’s hold on him is iron. 

“Kim Dokja,” he says. “Don’t be a coward.”

“I’m not a coward just because I don’t have anything to say to you!”

“You’re being a coward because you’re hiding the truth,” Joonghyuk says, as if that makes any sense. There’s a challenge in his voice, because it’s Joonghyuk and he’s always trying to test Dokja, seeing something inside of him, reading his soul open in a language that only he knows, trying to get Dokja to see it too. 

The problem is that Dokja knows himself. He knows the shape of his soul and knows how it’s created everything awful in this universe. Maybe Joonghyuk is right. Maybe Dokja is a coward. 

But the truth remains that the Kim Dokja that Joonghyuk thought he was kissing, the one who’s perfect for him and good and selfless, is a Kim Dokja doesn’t exist.

The fury washes over him so fast it should scare him. It doesn’t. Instead he plunges into it, blood boiling, all his muscles going tense. “Fine,” he snaps. “You want the truth?”

“You—”

“No, fuck you, I’ll tell you the truth.” His voice doesn’t even sound like his own. It rings in his ears, warped, monstrous. It shapes him into someone he doesn’t recognize. 

“I don’t know what to do with you,” he says, and from the corner of his eye, he can see the workers moving away, giving them space. It should make him guilty; but he’s so filled with anger that he goes on, “You drive me fucking crazy. You keep making me think things I shouldn’t. You keep seeing things about me that aren’t there, making me out to be this person that I’m not and never will be, and you don’t even know the half of it. And you go off and kiss me like you’re trying to give me hope, and you turn around and call me a coward and you think—” Dokja laughs, and it sounds ugly even to him. “You think that’s somehow gonna work? It’s not. That happy ending isn’t here, Yoo Joonghyuk! Because I’m screwing it up!”

“You’re not screwing up anything,” Joonghyuk says, frustrated. “Why do you keep saying that?”

“Because it’s true! And you—you shouldn’t have done that.” 

“Done what?”

“You shouldn’t have kissed me.” 

Joonghyuk goes stiff. But it’s not enough. This is a festering wound that’ll rot the longer he leaves it alone. He needs to cut it off here, now, before he can fool himself into thinking this is something they both want. 

“I wish,” he says, biting the words out, “that you never fucking kissed me at all, Yoo Joonghyuk.”

Joonghyuk’s grip loosens. His expression is caught halfway between stunned and hurt. It’s the kind of hurt that’s been flayed open and stripped raw. Dokja’s never seen him look like that before. 

It’s enough to shake him off. Dokja doesn’t allow himself to look back as he walks away, eyes burning. 

From a distance, smothered in writhing shadows that hide his expression, the Oldest Dream is looking at him. 

**

One of the things Dokja liked to do, when he moved into Joonghyuk’s house, was walk it from wall to wall at night, tracing out the dimensions. It was never according to any real measurements by the usual standards, just his own. This room is twelve steps, he’d think, counting them out. One, two, three… 

It was an easy way to get his mind off the call of the stars. He’d noticed it when he was in the hospital, when the doctors and nurses would make him stretch and breathe and listen to his body. There was something off about his body. His ankles throbbed with every step more days than not. His knees, like he was attuned to the misfortunes of another Kim Dokja in some phantom, far-off universe, snapped as he stood up, only for the pain to vanish before he could gasp. He woke up day after day with his joints aching, like there was something shoving inside his skin to escape. 

When he paid attention to that, all of the ways that his body was wrong, he’d hear it clearly: the stars, whispering to come back where he belonged. 

It helped to walk. Focus on anything beside his body. He could center himself that way and understand that he wasn’t on an endless train, or lost in the horrifying expanse of the universe, or fragmented, lost. He was a human named Kim Dokja, pacing the halls of a house that wouldn’t change simply because he wanted it to.

But slowly, the days would come when the dimensions weren’t as he remembered them. He’d walk, remembering the hall to be sixteen steps, only for it to come up as forty-one. Heel-to-toe, eighteen for one room, and the next, fifty. 

The layout of the house began changing. He would walk left through a door expecting the kitchen, and looked up to find the living room where he’d just exited. 

On one such night, Joonghyuk was leaning against the kitchen counter, sipping at a cup of water. “What are you doing up?” he asked.

Dokja didn’t know what to say. So he didn’t say anything at all. His heart thudded in his throat, deafening, nauseating. 

“If you can’t sleep, sleep with me,” Joonghyuk said and set his cup on the counter, too close to the edge. They both watched as it fell, and it surprised Dokja that Joonghyuk couldn’t catch it. Or maybe it wasn’t that Joonghyuk couldn’t catch it, it was that he didn’t care.

The apathy unnerved Dokja. Still he said nothing.

Joonghyuk moved past the shattered ceramic at his feet, leaving little trails of blood glistening on the wooden floor. You’re hurting yourself, Dokja almost said, but the words wouldn’t come out. His body was frozen stiff. He wasn’t even sure if he was breathing.

Joonghyuk paused at the end of the hall before the doorway to his room, where he stopped to look back. “Are you coming?” he asked. 

It took a moment for Dokja to reply. The paralysis shook off. “Yeah,” he said, and, stumbling, followed after him. 

Joonghyuk’s bed smelled like him, melting sugar and ash, familiar enough that he could find his way home by the scent of him. Dokja could feel himself sink into it like the ground was swallowing him up whole, but with Joonghyuk’s body pressed solid and warm against his, it was a comforting feeling, and he’d fallen asleep to the sound of Joonghyuk’s breaths, steady in the night. 

When he woke up in the morning, Dokja found himself in his own bed. He’d stumbled out into the living room, where Joonghyuk was holding that same shattered cup he used from the previous night, and he stared at it, fixated for a reason he couldn’t explain. His eyes flickered down to Joonghyuk’s bare feet: perfectly pale and uninjured. 

“Dokja?” Joonghyuk said.

“Did I come to your room last night?” Dokja blurted, because he couldn’t make himself say, Why did I wake up alone? 

Joonghyuk stared at him. “No,” he said, and carefully set the cup down on the coffee table with a quiet clink. “I’ve heard you walking before. But yesterday you slept the whole night through.”

Dokja swallowed. Who was that, sleeping beside me? 

The question went unasked. He couldn’t say it, too scared to be seen as exactly the crazy person he was fast becoming. 

**

     4. Edit a novel.

“Do you like editing?” a voice says. “Does it make you happy?” 

Dokja shivers. The voice seems to emerge from deep within the earth; something ancient, beyond this world, too powerful for even Dokja to fathom. He feels it resonate from the spaces inside his bones, rattling out, and it leaves him numb, cold.

He takes a glance around; there’s no one in the vicinity as far as he can see. The veranda door is closed and the space is devoid of people except for him—which is why he replies. 

“It’s something to do,” he says, words pitched low. He’s trying to get rid of the Oldest Dream by appeasing him, whatever the fuck he wants, not get himself admitted into a psych ward. “Why are you here?”

The writhing mass of shadows that Dokja recognizes as the Oldest Dream steps over Joonghyuk’s sprouting carrots in the veranda—as if his feet have physical weight; it’s a detail that makes Dokja’s insides seize with fear—and sits at Dokja’s feet, looking up at him. 

He doesn’t have only two eyes. Instead his shadows are covered with them, dozens upon dozens swiveling towards Dokja: wide, guileless. 

“I was wondering,” the Oldest Dream says. “You seemed lonely.”

“Is that why you’re here? Because I seem lonely? Does that even make sense to you?”

“I want to help you.”

“You’re not. You’re making it worse.”

“I’m you. How am I making it worse?”

“You don’t know what you do to me,” Dokja says, voice beginning to shake, “and I don’t mean that in a good way. Go away.”

“Is it because I’m a reminder of your worst memories?” the Oldest Dream asks, and reaches out. 

When a small hand surfaces from the shadows to land on Dokja’s knee, Dokja flinches violently. It’s a cold hand, like a corpse’s—but more than that, the sight of those chipped, raw-bitten nails, the scraped knuckles, all of it sends memories flooding back into his brain. He’s ten, cowering in the closet while his mom’s gentle tone shifts into something more pleading; he’s thirteen, hearing the word “murderer” and knowing it’s a walking brand on him; he’s fifteen, looking down at a long height from the hospital roof into the concrete fifteen stories below, wondering if it’s that long of a fall after all. 

He’s eighteen, twenty-one, miserable. He’s thirty-three, staring horrified at the monster who believes himself a child, solely responsible for all the pain in the universe. 

Dokja knocks the Oldest Dream’s hand away and rushes to his feet. The Oldest Dream doesn’t move, instead gazing up at him. Still so fucking innocent. Still so vile. 

“You’re responsible for this,” Dokja tells him, trembling. “You created this. You made him regress over a thousand times for your sick enjoyment. You’re a coward. And you—you waltzed off getting your happy ending, and you leave me there for an eternity, and you come back when it’s convenient and think you can just ask me if I’m happy? Fuck you. You have no right. What do you care? When have you ever cared? When—“

“Kim Dokja.”

Dokja whirls around. His vision is blurry, but he’d recognize that figure anywhere. 

“Joonghyuk,” he rasps, shoulders hunching. “I didn’t. I didn’t know you were there.”

It’s been two weeks since they’ve talked to each other, and it’s obvious that the tension is still there. Joonghyuk doesn’t say a word as he approaches. Dokja’s eyes dart down, but the Oldest Dream is watching them both. Corporeal. 

“I’m here for you,” the Oldest Dream says, as if in reminder. 

Dokja’s fist clenches, reels back—

Only to be caught by Joonghyuk. Dokja lets out a furious noise, but he doesn’t let go no matter how much Dokja struggles, just forces him to lower his fist. He wraps his hands around Dokja’s and begins prying his fist loose, finger by finger. 

“Kim Dokja.” First, the pinky. “What are you seeing?”

“…Nothing.” 

The Oldest Dream is humming now, eyes closed, swaying, before he leans against Joonghyuk’s leg. Joonghyuk doesn’t react. 

Dokja doesn’t understand how. The Oldest Dream is casting a shadow. He’s creasing the folds of Joonghyuk’s pants with his weight, and Dokja’s ears ache with the sound of his reality-breaking hums. It strains his eyes to focus on him, like he’s looking into a void that has no end. Joonghyuk should notice. There’s no reason why he can’t see it, when they’d both been at the train station, horrified at the sight of the Oldest Dream controlling the strings of the universe. 

Joonghyuk is possibly the only person who should be able to see the Oldest Dream, even more than Dokja. 

But he can’t. 

Why?  

“Don’t lie,” Joonghyuk is saying. He unfolds Dokja’s ring finger next, then the middle. “You keep seeing things. You hear them, too. Since when?”

Dokja stays quiet. He just blinks hard, abruptly miserable and lonely.  

The index and the thumb are tugged loose, and Joonghyuk’s standing there, cradling Dokja’s hand in his. 

“You’re not happy,” he says. 

“That’s not true,” Dokja says automatically. “I’m happy.”

“I’ve never seen a happy person yell at the air like you did.”

Dokja jerks, but Joonghyuk doesn’t let him go. Instead, he holds on tight, and Dokja casts his eyes around, looking at anywhere but him—and his gaze lands on the Oldest Dream on the ground, fiddling with the hem of Joonghyuk’s pants. Still fucking here. 

“You’re doing it again,” Joonghyuk’s voice says, from what feels like far away. “Tell me what you see.”

Dokja swallows, hard. “What will you do if I tell you what I see?”

“It depends on what you say.”

Always the fucking non-answers with him. “Yoo Joonghyuk. Let me go.” When Joonghyuk doesn’t move, Dokja tries to soften his voice. He has to remember: Joonghyuk isn’t an enemy. Joonghyuk wants him to be happy. So he has to be happy. “Joonghyuk-ah,” he says, gentler. “I’m okay now. It’s gone.”

It’s a lie. The Oldest Dream is curled up on the veranda. Beside his ear, one of Joonghyuk’s basil plants is swaying in the wind. 

Joonghyuk’s eyes linger on him, but Dokja stares back, impassive. After a moment he nods, steps back, and lets go of Dokja’s hands, turning around to head back into the house. 

The sight of his back lights something desperate in his gut, bubbling and sick. “Joonghyuk-ah,” he calls. 

Joonghyuk pauses. Doesn’t turn. 

Dokja scrambles for words. All he can manage is a fumbling, “I… ah… I’m sorry. About what I said a week ago. I shouldn’t have said it.”

“Why not?”

“Because—” It wasn’t true, Dokja wants to say, but that’s not the core of the matter here. “Because I hurt you,” he settles on.

It’s woefully inadequate as far as apologies go, but Joonghyuk turns just enough to look at Dokja. “You’ve done worse,” he says, before he walks away. 

**

When Joonghyuk appeared for the second time, Dokja was three days into his attempts to carve lines into the steel plate of the door for every day that he thought had passed. 

It was a special kind of hell, being unable to tell time. His phone refused to tell the time if he ever looked at the screen: it was always stuck at 11:59, the last stroke before midnight. He didn’t know how many times he’d stared at the screen and counted the seconds in his head over and over again, hoping that this time, the day would cross over into a new one. 

But it never did. In the train, no other apps worked; only the three thousand chapters of The Ways of Survival would load, and as much of a fan as Dokja was, reading about Yoo Joonghyuk’s regressions left a bad taste in his mouth after everything they’d gone through together. 

He wasn’t a character anymore. Dokja had no right to read his story as if he was. 

Dokja had sanded down his thumbnail to a raw nub by the time Joonghyuk’s voice said behind him, “You should learn how to stop being so selfish.”

Dokja started, and in his surprise he jammed his thumb into the door. The skin cracked. Soon he was bleeding, the red seeping into the tiny notch he’d managed to make in the door. 

But he didn’t turn around. He just stared at the door, praying he had the strength to make Joonghyuk go away. 

It didn’t work. “Well?” Joonghyuk said, demanding. 

It was the realism of his apparition that killed Dokja inside. “I don’t know what you want to hear from me,” he said finally. 

“You’ll die here. Are you planning to feel bad for yourself for the rest of eternity?” 

“There’s nothing I can do.” There was one option, but Dokja didn’t want to entertain it yet. He still wanted to hold onto hope, even though he knew it was largely useless. Sometimes it felt like a practice in self-flagellation, to think of alternative endings than rotting in this train. “In case you haven’t noticed, there’s nothing to do here. I don’t have any power.”

“You’re the Oldest Dream now.”

“And?”

“That means you’re a fucking idiot, Kim Dokja,” Joonghyuk said, and then he was being yanked from the floor and dragged by the collar, stumbling, across the train and to the window where he was hurled against the wall. 

The throw knocked all the breath from his lungs. He landed on the train bench with a muffled gasp, and struggled to gain his bearings. Being immortal certainly didn’t stop him from feeling pain. 

“What the hell,” he wheezed at Joonghyuk. 

Joonghyuk crossed his arms and scowled at him, jerking his head at the window. “Look. There are thousands of worldlines out there. You could stop feeling bad for yourself and do your job properly.”

He already was, if only at a distance. It hurt too much going too close, seeing everyone and being unable to reach them except in the probability sparks of an ancient Outer God. “I thought I was.” 

“This is why you’re selfish,” Joonghyuk said. “You’re just watching, but you could fix some of them. All those worldlines you created with your fucked up imagination, you could fix them. You could help me. All my regressions—you could make it so that none of it existed. You could repent for all the wrongs you did to me. Is that what you call ‘having no power’?”

Dokja stared, stunned speechless. 

“What, you don’t want to do it?” 

His throat was dry. “It’s not that, I… Is that possible? All of your regressions?”

“It’d be possible if you cared about anyone besides yourself,” Joonghyuk told him ruthlessly, and Dokja flinched. At that Joonghyuk’s expression softened, into something more familiar, kind. The Joonghyuk that he’d called his companion. “Kim Dokja,” he said, and kneeled at Dokja’s feet, putting a warm hand to his knee. “You want to help me. You know you do. You just don’t know how to be selfless enough to begin.”

Dokja shook his head. He wanted to block out his ears, but that was something that the Oldest Dream would do—not him. 

He was different. He had to listen to this. 

“That’s not true,” Dokja pleaded. “I’d do anything for you. You know that. That’s why I’m here.”

“We both know that’s not why,” Joonghyuk said, still in that soft tone.

Dokja bit his lip until he tasted blood. 

“But that’s another issue. You can help. Is it that you want extra incentive?” His hand traveled up Dokja’s thigh, stayed against his hip. His warm thumb slipped underneath his shirt to touch bare skin. 

“Stop.”

“I’m trying to help you.” The hand glided up higher, to his waist. 

“Don’t do this,” Dokja said, stomach lurching. 

Joonghyuk didn’t listen. “I can give you incentive,” he said. He was so handsome it hurt to look at him: those dark eyes, the strong edge of his jaw, the straight nose. He lifted his other hand and left it in the air. “Come here.”

“I—”

“Kim Dokja. Don’t make me repeat myself.”

Dokja, unable to resist anything when Joonghyuk called him in that voice, lowered his face until his cheek brushed Joonghyuk’s palm. Nausea continued to churn in his gut. To tamp it down, he closed his eyes, turning his mouth against the jut of Joonghyuk’s wrist bone. 

“I don’t need this,” he whispered. “This isn’t...”

“It’s everything you need,” Joonghyuk said. “Don’t lie. You don’t know how to be selfless without something like this. That’s why I’m giving it to you.”

“I can’t make you do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not fair to you.”

“You should remember I’m not real,” Joonghyuk said, and kissed him.

It was good. It was perfect. That was the worst part of it, how perfect the kiss was, how it was everything Dokja imagined it would be. He’d read about Joonghyuk’s kiss scenes with Lee Seolhwa an endless number of times in The Ways of Survival.  

Each time, the author had described it the same way: He was unexpectedly gentle. 

It was true. Joonghyuk’s lips were warm, quietly adoring; he kissed Dokja like he was actually in love with him and wanted to give him all the tenderness the world had to offer with that one kiss. Dokja whimpered and leaned into it, desperate and hungry. 

He wanted to do this forever. He wanted to fold himself into Joonghyuk’s body and learn the details behind every scar and every mark that he never read, and he wanted to hear it from Joonghyuk’s own voice and words, and he wanted to feel Joonghyuk’s mouth on his, kissing him so sweet like this, murmuring his name like a lover. 

He wanted, more than anything, for Joonghyuk to be real.  

When Joonghyuk pulled away, Dokja’s cheeks were wet. “You’re a hallucination,” he mumbled, because he had to remind himself. 

In response, Joonghyuk kissed the tears off his cheeks and stroked his cheek so softly that he could almost believe it was a real touch. 

“I’m all you have,” Joonghyuk said. 

**

     3. Visit Mom.

When Dokja walks into his mother’s apartment, he’s struck by how much it resembles her, in the sense that it has no frills and is utterly and completely practical. In the middle of Seoul, where apartments post-apocalypse are absurdly huge for the people who found themselves still coin-wealthy or barely a studio by legal standards, she’s managed to find an apartment with the exact square footage of space she needs for her furniture, and no more.

The entryway leads out into the dining area, the glass tables pressed up against the counters of the kitchen sinks and cupboards. He’s struck by how clean the kitchen is, how bare. When they’d lived together with his dad, all the counters had been littered with empty soju bottles and crushed cans of beer, sticky with spilled alcohol and the anju he’d forced her to make in the late hours after she’d returned home from work. 

But now the kitchen is simple, clean. A shelf for the dishes while the sink remains empty and clean and devoid of flies nesting in a pile of rotten food. The fridge has a few pictures pinned to the surface; he recognizes her placid smile among a sea of other female ex-inmates, her arms linked with two other women he doesn’t know the names of. She seems happy. 

“Do you resent her for it?” the Oldest Dream asks, behind him. 

Dokja doesn’t turn to look at him. He can’t; the Oldest Dream occupies so much space in the room that he seems to block out all of the light with his looming mass. He’s unrecognizable, large beyond measure, a rasping leviathan that breaks reality by laying eyes on him. He looks like something from the train, or maybe even beyond it, warped through the compression of a thousand worldlines—once human, but not anymore. The Oldest Dream resembles all of Dokja’s worst nightmares coming to fetch him back and swallow him into the endless abyss of the universe.  

So Dokja ignores him to wander back out to the living space. He strokes the surface of the couch, experimental; it’s leather. Good quality. Expensive. The TV is wide, and its remote lays perfectly in the center of the wooden coffee table near the couch, like the whole space is an image ripped straight from an IKEA catalogue. 

Setting two teacups on the coffee table, his mother looks at him. “Dokja.”

His gaze snaps back from the two doors at the end of the hall—bedrooms, maybe—to her face. “Sorry, I was just… looking around,” he says lamely. “It’s a nice place you have here, Mother.”

“I had help,” she says, and doesn’t elaborate. 

They’d managed to patch things up during the scenarios, but Dokja can’t deny that there’s still that awkwardness remaining between him and his mother. It’s a gap maintained by the both of them, for over a decade. Something like that isn’t so easy to cross. 

But he takes a breath. Forces himself to look away from the Oldest Dream, peeking into the cracked doors of the bedrooms down the hall, and sits down on the couch, diagonal from her. “What have you been up to?” he asks. 

Be a good son, he thinks to himself. That’s what you came here for. 

So he sits on the couch and sips his tea and listens as she tells him about meeting with her friends, some from prison, others that she’d made from facing the scenarios together. She tells him that adjusting to life outside of prison wasn’t as hard as she’d thought it would be. She tells him that adjusting to life outside of the scenarios was worse. She tells him that she’s glad to see him, and at that moment the Oldest Dream finishes looking at the bedrooms and curls up on the couch next to his mother, setting his head on her shoulder.

Dokja startles so badly that he spills the hot tea all over his lap. 

“I,” he scrambles to explain, as she stands and hurries to grab him a towel, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what—I was just surprised.”

“She’s my mother too,” the Oldest Dream says quietly. 

Dokja’s teeth sink into his bottom lip until he can taste blood. You and me are not the same, he thinks at the Oldest Dream, furious. 

It’s not long after that that she returns with a cool towel and an ice bag, pressing both against his thighs. “Are you okay?” she asks, brows furrowed. “Does it hurt?”

He breaks eye contact with the Oldest Dream and gauges himself. The pain’s a pulsing sort of heat on the skin of his thighs, but nothing too bad. The tea must’ve not been that hot. “No, it’s fine. Thank you.”

There’s a pause, and then she sits back on her heels, her palms curled around his knobby knees. “You said you were surprised,” she says. 

“I—” He can’t remember what he said to her. “Did I?”

“Yes. Were you surprised by the fact that I was happy to see you?”

“No, that’s…” Dokja trails off, because now the Oldest Dream is gliding towards him and sitting down on the floor beside his mother, tendrils of darkness wrapping around her waist from the side, his head tucking into the crook of her neck like he’s seeking warmth and comfort.

None of which he fucking deserves.

“Get away from her,” he finds himself snapping instead.

The Oldest Dream doesn’t move, eyes only tracking him lazily, but his mother’s hands lift from his knees. 

“What?” she says, quiet. 

“It’s nothing.” It’s not nothing; the Oldest Dream is still lingering, refusing to move. Dokja’s fists curl around the fabric of his soaked pants. “I was just seeing things that shouldn’t be there.”

“Dokja…”

“She’s my mother,” the Oldest Dream says over her voice. Suddenly it’s as if the world is narrowing down to the two of them, two reflections bound by the frames of a mirror that won’t let anyone else inside. The Oldest Dream’s dozen eyes are deep, unfathomable in his omniscience and age. It’s another reminder that he’s not a kid, but the cruel, spoiled, cowardly version of Dokja who refuses to disappear. 

“She’s my mother,” the Oldest Dream repeats again. His shadowy arms curl around her waist tighter, mouth pressing together in an upset line. “You might not remember, but she did everything for me. For us. And I love her. And if I want to hug her, I can. You can’t stop me.”

Dokja’s jaw tightens. If you disappear, everything would be okay, he thinks. If only you disappeared—

“Dokja,” his mother says, and by the sound of her tone, it’s not the first time she’s called his name. His eyes snap to her, but he can’t focus on her face. It’s blurred, hazy. The Oldest Dream, fucking things up for him again, taking everything. He knows it has to be him. “Dokja,” she says. “Sit down with me. Listen to my voice. Breathe in—”

“You know that’s not true,” the Oldest Dream continues. “You’re just jealous.”

Copper bursts in his mouth. Dokja is shaking so hard he aches. 

“If you really want something,” the Oldest Dream says, louder, drowning out the sound of his mom’s voice, “you have to reach for it. All that stuff about time keeping you two apart, that’s an excuse. Do you think you deserve this? Can you honestly tell me that you think you do, the way you are?”

Always talking about deserving, and happiness, and cowardice. As if he knows. As if he’s ever worked for a single fucking thing in his miserable life. 

“I don’t need to hear this from you,” he snarls. His mom’s voice stops; the silence in its absence is striking. But the Oldest Dream has stopped talking, too. So he needs to say this aloud, for both him and this fucked-up version of him to hear: “I never needed you in my life. Whatever you think you’re doing, you can stop. It’s not helping. You—coming in here, thinking you can tell me whatever you want, even though you’ve done fucking nothing to deserve it—”

“Dokja,” his mom says, hurt, but he can’t hear her, he’s only looking at the Oldest Dream who is staring back at him with young, solemn eyes.

“You,” he tells the Oldest Dream, “should have died the first chance you got. You don’t deserve your happy ending. You’ve done nothing to earn it, and you fucking know it.”

He stops, heaving, and the ringing in his ears is so loud that he almost misses it when the Oldest Dream murmurs, “Is that what you really think?” 

His throat is dry. But he manages to push out the words, still. “Yeah,” Dokja says. “It is.”

In a blink, the Oldest Dream vanishes. In his place is his mother, standing up, moving quickly to clear the tea. He blinks again at her, but she doesn’t stop. “Mom,” he says, hoarse, but she just shakes her head, face pale. 

She doesn’t look hurt, but she’d never looked hurt when they were living with his father, either. She was simply weary, tired of holding her fear close to herself.

It’s how she looks now, avoiding his gaze. 

“I think you should go,” she says, clipped. Detaching herself again, cutting the lifeline short. “For today.”

“Mom—”

But she’s already retreated into her bedroom, the door closing behind her.

**

Two bedrooms, Dokja thinks on the train ride home from his mom’s apartment, dazed. One of them was clearly for her, but it doesn’t make sense that there’s another to begin with. She lives alone as far as he knows. 

But maybe she’d told him otherwise, and he didn’t listen, trying to get rid of the Oldest Dream. None of what he’d said had been meant for her, but he can’t explain that. Sorry, I wasn’t talking to you, but the visage of my younger self, who I hold a lot of resentment towards and it just so happened that everything I told him also fit what I could have said about you.

He’d gone to visit her in his feeble attempt to be a good son—and he’d failed. He’d spent all of thirty minutes with her. It was enough time for him to screw it up completely, the way he seems to be screwing up everything these days.

Dokja’s head is spinning, but still he manages to keep tight grasp of the key he’d spotted on the coffee table, beside his tea cup, on his way out. 

It looks like a house key. 

Two bedrooms. 

He wants to take out his phone and ask her. Simple: Was that other bedroom for me?

But Dokja doesn’t know if she’d even respond now. 

A hand closes over his as the train doors hiss open. Dokja looks up, expecting Joonghyuk on instinct, but it’s only the Oldest Dream, back again to tug at the key in his loose fingers and ask, “Do you think you deserve this?”

Dokja finds that he can’t reply.

**

Dokja spent a small eternity staring at the flickering light left by the 0th turn’s Yoo Joonghyuk. He’d barely noticed his body breaking apart. Pieces of him were crumbling away into stories and the fragments of his consciousness, and he’d let them go, hoping that a part of him would accompany the lovely Joonghyuk who had prayed for his continued existence. 

That was how Joonghyuk found him: surrounded by a dying storm of probability sparks, pressed against the window with his missing fingers and shredded arm. 

“I didn’t think you were capable of it,” Joonghyuk’s voice said behind him. 

It was obvious, hearing the hallucination of Joonghyuk’s voice, that this figment of his imagination was nothing like the real Yoo Joonghyuk. That 0th turn Yoo Joonghyuk, who was happy and wished him well and asked to meet him behind lifetimes of suffering, would have never spoken to him like this. 

The real Yoo Joonghyuk wanted him to be happy. He understood that now. 

But it was still a Joonghyuk who was close enough to touch. Eternity was lonely enough to make Dokja desperate. He turned, clutching at his mangled arm with the stump of his wrist. “Did I fulfill your expectations?” he asked, with a dry smile. “I tried to be selfless. Like you said.”

“Incentive,” Joonghyuk noted. He sat down beside Dokja, and gently took his injured arm in his hands, fingers tracing across the oozing cuts left by the probability storm. “How did it feel?”

Joonghyuk’s touch felt numb against his deadened nerves, like he was feeling Joonghyuk’s fingers through several layers of plastic. The pain was barely there. “It felt good. I can’t tell you how great it was being the one to save you, for once.”

“You’ve saved me before.”

“Yeah, but still. Who can say that they were Yoo Joonghyuk’s one and only sponsor?” 

“So in the end, it’s still selfishness,” Joonghyuk said, fingers digging in. His nails tore through flesh and muscle, wormed underneath to reach hard bone. 

Agony blazed through Dokja’s arm, all the worse because of how sudden it was. 

“Fuck!” he cried out. “I—Joonghyuk-ah! Let me go!”

“This is punishment,” he said. “Bear with it.”

“Joonghyuk!” 

Tears sprung to Dokja’s eyes, but no matter how much he rammed at Joonghyuk’s chest with his stump of a hand, Joonghyuk didn’t budge. Instead, he tore a wider cut in his arm, peeling the skin, sinews of muscle. 

Eventually, Dokja slumped, exhausted. Plip-plip, went the sluggish drops of blood from his elbow. 

“Why are you doing this to me?” he asked, hoarse and muffled in his elbow. He’d bitten down to keep from screaming; an old habit. 

“Because you didn’t learn,” Joonghyuk answered, calm. Finally he unhooked his fingers from the meat of Dokja’s mutilated arm, and set it down against his knee with a patronizing pat. “Your intrinsic motivations haven’t changed.”

“I just—“ He shuddered as his arm shook with the aftershocks of pain. “I just want to make you happy. Is that selfish?”

“Kim Dokja,” Joonghyuk said, pitying, and cradled his face with blood-soaked hands. “You can’t possibly be so full of yourself as to believe you can make me happy.”

**

2. Repay a debt.

Dokja's always abided by the philosophy that if something isn't working out, abandon it and jump ship immediately. He can't say it's worked out considering his previous educational, financial, and employment choices, but he's alive and surprisingly rich, so he can't say that his philosophy doesn't work either.

With that in mind.

me

What are you doing this weekend

lee seolhwa

How did you get my number?

me

I have connections. Can you answer the question

lee seolhwa

I was planning on nothing, but now that you’re asking, I might have to be preoccupied unless you have a good answer for me. Why are you asking?

Dokja is in the middle of typing out a nonchalant, how do you feel about a blind date, but he only gets five words in before his phone is snatched out of his hands, and he peers up from the couch to find Joonghyuk staring at his phone, mouth thinned. 

“You could’ve asked if you needed my phone,” Dokja points out, when Joonghyuk continues to say nothing.

Instead of returning his phone to him like any decent called-out thief would, Joonghyuk pockets his phone and crosses his arms, as if Dokja is the one who’s done something wrong. “Why are you texting Lee Seolhwa?” he demands.

Ah, tricky situations. “I have my reasons. I don’t need to tell you.”

“You were going to ask how she felt about blind dates,” Joonghyuk says, flat. “Weren’t you.”

Fucking protagonists.

“And if I was?” Dokja retorts. “It still doesn’t have anything to do with why you stole my phone. Which I would like to have back, by the way.”

“But if it does?”

“What?”

“If,” Joonghyuk enunciates slowly, leaning down to box him in against the couch, “it has something to do with me—then what will I get?”

“You manipulative sunfish,” Dokja says, hardly breathing, because they’re too close for comfort. They’re so close that it’s fast becoming a real worry that Joonghyuk might be able to hear his thudding pulse. “Walk it back a few steps, and then we can talk like normal people at a normal distance.”

“I think you’ve proved you’re far past ‘normal’ at this point, Kim Dokja.”

“Wh—hey!”

Joonghyuk doesn’t respond to any of Dokja’s efforts to shove him away. He doesn’t get closer, but he doesn’t move away either, staring at him with intent. "I thought you would've known better than this," he murmurs.

"What, doing you a favor?" 

"If you think you're doing me a favor, you're a bigger fool than I thought."

"That's not—"

"I kissed you," Joonghyuk snaps, thunderous.

Dokja freezes in place, halfway caught between denying it and cowering back into the cushions.

"That might not mean anything to you," Joonghyuk continues, low. "But it did to me. I wouldn't have kissed anyone if I didn't feel anything for them. And if you don't feel anything for me in return, that's fine, but you can't set me up with another person when you know how I feel and expect me to thank you."

It's maybe the most Dokja's ever heard him say in one go. "That wasn't what I was trying to do. I just—I know you. I've known you for every regression, every worldline, and Seolhwa—"

"All that time watching over me, and you haven't learned a goddamn thing, Kim Dokja.” His jaw is tight when he pulls back, putting a clean distance between them both. "You think I'm the same person as I was in those regressions? You know as well as I do that my decisions make me who I am.” He exhales, short, seething. “I told you before. I'm not a character."

"I know you're not," Dokja says helplessly.

"Do you?" Joonghyuk demands, and Dokja falls silent, because Joonghyuk is beyond angry and hurtling straight into fury, the type that's making his knuckles go white, voice bitten down low with barely restrained emotion. "I'm not sure you do. Otherwise you wouldn't be telling me that I'm mistaken about what I feel, because it's not in line with what you read. Is that not the case?"

"Of course it's not!" Dokja explodes, and shoots up to his feet, grabbing at Joonghyuk's wrist. Joonghyuk doesn't shake him off, but he goes even more tense, if possible, all of him a live wire, exposed and stinging. "I don't think of you as a character anymore. I've stopped that a long time ago, you have to know that."

"Then tell me," Joonghyuk says, quiet, "why you're acting like this."

Dokja bites his lip. 

What can he even say? That he's seen the glowing happiness he's shared with Seolhwa in other lifetimes? That the warmth that Yoo Joonghyuk of the 0th turn had left him was what allowed him to hold on even when he was being terrorized by his own hallucinations? That he wants Joonghyuk to be happy, and that there would be no way he could find it with Dokja?

That it'd be selfish to keep Joonghyuk for himself when it's clear that there wouldn't be any happiness to be found there?

His fingers let go of Joonghyuk’s sleeve. 

"I just… I don't think that you're making a smart decision here,” Dokja says eventually. “That's why."

"Because you think I'm a character," Joonghyuk says tonelessly, but Dokja is already shaking his head.

"No, because—because I can't make you happy. I can't."

"You already do!”

If this conversation wasn't delivering Dokja to the utter pits of despair, he'd smile at how childish Joonghyuk sounds, talking like that. Naïve, even after all they've endured.

But he knows all too well that Joonghyuk's lying. Maybe Dokja manages to make him happy every once in a while or soothes his soul or whatever it is that makes Joonghyuk fall in love, but he knows himself—and Joonghyuk, on that point—too well to fool himself into believing that that sort of happiness is sustainable long-term. It's a simple truth: people like Lee Seolhwa are devoted and constant and present enough to maintain a relationship. Dokja isn't.

"I'm doing you a favor," he says, in the ensuing silence. "You have to believe me on that."

Joonghyuk goes still. Even if he doesn’t make a sound, Dokja can see, even if he doesn’t understand, how much his words cut Joonghyuk. 

“I’m not saying this to hurt you,” he scrambles to say. “Joonghyuk-ah. Look at me. I…”

The ensuing silence seems crushing. Dokja can’t bring himself to break it.

“When will you understand?” Joonghyuk asks softly, his shoulders hunched and small. “People care about you. You’re allowed to have that.”

“But I,” don’t deserve it, he wants to say, but he’s self-aware enough to recognize what a terrible decision that’ll be. 

The curtain shifts. The Oldest Dream emerges from the shadows and his body oozes over to Dokja, capturing both of Dokja’s hands in the pile of wriggling shadows. Cold palms. 

“Stop that,” the Oldest Dream says, and Dokja looks down to see that he’s torn the skin off the edges of his fingers. 

“I know it takes time,” Joonghyuk is saying. “But you make it so goddamn hard sometimes, Kim Dokja.” 

It’s the same song and dance. Everyone keeps telling him the same thing: that it’s hard for them, that he’s making it hard for them. 

Dokja’s used to being called difficult. But it’s different when Joonghyuk says it.

“I’m trying,” Dokja says. “I don’t know how to do this, either, okay? But I’m learning. It’s hard for me, too. And you—you don’t make it any easier.” At that, Joonghyuk finally spins around, eyes wide, but Dokja’s too far into his rant to notice. “You, with all your touches and—and the way you look at me, like I won’t notice, and I don’t know why you stick around when you know that I can’t—”

“You can,” Joonghyuk says, steely. “You just won’t let yourself.”

“Don’t assume anything about me,” Dokja snarls.

But Joonghyuk doesn’t take offense. Instead, he watches in muted trepidation as Joonghyuk pads over to him, leaning over his chair, and raising his hand—to flick him in the forehead, once. 

“Don’t be stupid, Kim Dokja,” Joonghyuk tells him. “I lived for you, and you lived for me. I don’t have to assume anything that I already know.”

“And I’m telling you that you know nothing about me.”

In response, Joonghyuk takes out Dokja's phone from his pocket and tosses it to him before leaving without another word.

Dokja stares down at his unfinished message. He's doing the right thing. He knows he is. He has to do it, even if Joonghyuk doesn't see the positives in the short-term, because he knows for certain that this is what will bring Joonghyuk happiness in the future. He's seen it. He's made it happen, even.

"Are you going to send it?" says the Oldest Dream. He casts tall shadows over Dokja’s lap, stretching over his body, eating him whole. 

Dokja doesn't move. He just clutches the phone in his hands with icy fingers, feeling cold lead sludge through his veins.

"Do you think this is what Yoo Joonghyuk deserves?" the Oldest Dream asks.

It is. It has to be.

"Then why won't you send it?"

The screen goes dark. Seeing his reflection on the surface, Dokja knows now what he's always denied. The simple, awful truth: "Because I want to cling to this for as long as I can," Dokja says to the Oldest Dream.

The Oldest Dream doesn't judge him. Instead he gazes back with unknowable eyes. "Even if you don't think it's yours?"

"Don't be stupid," Dokja says. He’s always thought Joonghyuk, if only one part, was his. That character in The Ways Of Survival, whose existence was only known and treasured by Dokja throughout his entire life—that Yoo Joonghyuk belonged to him from the beginning.

But possession doesn’t equal deserving. He can possess happiness, sure. It doesn’t mean that Dokja deserves it. 

**

The days pass in a haze. Dokja continues to go about his daily routine of reading, sleeping, and editing Sooyoung’s novel, with the addition of swerving out of Joonghyuk’s path whenever he can. He doesn’t visit the rooftop to stargaze anymore. The stars have grown too loud for it to be peaceful. 

Some days it feels like something else is creeping into his body. The stars are so deafening that it makes it difficult for him to think, but more than that, he finds himself paralyzed throughout odd moments of the day, unable to draw even a single breath. The scariest part is that he can’t control or predict when it happens. He has to ride it out, until the warmth seeps back into his body and he can take a rattling inhale, letting the air trickle into his lungs. 

But a dull pain litters his body, after. Dokja emerges from the shower one day and finds his reflection in the foggy mirror to discover mottled bruises all over him: on his protruding ribcage, the curve of his spine, up and down his legs. He doesn’t remember falling. He doesn’t remember much at all, actually. He only remembers the strange paralysis and the icy cold welling into his bones, nesting in his marrow, his soul. 

Meanwhile, the Oldest Dream only grows bigger and more terrifying with every night, his voice indecipherable between the slurred syllables and the crackle of probability, ancient power. 

Dokja has a growing feeling that he should tell someone—that he’s losing time and that his body is constantly in pain and he doesn’t know why. That there’s something inhabiting his body that isn’t wholly him, and it’s leading his body around pretending to be him, and that he’s seeing the illusion of himself grow more monstrous, but he doesn’t know how to say any of it. Joonghyuk looks at him sometimes like he knows the fear is weighing on Dokja’s mind, but he doesn’t say anything either. 

He’s tired of you, the stars whisper to him. Dokja can’t refute it. 

So Dokja begins to ignore his reflection. He carefully averts his eyes from the mirror when he steps out of the shower; pushes the stinging pain of his swollen joints far from his mind; sleeps without shifting around in an attempt to avoid aggravating the unexplainable bruises. 

He sleeps, and sleeps, and sleeps. Each night, Dokja will dream about the same thing: he will walk the apartment, wall to wall, counting the steps, two, four, six, eight, ten, and push the window open. The night air will call to him, and he’ll look down, but instead of the concrete waiting below half a dozen stories, there will only be freefall. One step, into thirteen. 

He’ll struggle not to fall, to hold his balance. But the vast emptiness of the universe will call for him to return, and Dokja will have no choice but to listen, and spins endlessly into darkness until he wakes up, throat hoarse from sleep and bitten-down screams.

**

“Do you think you deserve this?” the Oldest Dream asks.

Dokja is exhausted, miserable, shaky in his own skin. He’s so tired of being tired. “I’m starting to think I do,” he answers.

Chapter Text

After he returned, Dokja discovered that he liked to sleep with piles of blankets and pillows, heavy to the point that it’d be hard to breathe when he woke up. He’d stare at the ceiling of his room inside Joonghyuk’s apartment, disoriented, lost, and then it’d click: he wasn’t inside the train anymore. He was back to reality. 

Outside, the smell of steamed eggs and seaweed soup floated into his room, the clinking of chopsticks and sizzling fish indistinct in his ears. It was too hot for steamed eggs, he thought blearily, but he was sleeping with four different blankets and Joonghyuk’s loose sweatshirt, so maybe he didn’t have a point to go off at all. 

Dokja’s sweat was sinking into the sheets; he needed to wash them again. 

For a long minute, he couldn’t bring himself to move, still shaking off the haze of sleep and a half-forgotten dream about being cold, about being trapped inside a train without an end. 

The door creaked open at that moment. “It’s time to eat,” Joonghyuk said, leaning against the doorway. The morning sun streamed through the windows, kissing him with the gentlest glow. He didn’t look real.

Dokja didn’t say that, though. “Okay,” he said, voice hoarse as if he hadn’t spoken in a thousand years—or a thousand lifetimes, maybe. “I’ll be out soon.”

Joonghyuk nodded, but he didn’t move. Instead he stood there, waiting, eyes locked on him as he pushed the blankets into a towering lump at the foot of his bed. 

“Is there something else you need?” Dokja asked, stretching. It was mostly for show; he didn’t particularly feel a need for it these days, or much else at all. Hunger, exhaustion, thirst, warmth—all of it seemed to have numbed, somehow. 

“No,” Joonghyuk said, unmoving.

“Well, if you don’t mind, I was going to change.” When Joonghyuk still didn’t move, Dokja sighed and climbed out of bed, stripping off Joonghyuk’s sweatshirt and into a normal T-shirt, efficient with practice. “Seriously, there’s no reason for you to be looking—” 

“You’re wallowing,” Joonghyuk said suddenly.

Dokja stopped, realized the ends of his shirt were caught on his ribcage, and pulled it down fast before Joonghyuk could see. The words hit him, a heartbeat later. “I’m not wallowing.”

“You are. You’re sleeping for half the day.”

Dokja shot an incredulous look at the window in his bedroom, where the 8 AM sun was glowing orange, just above the line of trees and buildings. “You’re kidding.”

“You get up early, but you go back to sleep. You eat. You sleep. You read Sooyoung’s novel. You sleep.” 

Dokja couldn’t remember enough about his daily routine to refute him. But it rubbed him the wrong way, nonetheless. “I don’t sleep that much,” he protested.

“Twelve hours,” Joonghyuk said. “Minimum. You’re wallowing.”

Then he crossed the room to hand Dokja a notebook. 

Dokja stared down at it. It had a pink cover with art of a rabbit that looked an awful lot like Biyoo. 

“What is this?” he asked.

“A notebook,” Joonghyuk said. As if Dokja was blind.

“I can see that,” Dokja said, because clearly he wasn’t going to say anything else. “Why?”

“It’ll be useful for writing down a list of things you want to do,” Joonghyuk said, before he swept out of the room to finish preparing their breakfast. 

For the next few days, Dokja thought about the list on and off. The truth was that it wasn’t too difficult of an endeavor, mostly because there was already an ongoing list in his head. He’d never titled it before, but he imagined that it would go something along the lines of: A SHORT NUMBER OF THINGS I WANT TO DO BEFORE I DIE (AGAIN). Or, for a shorter, non-traumatizing title: THINGS I WANT TO DO BUT NEVER HAD TIME FOR BECAUSE I WAS A CORPORATE SLAVE AND NOW I’M MANY THINGS INCLUDING A RETIRED GOD AND A CEO. 

But, as Dokja discovered in the past few days, it was hard to put it into words. It was one thing to think about what he wanted offhand, to pass a kid having a birthday party at the park with cake and candles and think, I’d like to have that, and move on with his day knowing that he would probably never have it. 

It was a whole different worldline to commit that thought to paper and ink and write, I would like to have a birthday party, as if he was a five-year-old. 

Because Dokja didn’t want a birthday party. He didn’t care about his birthday. It always fell on the worst of winter when there was no snow, but the streets would be full of grey sludge and half-melted snow, the city smelling more like smoke, made all the sharper from the biting cold of the air.

The most memorable birthday he had was his sixth or seventh, when his mom took him out to the park and they’d made snowmen from the pieces of slurry-snow littering the patches of yellowed grass. She’d bought him a newly steamed sweet potato from a street vendor after, as if to make up for how pathetic the snowmen were—or maybe that was because Dokja had cried about it. 

The point was, Dokja didn’t care about birthdays or parties. It was just—something he would’ve liked to experience, if only to say he tried it. If the Dokkaebi Shop sold a “The Bottled Experience Of An Imagined Party For Your Sixteenth Birthday,” he’d buy it, guzzle it down, have a fantastic three minutes with that trip, and continue with his day, chalking that up to a nice little memory. 

In the first place, he wasn’t even sure what should count on the list. It was probably best to put something wild and crazy like other people would since he possessed an insane amount of money at his disposal, like, I WANT TO GO TO ITAEWON AND CLUB FOR A WEEK, or I WANT TO TRAVEL TO EUROPE AND DRINK BEER LIKE IT’S WATER. He didn’t want that, though, and he wasn’t into the really death-defying shit like bungee jumping, especially after surviving the actual apocalypse. 

But he couldn’t be too greedy, at the same time. He had to make his list small and achievable. Something that would give him enough satisfaction that he would have no regrets or lingering ties. 

He was almost tempted to call Sooyoung and ask, but he had a feeling she’d sigh at him, as if he was a feeble grandpa on the verge of dying with one word, the way everyone had taken to approaching him these days. Dokja wasn’t pathetic enough to risk that. 

So instead, he took his pen and, on that piece of blank paper, he wrote, small and cramped— 

**

     1. Have a birthday party. 

Sooyoung smears some frosting on his cheek when Hyunsung brings out the cake. "Hey," Dokja protests, on auto-pilot, but if there's anything off about him, no one notices because they're all too busy laughing and shouting at each other instead. The noise is loud, familiar; it's almost enough to drown out the clunking of a train that's not far away, now.

It's as if Dokja is sinking into a pool of warmth, into the little drops of wax that are dripping down from the melting candles.

The lights have been turned off. Only the candlelight glances off their faces, smiling at him. It should comfort him, but it doesn't. Something about the firelight warps their faces like he's looking through four different mirrors, or four different dimensions in an attempt to see their faces. He doesn't know where he is, he thinks, but a hand on his shoulder grounds him.

Happy birthday, they sing.

Dokja closes his eyes and tries to center himself: he is Kim Dokja. He is at home, in Joonghyuk's apartment. He is in his own body, in his original timeline, inside a building with four walls and two windows and doors that lead to a different room—

There's a second hand on his shoulder. The weight of it is heavy and unfamiliar. He doesn't want to turn to figure out who it is. The mystery is better, he thinks, trying to convince himself of it: he is surrounded by only his friends and no one else. 

Come back—

In the expectant silence that follows as they wait for him to blow out his candles, he hears the Oldest Dream say, "Are you happy?"

The room vanishes. 

**

He's on the subway tracks. The doors are about to close, but inside the train, the Oldest Dream waits for him on the other end, his shadows filling the whole train car by himself. The darkness oozes into the windows, strains to escape. But the train holds. Instead, the Oldest Dream's million eyeballs swivel towards him, looking only at him.

Are you happy? the Oldest Dream asks, but it doesn't sound like him. There is no ozone spark of probability in his voice; it just echoes inside him, leaving him rattled, shaky, weak.

"What do you care if I'm happy?" Dokja manages. The words wrench out of him without his consent. His knees buckle, and he has to brace himself against the subway bench, his nails digging into the wood. "You don't care. But I have to prove you wrong. I have to be happy—"

The eyes begin to shake. The effect is immediate and dizzying; Dokja hears a sound ripped out of him, like a ragged, animal moan of pain. He is fragmenting again. 

"You don't have to do anything," the Oldest Dream says.

"Fuck you," Dokja snarls. "You don't know anything. You should've died, you should've never appeared—I wish that you would—"

High, desperate: "You don't mean what you're saying!"

"—disappear," Dokja finishes, gasping, and he is—

**

—blowing out the candle fire.

There are cheers, slaps on his back. His friends are each plucking out the candles on his cake. He tries to remember why. Candles, candles. Sangah had insisted that they didn't need all thirty-four, but it had been Jihye who'd shown up with four whole packs, proclaiming that they couldn't go to waste. It's his birthday, Dokja thinks. He is having a party. 

The cake has been littered with holes. The cream is smeared and ugly.

Dokja stares into it, feeling bereft.

"Do you want to cut it?" Hyunsung says. In his hand is a knife: long, thin.

Dokja can tell just looking at the blade that it's been sharpened enough to slice clean through the cake and maybe even something harder, enough to saw through bone if he tried.

"Yeah," he says, and takes the knife. "Thanks."

He begins cutting out pieces, controlled, slow, hand poised over the cake to gauge the right amount for all eight of them. The Oldest Dream is tugging at his shirt.

Dokja makes the mistake of glancing at him—and in front of his eyes, the Oldest Dream's palm has been sliced open, deep. “Be careful,” the Oldest Dream whispers.

"Dokja-ssi!"

Dokja startles. The knife clatters to the table. There are people rushing to him, shouting—and it's only then that he realizes that he's cut his palm open, too. There's blood dripping into the cream, hot and melting the surface.

"The cake," he says dumbly, and Heewon snaps, "Never mind the cake, look at your hand!"

Someone comes back with a towel, disinfectant. His head is spinning. It's Sangah. "You should wash it off," she says, taking his hand in her warm ones, inspecting the cut. It's bleeding sluggishly, so it must not be too deep. "It's not that bad, but you might've gotten some crumbs into it. Joonghyuk-ssi, will you—"

Joonghyuk steps forward, but Dokja is already snatching his hand back from her, backing away.

"No," he says, clutching his hand to his chest, staring at Joonghyuk's eyes, "I'm—I got this. I'm fine. You can start eating without me. I'll be right back."

Then he stumbles off to the hall and into his bedroom, intending to go into the bathroom inside, but sitting on his desk, waiting for him with his bleeding hand, is the Oldest Dream.

Dokja shuts the door behind him and drops the towel at his feet. "You," he bites out, low.

The Oldest Dream simply blinks at him. Those million eyes, ancient. Knowing. "I told you to be careful," he says— 

—and Dokja snaps. He strides forward and lunges for the Oldest Dream's neck and before he knows it he’s fisting his collar with both hands, yanking him up from the desk. Dokja’s hand stings, but he ignores it. The pain is secondary. Everything is secondary to this, the two of them, and those goddamn stars that won’t stop howling in Dokja’s ears. 

Something needs to give. Dokja knows that now. There is only the two of them, inside this train, inside this horrible subway that won't let him leave, and he can't escape from it. So there's only one choice.

All of his surroundings melt away. He’s not in his room anymore, with four beige walls, a bed he barely sleeps in, a desk he doesn’t use, the room where he’s haunted by the ghost of himself. No, he’s in the train station, and the train is shrieking towards them both, the lights flashing bright and blinding in Dokja’s eyes, casting across the Oldest Dream’s terrible young face, rising to the surface under the sea of shadows. 

This is the train station where Dokja should’ve ended things the first time. But this time is different. This time he’ll do it. This time he has to. He clenches his fists, and something pops, bursts; his blood drains into the shadows, and the rest of his hands follow. The shadows are swallowing him whole. 

But below those shadows, he’s got his hands right over the Oldest Dream’s butterfly pulse, fast and terrified.

"Let me go," the Oldest Dream manages to say, through the iron grip around his throat.

His face is pale. It's a good look. It's exactly what Dokja needs.

"No. I've had enough." He squeezes, and the Oldest Dream lets out a tiny cough, fingers scrabbling at Dokja's hand, but he ignores it, shoves him down to the ground, pinning him against the desk. A mug falls and shatters to the ground. Dokja barely hears it. He’s listening to the Oldest Dream’s ancient heartbeat, waiting for the moment when it’ll stop forever.

“You ruin everything,” Dokja says. He’s hardly hearing himself speak, he’s so furious. “You can’t leave me alone, can you? You always have to try to fuck up my life?” It should scare him how angry he is. But it doesn’t. It just makes Dokja squeeze harder. “Is yours not good enough for you?”

“No!”

The Oldest Dream’s shaking shifts something on the desk. Dokja’s eyes flick towards it. There: the cord connected to his lamp, swinging wildly against the desk like a trapped animal.

The Oldest Dream sees it too. His scrabbling gets more desperate, clawing against his knuckles, drawing blood. "You don't want to do this!" he cries. 

But Dokja’s had enough of the Oldest Dream telling him what to do.

He moves fast. He snatches the cord, and the Oldest Dream is screaming and biting and tearing off entire chunks of flesh from Dokja’s arms, splattering blood on Dokja’s cheek. He’s crying stop it stop it stop it stop it, but Dokja doesn’t stop. He can’t. His body is frozen cold, and he’s not even fully there, not really; he’s watching himself from a distance act like a puppet, methodical, rigid, strong. For all that the Oldest Dream is a god, so is Dokja. He’s bigger, faster, hardened after the scenarios and all that fucking time on the train. The Oldest Dream doesn’t have a chance. The screams die off in a choked gurgle. He’s got the cord winding around the Oldest Dream's neck. 

A loose thread, snapping off.

Dokja is lightheaded with it, the elation. He’s finally going to get rid of the Oldest Dream, the way he should've since the first time he saw him in the house, in the train, and even before, curled up and cowardly in that fucking station where he'd screwed up everything. This was the root of all the bad in the universe, all the suffering that his friends endured, trying to achieve their one happy ending: it was him, all along. 

"It’s not you," the Oldest Dream chokes out. His arms strain underneath Dokja's thighs, but Dokja isn't letting go.

Not this time.

"I told you that we're—" Dokja gasps, struggles to circle the cord around the Oldest Dream's neck, "—different. I, I need to do this—” The Oldest Dream is crying now, tears sliding hot against Dokja’s icy hands, and so is Dokja. Mirrors of each other. Dokja has never resented himself more. He sobs with it, his hands trembling uncontrollably. “I need to get rid of you. I have to, I—”

"No—” 

Dokja yanks the cord tight, cutting off the Oldest Dream mid-breath. Let me do this, he begs in his mind; he doesn’t have enough air to breathe. Spots are bursting in Dokja's eyes. His hands are losing their strength. Let me do this, let me finish it, please, please— 

The cord slips out of his fingers and thuds to the floor. He slumps over the Oldest Dream's unmoving body. He’s not strong enough. But he has to be. He has to end this. Dokja strains to reach the cord, but it flutters out of his grasp, and he realizes it then: the Oldest Dream's eyes hold no fear.

Dokja's breaths are strained, rattling.

"What did you do to me?" he gasps out, clinging to the shadows of the Oldest Dream.

The Oldest Dream just places a hand to his cheek—nurturing, tender. 

“Nothing that you haven't done to yourself," he whispers, and in another blink, vanishes.

Dokja's fingers catch against something. But it's not the Oldest Dream's shirt. It's the cord that he's wrapped around his own neck, wet with his blood.

He struggles to free himself; he tugs, and tugs, and tugs. The cord only gets tighter. Black creeps into his vision. I’m being devoured, Dokja thinks suddenly, terrified. There’s nothing he can do. He can’t escape. The whistle of the train rings high in his ears. Lights explode in his eyes. His hands scrabble out, trying to reach for the edge of the desk, yank out the cord from the outlet, but it's stuck against edge of the desk, unmoving, and Dokja can't breathe—

The lamp crashes to the floor. 

The cord slackens, and Dokja doubles over, retching. His numb hands fumble to get the cord away from his neck, and that’s when he hears Joonghyuk shout, “Kim Dokja!”

The ice in his body shatters. Everything fades: the train, the stars, even the residual phantom touch of the Oldest Dream’s hand against his cheek. It’s only Joonghyuk at his side, unwrapping the cord from his neck, one, two, three times. 

Then Dokja is freed, and there’s nothing to stop him from collapsing into Joonghyuk, dizzy, shaky, throat burning with violent coughs and dry heaves. 

Murmurs are coming from the door. Faintly, from a long distance away, he hears Sooyoung say, “Give him some space,” but Dokja isn’t paying attention. He’s just holding onto Joonghyuk’s sleeves with his bloody hands and telling him, “It wasn’t me.” He coughs again, clutches Joonghyuk’s clothes tighter and curls into him, terrified of that cold that had taken over him, all that violence he didn’t know he was capable of. “It wasn’t me.”

“What wasn’t you?” Joonghyuk asks, catching his trembling hands. 

But Dokja shakes his head. He can’t answer. All he can say, over and over again, is, “It wasn’t me.”

**

Come back, the ancient voice says.

You don’t belong there. 

You are unwanted. 

Your presence is destroying their ending. 

You are not a person. You are not one of them. You are a bystander. You are a watcher. You are out of place. Out of time. You are not Kim Dokja. You are—

He’s lost in the sea of his consciousness, but he doesn’t have to be awake to know: the four walls of his room are stretching, hardening into frosty steel. The moan of screeching metal echoes in his ears. His skin is unravelling at the joints and creases, crackling into probability and endless power. He is ancient; he is not of this earth. His scars grow into old tissue that doesn’t contain blood, but stories, and he knows that he is becoming the Oldest Dream once more. 

The train is coming for him, he thinks, paralyzed. The stars are right. 

He’s out of time. 

**

Tears that Dokja didn't shed are streaking down his cheeks when he wakes up. The bed shakes with their quiet cries. Feeling like his body is being controlled by an outside force, his eyelids lift and he finds himself staring into an endless abyss.

Back again, still that incomprehensible mass of shadows, is the Oldest Dream looming over him. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he warbles. Even through the strange rattling quality of his voice, he manages to sound sad, like he’s the one being hurt by Dokja just lying there. 

“What more do you want from me?” Dokja asks, too tired to start another fight. 

The dozens of eyes on the shadows blink at him. “I didn’t do anything. How many times do I have to tell you for you to understand? It wasn’t me.”

“What, like I tried to—” Strangle myself with a cord because I thought it was you, Dokja barely bites back in time. Instead, he lets the silence sit for a moment before he continues, “It was you. I wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t for you.”

“You’re placing blame on me because you can’t handle blaming yourself.”

“Get out,” Dokja says, and when the shadows refuse to move, he turns his back on the Oldest Dream, squeezing his eyes shut again. “Fine. I don’t want to hear another word from you.”

“I was trying to help,” the Oldest Dream murmurs, but Dokja curls into himself and doesn’t let himself say another word.

**

Come back. You know you don’t belong here. They don’t love you. They don’t want you. You’re ruining things for them. They’re scared of you.

He thinks back: I’m scared of me too.

The whispers don’t stop there, though. Come back, they tell him. They’re furious now; he can feel them trembling deep in his bones. The strange coldness sinks into his body, and once more, he’s transfixed, unable to tear his eyes away from the stars blinking at him, high above in the night sky. 

Come back, they say. Come back. Come back. Come back. 

**

“Tell me,” Sooyoung says, “if you meant to do it.”

She’s pale, sleepless, knees tucked to her chest in her chair beside his bed. He’s only seen her this disheveled in the days immediately after he woke up the first time, and the stress alone seemed to age her a decade. He’d thought, ironically, that she and Joonghyuk were a matching pair. Too old for their bodies. 

But so was he, by that point.

“It was an accident.” A half-truth, not that it makes it any easier to say. “Han Sooyoung, you know I wouldn’t do that.” 

Her stare doesn’t relent. It slides into his skin like tiny needles. “You’re lying.”

“Why does everyone assume I lie?”

“Because all you ever do is lie. And you won’t look at me in the fucking eye, asshole.”

“That’s not really fair—”

“Kim Dokja,” she snarls, and he snaps his mouth shut. “Tell me honestly. Did you mean to do it?”

Dokja grimaces. If she said it in her usual brand of loud fury, then that’d be something he could get past. But Han Sooyoung, like this—her voice stripped raw, all her hurt held tight to her chest—he can’t lie to her. No way out of this now. 

“Would it help if I said I didn’t realize I was doing it?” he says, tentative. 

Silence. 

“I know that doesn’t make sense. But it’s true. There was this—I don’t know, weird fog over me. I didn’t mean to do it, and I’m saying that honestly, except I didn’t know what I was doing, either. None of it was intentional.” He hesitates before he adds, half-pleading, “I want to stay here. I’m not trying to ruin things by leaving. Believe me on that. But the fact that I did—I’m sorry. I swear I didn’t mean to screw it up, and… I don’t know, maybe that’s scarier to you. But you asked for honesty. I’m giving it to you.” 

More silence. 

Dokja scratches at his head, trying to laugh. “You’re freaking me out here by being so quiet, Sooyoung-ah.”

“I’m freaking you out,” Sooyoung says finally, flat. “How quaint.”

He winces. “Are you angry?” 

But she doesn’t answer, even when it’s obvious that she’s beyond simple anger and bulldozing straight into lethal fury, the kind that changes entire worldlines and the fate of constellations with the force of her spite. She just sits there, looking small, so tense that electricity could spark off her at this very moment, like she’s holding it all in with a sliver of self-restraint and nothing else. 

“I wasn’t angry at first,” Sooyoung says after a moment. “I don’t think I am now. Mostly I’m thinking what the fuck I’ll do if you disappear again, and maybe after that is worry, and after that is anger. It’s not really a priority emotion, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh.”

Sooyoung’s eyes flick up, and he’s struck by how intent she looks, like he’s the one variable who’s always skewing her plans out of order and she’s trying to figure out how to make him stay long enough for her plans to succeed. He wonders what plan she’s got in her head, then shakes it out of his head: probably the ideal happy ending. 

She is, after all, a writer.

“If you leave again, words will not be enough to let you fucking know how much I will kill you over this.”

“Sooyoung—”

“Answer me.”

Dokja hesitates. 

He wants to say yes. The fluorescent lights of the hospital room make her sharper, paler. It’s recalling memories of the first time he’d seen her here, only half a year ago. 

Back then it almost hurt to look at her; everything about her screamed delicate. His friends were all like that. Pieces of glass that weathered a storm and came out worse for it. 

But her, she was more like a sword whetted too much, on the verge of snapping, made too fragile by everything that made her sharp. That same honed temper is pressed against his neck now, holding him hostage. Every cell in his brain is telling him that if only for self-preservation, he should smile, nod, tell her what she wants to hear. Of course, he imagines saying. I’d never leave you.  

The words don’t come, though. 

Sooyoung asked him to be honest—and after all they’ve been through, she deserves that much. 

He’ll pick up the pieces if necessary. It’ll hurt. But he’s done it before. He can do it again. He’s had three decades to learn that it’s a simple process: feel the pain. Remember that it doesn’t really hurt. Remember that it will never hurt as much as the pain he’s caused, and take responsibility. Push down every emotion that’s not necessary. 

After that, forget it, and move on. 

“What if,” Dokja begins, only for Sooyoung’s mouth to thin, “and I’m saying this hypothetically—but what if there’s extenuating circumstances? Circumstances that are out of my control. Things we can’t help. You, me, everyone else, we should be realistic about this, you know?”

“Realistic?”

Her and Joonghyuk both—sometimes it’s almost adorable how naive they can be. “I can’t stay here forever,” Dokja points out, smiling.

“And why not?”

“No one lives forever, Sooyoung-ah.”

“You don’t even want to try,” Sooyoung says, upset.

It’s an unfair accusation. 

Being on that train—he’d tasted immortality, for a brief moment. It was so awful that tearing his consciousness into little fragments came to him as a solace. He wouldn’t have to be awake a second longer, watching time slip by him like water. He wouldn’t have to endure the burden of existing. He finally got to be free. 

Dokja had never told them that, of course. When they piled on top of him in the hospital after he woke up, their tears kept soaking into his skin, and they were so loud and messy in their relief. He recognized even then that they were hopelessly entangled in him, all their lines crossed so that it was hard to tell where he ended and where they began. 

“Don’t leave again,” Yoosung had cried, and it was followed by similar sentiments from the rest of his friends. You can’t leave, they said. You don’t know how much it hurts when you do. We’re going to fight each time to get you back and you can’t stop us, so stop trying. You’re ours. 

It was sweet in its own way. But there was a sense of unspoken frustration that bubbled inside him. 

You don’t understand, Dokja wanted to say. For once it didn’t hurt. 

“You can’t expect me to live forever,” he says instead. “It doesn’t discount the happy ending you guys all worked for if I’m gone, you know? Happy endings can exist without me. You shouldn’t punish yourselves for anything I do, because it’s not your fault, and there are some things you can’t help, like—”

“Like what? You dying?”

It throws him off. The way Sooyoung says it, dying. It sounds so heavy in her voice. 

“Dying,” Dokja agrees, after a beat. “Yeah. But sometimes sad stuff happens. It’s inevitable. You can’t expect happiness forever, or you’ll be disappointed. There’s always going to be a situation, something that requires a sacrifice, someone to take the fall—” 

“Why?” she demands. “We’re out of the scenarios. We’re free. There’s nothing that threatens us anymore. We’re finally back to normal, you stupid squid.”

It makes him smile. “Normal sounds great when you say it,” he tells her. 

“What the fuck does that even mean?”

Normal was hell. Unexpected tragedies at every turn. At least when the scenarios occurred, there would be an announcement, a system pop-up with clear rewards and penalties and outlined rules. He could understand the apocalypse. 

But normalcy—there hadn’t been any scenarios when he killed his father, and when his mother went to jail in his stead. There hadn’t been any scenarios when he climbed on top of the hospital roof at fifteen and craved the relief that would be waiting for him seven stories below, promising to himself that this time, he’d do it right. 

“Normal doesn’t guarantee anything,” is what Dokja says in the end. “I’m speaking hypothetically, Sooyoung-ah.”

“No,” she says, “no, you’re speaking in predictions. Contingency plans for things that don’t even need to happen, but you keep preparing for it so that you can step back and say I told you so and you—you make these things happen, Kim Dokja!” 

“Sooyoung—”  

But she doesn’t stop, growing louder with every word, going on to yell, “That’s what you don’t understand! There are other options, other choices! You know that thing you do, when you give us two choices that are bad and then the third choice is always something better that you’re determined to make happen? For you, that third choice? That preferable, better choice? It’s always self-sacrifice, and it’s like—it’s like you don’t know anything else.”

Dokja can’t reply.

“But third choices can exist where we all get out of it alive and fine. And you… you were the Oldest Dream. You created the Star Stream, you created this entire universe somehow, all the worldlines, and this whole apocalypse, and you might be blaming yourself for this whole thing,” Sooyoung says, to which Dokja winces again, “but here’s something that hasn’t gotten through your thick fucking skull: the Star Stream exists because I put it into your head. It was put into my head because Yoo Joonghyuk existed, so I could write it. And Yoo Joonghyuk existed so that you could read it, and the cycle continues, on and on, so what I’m trying to understand is how you thought that you had the sole responsibility to bear all this by yourself.”

He can’t bring himself to move. Her feet thud onto the ground, and she’s hunching over herself, gripping her hair in her fingers. 

“You were bearing that,” she says, to herself if anything. “For… shit, I don’t know. Years.” When she stares up at him, her expression looks like it’s been whipped raw. “Do you even know how long you were the Oldest Dream?”

It’s not something Dokja can answer so easily. The weight of eternity had been crushing, without hope. When he realized it was an eternity that would never end, he’d understood not long after that there could be no escape from it. After that, counting time seemed like an exercise in self-flagellation. 

It had been only him, and it was the worst hell he could ever imagine. 

“I don’t know,” Dokja says. “But it’s not like it matters. I’m here now.”

“For how long?” Sooyoung demands, and when he doesn’t answer, she repeats, “For how long?”

“For the rest of my life.”

“And how long will that be?” 

Dokja stays silent. 

Sooyoung stares at him, jaw clenched, before she stands, her chair screeching in his ears. “I take back what I said later,” she says, her voice wet. “I am so fucking mad at you, Kim Dokja.”

He doesn’t flinch; he doesn’t have the right to feel hurt. Instead, he says, “I’m sorry.”

“You’re not,” Sooyoung says, and leaves. 

**

Come back. Come back. Come back come back come back come back come back come back— 

**

Joonghyuk’s hands are cupping Dokja’s face. “Tell me what you see,” he says. Any other time it would be an order. But today—when Dokja is shivering with the uncontrollable ice crawling up his fingers and strangling every nerve dead, the shadows of the Oldest Dream crushing over his shoulders, a shadowy tendril snaking around his throat in subtle warning—Joonghyuk sounds helpless and frustrated.

They’re close enough that Dokja can feel the heat emanating from him, sun-warm. Joonghyuk’s crossed legs are hooked around Dokja’s ankles, and even as he curls into himself and tries to make himself smaller, the weight of Joonghyuk’s gaze stays present, anchoring him to shore. 

Dokja leans into his touch. It feels distant, but it’s comforting enough to block out the noise, for a moment. “You’d think I’m crazy,” he says. 

“I already know you’re crazy.”

“Bastard.”

“Kim Dokja. Be honest.”

He squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head. He’s tired of honesty. “It’s going to disappoint you.” He knows it, because Sooyoung had looked at him the same way—like he was someone she knew but less, somehow, the memory of him more picturesque than the reality. If she was angry, that would be one thing. Her disappointment—it hurts more because she’s seen the core of who he is, and the fact that she left means she despised what she saw. 

If Joonghyuk does the same, Dokja doesn’t know how he’ll bear it. The hallucinations of him on the train were bad enough, but at the very least, they were simple hallucinations. 

This time, Joonghyuk is real. That’s more terrifying than anything his mind can conjure up. 

“I’m not going to do that to you, Joonghyuk-ah. I’ve…” Dokja exhales, lets out a little laugh. “Shit. I’ve hurt you enough as it is.”

“I endured over a thousand lifetimes for you. What makes you think you can do anything to get rid of me now?”

“Sap.”

“I’m telling the truth.” 

Dokja shakes his head again and reaches up to tug Joonghyuk’s hands away from his face. Now they’re curled in Dokja’s palms, loose fists without any fight. 

“I know you remember,” Dokja says, opening his eyes to stare down at those calloused, scarred hands. “All of the regressions. Sometimes you act too much like the 0th turn version of you that there just can’t be any other explanation.”

“Then you should know how I feel,” Joonghyuk says, simple. The implication is clear: You should know that I still wish for you to exist somewhere—here. 

Dokja’s jaw flexes. “You’re not listening to me. I’m telling you that there are limits to what people can endure. I—“

“You’re already reaching your limit,” Joonghyuk says. His voice is cracking in two; it’s horrible to listen to, like a tree that stood for centuries and centuries finally crashing down to Earth with a resounding thud. “Let me help you.”

“You’ve already helped enough.”

“That should be my line.”

Dokja’s chest aches. There’s a bruise that hasn’t healed there, still mottled yellow and violet, but it doesn’t feel like a bruise sort of ache—it feels deeper, like he’s caving in from the inside. “Why are you so stubborn? I’m doing this for your own good. Even Sooyoung—“

“Han Sooyoung is impatient,” Joonghyuk interrupts, annoyed, and then, noticeably softer: “She was worried about you.”

“So she left?” It comes out hurt, despite his best efforts. 

But Joonghyuk doesn’t react. “You know her.”

Dokja chews on his lip. He does; her way of fixing things is to turn a seemingly unsolvable problem over in her head until she understands it from every angle, every possibility, then maps out potential solutions. And if that doesn’t work, she’ll beat the problem until it’s dead. 

“She’s in her planning stage,” he realizes, before he chokes out a laugh that tears out of him. “God. Should I be worried?”

Joonghyuk stays silent. It’s an answer in and of itself. 

It doesn’t change Dokja’s mind, though; it can’t. “I’m still not going to tell you. There are some things that you just—have to keep to yourself. Things you don’t know.”

“Like how you keep seeing the Oldest Dream?” 

Dokja’s head jerks up. The fear is thick in his throat; he’d almost forgotten about the Oldest Dream’s presence behind his back, so lulled by Joonghyuk’s warmth, but it’s at the forefront now, the ice creeping into his bones. He can hardly see Joonghyuk anymore. There’s only darkness, crushing and malevolent. 

In his ear, the Oldest Dream whimpers.  

“Let me out,” he’s wailing. The despair oozes off him and into Dokja’s skin. “Let me out—it’s hard to breathe in here—let me out—I was trying to help, believe me, I was—“ There’s an awful gurgle in his throat, before he falls silent. And then it kicks up again, louder, shrieking: “Let me out! Let me out!”

“—Dokja,” Joonghyuk is saying. Dokja’s eyes snap to him. He’s holding Dokja by the wrists, his legs locked around Dokja’s ankles now, rendering him immobile. “What are you seeing?” he asks, louder. 

“I—“ Dokja chokes, frantically shakes his head. Not Joonghyuk, he thinks, because the shadows are crawling over his arms and reaching for Joonghyuk, like it wants to take him too. He fights to break free of Joonghyuk’s grasp, but he won’t let go. “You can’t know!“ Dokja cries. “You can’t, you can’t—“

“I can,” Joonghyuk insists. 

But Dokja isn’t paying attention anymore. The Oldest Dream is kicking up again, caught halfway between a childish tantrum and a plea for mercy. “You can see me,” the Oldest Dream begs, his twisted fingers clawing from inside the veil of shadows, “I know you can. Just tell him—tell him, tell him—or else we’re both going to—“ 

Probability crackles, burns a line from his neck all the way down to the base of his spine. The Oldest Dream cuts off with a shriek. 

Dokja nearly sobs at the pain of the Oldest Dream’s disappearance, but he holds it in, collapsing into Joonghyuk who wraps his arms around him and holds him close. His heart is thundering in his throat. 

It’s sickening, he thinks, to be so helpless. 

It’s always the same thing. He’s always relying on Joonghyuk, always cowering, messing things up, putting their efforts to waste. The Joonghyuk that he’d hallucinated in the train was right; he is selfish. He is unworthy of their efforts. He can’t make anyone happy, least of all himself, no matter how hard he tries, and it is killing him from the inside to know that. It’s the kind of truth that rots and shakes him apart. 

But his friends don’t see it. Maybe they can’t, or they don’t want to, too stubborn and attached to pull away and see the real him, the problem that he is; or they’re used to being good, to helping people, being the heroes who save the world. It's a habit, or a debt that they think they owe; it must be. There’s no other explanation for why they’ll try to help him, time and time again, so undyingly loyal, steadfast. But it’s all a wasted effort when it’s Dokja that’s the problem, and even Joonghyuk can’t help that. 

Those emotions that Joonghyuk feels for him, that love—that burdensome, terrifying love, made all the worse by how much it is, how devoted—Dokja will never do a goddamn thing to deserve it. 

He’s gasping for breath when Joonghyuk’s voice says, “But you do deserve it.”

Dokja hears himself shudder: something animalistic, horrible. “I don’t,” he manages, defeated, and when he blinks, there are tears on his face, soaking into the curve of Joonghyuk’s neck. “You’re—you’re just saying that. Because you’re in love with me.”

“And you think I shouldn’t be.” Dokja nods, mute. But Joonghyuk still doesn’t get angry; he doesn’t seem scared, or disappointed, or anything at all. The world is spinning around him, shattering away into pieces, and the only thing that’s keeping him together is Joonghyuk’s body, holding him close. 

“Do you think I’m disappointed in you?” Joonghyuk asks. 

“You should be—“

“I’m not asking you what you think I should feel. I’m asking you what I do feel.”

Throughout the entire time they’re speaking, Joonghyuk doesn’t let go. He’s lacing his hands together, palms pressing on the small of Dokja’s back. The touch is steady. 

Something is lodged in Dokja’s throat. He can’t do anything but bury his face in Joonghyuk’s neck, unable to answer. 

“How many times did I regress?” 

The answer is knee-jerk. “One thousand, eight hundred, sixty-four times.”

“No. One thousand, eight hundred, sixty-five.” Joonghyuk draws the numbers on Dokja’s back. The lines of the five, the curve, before he stops there, leaving his index finger pressed against the jut of Dokja’s spine. “I’d do it a sixty-sixth time to get you back if you left again,” Joonghyuk says, quiet. “You could make me eat dirt, tell me that I shouldn’t have kissed you, wake me up in the middle of the night. It doesn’t matter.”

“All I do is hurt you,” Dokja whispers, jagged. 

But Joonghyuk shakes his head. “You’re not listening.”

“I am. I’m trying.”

“Then get this one thing through your head: you’re overthinking.”

“I ruin things,” Dokja says, because it’s true. 

Again Joonghyuk shakes his head. “The only way you could ruin things is if you left because you thought it was for our own good.”

“You don’t know,” Dokja says. His tears have stopped now, but he doesn’t feel anything. His heartbeat slows, and his breaths change into something calmer, steadier. The exhaustion is pulling him under. “I’d be intolerable. I’d be so greedy you’d get tired within the week—so I can’t have it all. That’s not realistic.”

“Enough with being realistic.”

Dokja curls his fingers into the soft, worn fabric of Joonghyuk’s sweater. “I can’t have everything I want,” he says.  

In response, Joonghyuk presses a kiss to the top of his head. “You should,” he says. 

**

Long after Joonghyuk falls asleep, Dokja finds himself gazing at his face, the scar on his cheek stroked silver from the moonlight, those fine grey strands falling over his dark eyebrows. His cheek is smushed into the pillow. That alone makes him look ten years younger, but really it's everything about him that Dokja's never noticed before. He sleeps with his mouth half-open, fingers holding onto the edge of the pillowcase. Every so often he'll twitch like he's being electrocuted, but then go straight back to utter stillness like a statue made of soft, warm water.

If Dokja allowed himself to be greedy, he'd push himself up to his elbows, lean over, and kiss him and kiss him and kiss him. Wake him up like a fairy tale, watch those dark eyes open and set their sights on him. And Joonghyuk would say, cranky and annoyed, "What are you doing, not sleeping?" and Dokja would reply something like, "It's your fault you're too handsome, you sunfish," partly to tease, but partly because it's the truth.

He'd ask: Why do you think I should have everything I want? Why are you so sure that you won't get tired of me? What do you see that I don't?

Joonghyuk could say nothing. He could be cruel. Merciless. Tell him that Dokja had imagined it all in his head. The one Dokja had hallucinated in the train had certainly told him that, again and again. He’d torn the message into Dokja’s body and made it stick through the aftershocks, pressing the words into his mouth. He’d said that Dokja was a coward; that he was selfish; that he could get a happy ending, but it wouldn’t be one that he deserved, and that he shouldn’t be happy. All the truths that Dokja knows. 

But the Joonghyuk he knows—the one he’s spent the past half year around, who touches him just because he can and kissed him on the ferris wheel and peels apples like a worried mother-in-law and keeps coming back to him, stubborn and stupid in the way that only a person who lived over a thousand lifetimes can be—wouldn’t say anything like that. It makes him doubt. It makes him think. It makes him, above all else, want. 

Dokja doesn’t have to ask Joonghyuk to know his answer, really.

It’d be simple. Joonghyuk would look at him, touch his cheek, and tell him, sincere and solemn, to stop asking stupid questions.

The Oldest Dream fizzles into existence, one limb at a time. Dokja doesn’t move away from the warm cocoon of the hospital bed he’s lying in with Joonghyuk. 

Instead he curls his fingers into Joonghyuk’s pillowcase. Their pinkies touch: one anchor.

Something about the Oldest Dream seems different today. The shadows that cloak him are beginning to shed. He’s no longer shapeless, a deformity upon reality. Dokja can see the shape of him now—small. Hunched over. Worried.

That, above all else, catches him off-guard. The night terror is taking on new shapes—but Dokja doesn’t know how to be scared anymore. Mostly he’s tired of the fear. 

Today, the Oldest Dream asks him a new question. “Can you even see me?” he asks, soft. 

It startles Dokja so much that he answers. “No.”

“You can start there, then.”

“You can’t make me do anything.” The anger is reflexive. Something growing inside Dokja again, rotten at the roots. The shape of the Oldest Dream wobbles and looms larger. 

Dokja closes his eyes and forces himself to exhale, trying to block him out. 

It doesn’t work. “I’m trying to help you,” the Oldest Dream whispers. “Why won’t you let me?”

“Because you’re not trying to help. You’re being a bother.”

“I’m not—I—“ The Oldest Dream sounds terribly young. “I’m trying to help,” he repeats, in defeat. 

“And how is this helping?” 

“The stars that want you back,” the Oldest Dream says, to which Dokja stiffens, eyes snapping open, “I’m blocking them—I’m helping, I am, but you aren’t making it easy—I—“

“What the hell are you talking about?” Dokja demands, but in the next blink, probability sparks flash across his vision and the Oldest Dream is whisked away, gone. 

The unease lingers with him for a long, long time. 

The next day, when Joonghyuk comes to sit by his bed, quietly cutting an apple, Dokja is restless. He can’t stop thinking about the Oldest Dream, his warping shape, the monstrosity. But he doesn’t know who came first—the stars, or the Oldest Dream, or him. He doesn’t know who the monster is. 

He’s so deep in thought that when Joonghyuk asks him what he’s thinking about, Dokja finds himself blurting, “Sometimes I hear the stars calling for me.”

He snaps his mouth shut, but it's too late; the words have already come out.

Yet Joonghyuk doesn’t stop slicing into his apple, hands deft and certain. “What are they saying to you?”

“…They’re telling me to come back.”

“Why?”

“What?”

“Why do you hear them?”

The question stumps him. “I,” Dokja says, then pauses. “Huh. I have no clue, actually.”

Joonghyuk stays silent. The only sound in the room is the scratch of his blade against the skin of the apple, rhythmic and soothing. Scritch. Scritch. He finishes cutting the fruit into eight even slices, methodically removing the seeds as he goes along. Then he cuts off portions of the skin of each slice and places the scrapped peels in a neat, curling pile at the edge of the plate. Finally he sets down his knife, picking up a slice between his thumb and index.

“Your stars are stupid,” Joonghyuk says, before offering him the slice.

They’re rabbit apples, Dokja realizes, complete with little red ears. 

He barks out a laugh—and then, unable to help it, he steals the apple right out of Joonghyuk’s hands, teeth grazing against the pads of his fingers. 

**

It takes two weeks for Dokja to be discharged this time. Alongside the minor strangulation and the cut on his palm, Seolhwa had discovered the bruises, swollen ankles, and a dozen odd injuries that he’d collected but never noticed. 

She doesn’t remark upon it, but somehow, the judging silence feels worse.

Before long, he’s shuttled off back to the apartment with no show for his injuries other than a thin bandage around his neck that’s more of a shameful choker than anything. He almost expects Joonghyuk to tease him about it—or tease him as much as Joonghyuk is capable of doing—but his expression closes off at the sight of it.

“You’re not fully healed,” he says, in a tone that implies, You should be in the hospital right now, so why are you here?

“Mother hen. I got discharged and everything.”

“Legally?”

“You want the papers?” The joke doesn’t land. Joonghyuk is still tense, the worry rolling off him in waves. Dokja needs to take another tactic. Perhaps pity. “I just needed to get out of the hospital,” he says, more honest than he’d intended, and at that, some of the tension sheds. “I wanted to go home.”

“...You think this is home?”

Suddenly Dokja is seized by anxiety. Maybe Joonghyuk had thought differently. “Isn’t it?” he asks, uncertain.

“You never said anything.”

Bastard. “I didn’t realize it was something I had to announce. How would that even work? I come back from doing whatever, jobless as I am, and I take off my shoes and see you in the kitchen with your apron and say, ‘I’m home, honey’?” Dokja tries to smile at him, but Joonghyuk stays still. There’s that hurt again, rising up to the surface. “That’s not the kind of people we are, Joonghyuk-ah.”

In response, Joonghyuk steps closer and closer until he’s boxing Dokja against the wall, one hand on the verge of grazing his bandaged throat, but not quite. The shadow of his touch is warm. It makes Dokja hold his breath, transfixed. 

“You keep denying yourself things that are perfectly possible,” he says. 

Sickeningly sincere protagonist words at play. Dokja never thought it’d be directed at him, though. “What sweet things you say, Joonghyukkie,” he manages to say. 

“Don’t hide.”

“How could I hide when you’re staring at me like you want to kill me?”

“You’re terrible at interpreting expressions,” Joonghyuk tells him, before he pulls back. 

**

With little else to do with his time, Dokja opens the notes app on his phone and begins another list. He doesn’t let himself think about it too hard. He writes down what he wants: the realistic things, the unachievable things, everything in between. He writes down things that could take years to accomplish. He puts his bottomless greed into words that say:

     1. I want to be carried home. 

     2. I want to read with someone. 

     3. I want to visit the snack shops and buy everything I want without caring about how much it costs.

     4. I want to wake up next to someone. 

     5. I want to make a good breakfast for someone else.

     6. I want to go on a date.

     7. I want to try karaoke.

     8. I want to learn how to apologize properly.

     9. I want to spend the whole day in a library and stay there after the lights have been turned off and read books in the dark with nothing but a blanket and a flashlight.

     10. I want to visit Jeju for a day and fish for clams.

     11. I want to go to a cat cafe. 

     12. I want to wear hanbok on Chuseok and celebrate it with everyone.

     13. I want to have a birthday party, a good one this time. 

     14. I want to stay home for a week with nothing to do. 

Dokja stares down at the list. It’s shorter than he thought. So he fills up another three lines—repetitive, real, honest.

     15. I want— 

**

Come back, the stars beg him.

Dokja breathes in, reaches out for Joonghyuk, sleeping beside him, and burrows his face into Joonghyuk’s shoulder. 

Eight months have passed since he’s returned from the train—eight months since he’s returned to being human in a city with a home. This, he thinks, is what he’s learned about what it meant to be a monster that kept watch on an endless train: it was numbing. It was lonely and quiet. All of the sound that he ever heard was sound that was reflected in his ears, the shadows of his footsteps echoing behind him, empty. He only ever knew himself, and he was so sick of his reflection to the point that it was easy for that hatred to turn into fear, and that fear to turn into resignation, and that resignation to turn into endless, spiraling despair. 

It was easy to become numb. Cut off his nerves, one finger at a time, crawling up each joint of the fingers, past the knuckles, up to the wrists and beyond; to his elbows, his shoulders, the lean meat of his deteriorating calves, his thighs, all that cold creeping up to his chest until he wasn’t a person anymore but simple nothing. He was mere fragments of ice, shattering across the universe. 

But being human, being real—

First you ache, he thinks. You claw through those shadows to emerge, vulnerable, naked, horribly human with all of your new nerves exposed and raw and set alight, like every muscle had fallen asleep and the sensation jolted you to wakeful consciousness, painful night after night after night, fresh monsters taking your place, but looking at them, you know. You can see the difference: you are human. You are a person again. 

Eight months have passed since he’s returned. 

In that time, Dokja has felt the summer wind at the summit on a ferris wheel. Soil has crumbled through his hands and clung to his fingers and wedged itself underneath his nails. He has felt the bite of a papercut against the thick pages of Sooyoung’s unedited manuscript. He has tasted cotton candy, warm rice, homegrown carrots diced up in an omurice; nine hours of sleep stale in his mouth; a tomato smoothie he never asked for; a kiss, lovely and gentle. 

Come back, the stars whisper. You don’t want to be human. You want to be back. With us. 

I don’t, Dokja thinks.

You do. Come here, come—this is what you wanted, they wail at him. The strange ice reaches into his chest, crawls up his collarbones, his neck, plunges deep into his skull.

Memories are flashing in his eyes. Eight years old, hearing his parents fight, shatter dishes on the wall opposite of his locked room; twelve, so terrified of his father that eventually he forgot how to be scared sometimes, only to remember, again and again; fifteen, staring down from the roof and craving the relief, promising himself that this time, he'd do it right. 

Twenty-four, hopeless, holding on for one chapter a day; twenty-eight, with a second murder on his hands; thirty-three plus half an eternity, Yoo Joonghyuk telling him, “You’ve hurt me worse.”

Dokja swallows.

You don’t want this, they’re coaxing. You don’t. You want to forget. You want to disappear. You want to make things perfect. You want to go before you ruin their memory. You want to leave. You want to see a happy ending before leaving, before—

Dying, you mean, Sooyoung’s voice rings in his head. 

Dokja’s breath rattles to a halt. 

The stars are mourning. The ice is haunting his body, the monster creeping into him, and it’s devouring him skin-first, burrowing deeper into his blood, preparing to drag him back onto a train that materializes from the four walls of the room, extending into sixteen, fifty steps, heel-to-toe, the horrible crash of steel screeching in his ears. 

The ancient voice thunders in his ears: Come back. 

**

But— 

Dokja doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want this ice. He wants to be human. He wants to breathe. He wants to be carried home, and wake up next to Joonghyuk, and learn how to apologize, and he wants to love, and be loved, and have his own warmth to share, and he— 

He wants—

If he can have it, if he can have one thing—  

**

     15. I want to stay.

     16. I want to stay.

     17. I want to stay. 

**

The ice cracks. 

**

He collapses, strings cut, into the bed, curling into Joonghyuk with a strangled gasp. Laughter bubbles in his throat. Underneath him Joonghyuk is so warm that Dokja is almost giddy with it, all that heat seeping into his body, chasing out the shadows, reminding him again and again: he is human. He belongs here. He has four limbs, nerves, made from flesh and blood and no stories, no myths, he is painfully human, and he is here. He doesn’t need to return. Some things, he thinks, don’t need to be an inevitability.  

Fuck off, he says to the stars, even though they’re gone now. This is my home. 

He breathes, listens to his shuddering exhales, feels his chest rise and fall in time with Joonghyuk’s. 

He thinks, holding this one precious truth close to his heart: This is where I belong, and no one can make me leave. 

**

8. I want to learn how to apologize properly. 

Dokja tries calling Sooyoung a week after he gets settled back at home. She doesn’t pick up, but she does send him a text: i want a written letter from you because so help me god i can’t figure out what the hell ur thought process is and it’s impossible for me to track in a conversation. write me a fucking letter

He texts back, Is this because you want to edit my letter and tell me my prose sucks? 

She replies: it’s one reason

So Dokja grabs a piece of paper and a pen. He doesn't let himself overthink; he just puts down whatever comes to mind. He's known her for long enough that she won't begrudge him for whatever bullshit he writes, he's certain.

**

Han Sooyoung,

I've never written an apology letter before. I should probably first apologize for that. Secondly I'm sorry for worrying you. I hope you're doing well.

**

He sends her a picture of the short letter because the postage isn't too reliable and he's not sure where she's living nowadays, nomadic as she is. Within minutes she texts back.

han sooyoung

u suck at writing apology letters

me

Well I've never done it before

han sooyoung

write me another one

me

The first one wasn't good enough?

han sooyoung

of course not

**

Dokja runs out of his already-miniscule supply of lined paper real fast, writing letters that Sooyoung barely spends any time reading. As a present, Joonghyuk shows up the next day with a hefty box of lined stationery paper, Christmas themed with little Rudolph reindeers dancing across the borders.

"Do you really think this is necessary?" Dokja asks, incredulous, as he watches Joonghyuk set the box at his feet in front of his desk with a muted thump.

"I got it on sale," Joonghyuk answers, and then, a moment later: "Han Sooyoung is picky about her apologies. There are more people aside from her waiting to hear from you, too."

"You're saying I should write letters to all of them?"

"It would be one way to start," Joonghyuk says.

**

Han Sooyoung, I still don't know how to write apology letters and your constructive criticism wasn't very constructive. I don't know what I'm supposed to be apologizing for other than worrying you. I'm sorry you had to see me that way, since it's true and it might be something you want to hear. I know you're furious about me dying all the time. I hope you're doing well.

**

Her demand is endless: another, she messages him.

**

Han Sooyoung, I'm sorry for making you mad at me. I know you care about me, even if you do tend to express it in scarily violent methods, and I shouldn't have trampled on it the way I did.

**

Han Sooyoung, this is my twelfth apology letter. I'm running out of apologies and my hand hurts, so I’ll stop for today and resume tomorrow. It wasn't Yoo Joonghyuk who stole the banana milk in your fridge the last time we visited, actually. It was me. I apologize for that. 

**

Han Sooyoung, is it bad that I'm enjoying writing these apology letters? I don't know how you have the time to read them between your manuscript and whatever the hell you do in your free time—climbing on top of roofs and staking out the city and rummaging through trash for precious jewels, maybe—but I'm surprised you're not getting tired of it. This isn't a complaint, by the way. It's helping. I'm sorry if that makes you uncomfortable.

**

bastard, Sooyoung texts him later that night, one week after he'd started this whole letter writing process, why the fuck would u think that anything u do makes me uncomfortable? u fucking squid. write me another

With little else to fill up his time, Dokja starts on another letter. Sitting at his feet, the Oldest Dream—still blanketed in shadows, but shape becoming more and more definitive by the day—hums a senseless tune. For once it doesn't hurt his ears.

**

Han Sooyoung, I didn't know you knew how to say such sweet things. Never say them again or I'll break out into hives. Last time Joonghyuk came in and asked me why I was shuddering like that. But it might just be you growing sappy in your old age, so I'll try to accept it in the future if you choose to be nice to me again on the new moon of the Lunar leap year. As for the apology... Hmm... I'm sorry for not finishing the edits on your manuscript. I'll finish it soon.

**

han sooyoung

i'll care about you as much as i want

bitch

u know it'd be much easier for me to say this stuff if u werent so WEIRD about hearing it

but no!!

i have to train u!! like a little dog!!!

i throw u a scrap of affection and love and u start dodging it better than u would actual bullets does that even make sense to u???

stop apologizing for my banana milk u son of a bitch

write me another letter

"She seems angry," Dokja notes after he's finished reading her messages aloud, and looks up from his phone to blink at Joonghyuk from his stool at the kitchen counter. "I mean, I don't think she's really angry, but more... annoyed? But not even really annoyed. Sooyoung's emotions are all over the place these days."

Joonghyuk, calmly grating potatoes into thin sticks, doesn't so much as bat an eye. "It's because you keep sending her senseless letters," he says.

"I'm trying to make them meaningful! I carried around that guilt of the stolen banana milk for two months." When Joonghyuk doesn't respond, Dokja adds, contemplative, "Also, I'm beginning to think that there's something a little wrong—like, morally—with demanding handwritten apology letters from someone who got discharged from the hospital a week ago."

It doesn't even faze Joonghyuk. The rhythm of his potato grating stays constant and steady, like the heartbeats of the world's most stable coma patient. "You don't have to write the letters," he points out. "No one is forcing you."

"I know that."

It hasn't escaped Dokja's notice that all of his friends, Sooyoung included, have been incredibly patient with him—not just in this particular instance, but for years. It had been a constant worry that sooner or later, there would be a time limit on this type of relationship, something to cut it short, because that was what the world did to him. It had done it to him and his mother; his friends, after the news about her arrest was splashed all over the papers; and then again to his real friends, every time he died and they'd chased him to the ends of the universe to get him back.

It's always been a ticking time bomb for him. Waiting for the other shoe to drop. Bracing himself for the moment, inevitably, when his happiness would come to an end.

But he's starting to think that it doesn't have to be that way.

**

When Dokja wakes up the next morning, there are budding pink carnations at his bedside table, tucked inside a dark glass vase. They’re too small to have been bought at the store, which means that someone has grown them personally. 

There’s a card that has been slipped underneath the vase. Familiar handwriting greets him.

Dokja, 

I know you haven’t been feeling like yourself; I don’t know how long it’s been since you have. Take your time. You’ve always punished yourself too much and endured for too long. 

You learned that from me, I think. But you’re allowed to be happy. It’s not something you need to earn. It can just happen. That’s something I had to figure out, and I’m hoping that someday, it’ll click for you as well.

The last time you visited, you didn’t tell me anything about yourself. So you can tell me everything this time. What you’re thinking, how you’re doing, stories about your friends. If there’s a book you've been enjoying recently, I’d like to hear about that, too. 

The letter is unsigned, but he doesn’t need a signature to know exactly who it’s from. He reads it over and over, tracing the ink burrowed into the paper, the same five words: you’re allowed to be happy. 

It isn’t until he finishes reading that he realizes the ink is smudging under his fingers. He touches his wet cheeks, surprised, and at the realization, it’s like something collapses inside of him. All the strings holding him up get snipped loose and sets him through freefall. He’s unravelling, shaking apart, crying so hard that he can barely breathe through it. He has to brace himself against the table, can’t do anything but hold on because he keeps shuddering and he can’t stop. He wants to. He has no reason to cry. But he still can’t stop, and in a strange way it almost feels good. It’s not him sinking helplessly into it, held hostage, but instead it washes over him in waves, in time with his mother’s words telling him, You’re allowed to be happy. You’re allowed to be happy. 

His vision blurs. He breathes in, chokes on it, and then laughs a little at the ache in his lungs. He’d never done that on the train, he thinks; he’d never felt alive. He closes his eyes, curls into himself, but this time, the space doesn’t warp around him or take him back to the train; he is alone, and he always has been. And it's not such a terrible thing, to be alone.  

**

Han Sooyoung, he writes, I’ve come to a realization today. 

**

He’s teetering on the edge of sleep when a hand slides into his hair. It’s a cold hand, so it’s not Joonghyuk. Dokja opens his eyes to find the Oldest Dream smiling at him, with two eyes and a nose and chapped lips. 

The dimensions of him are still off. Stretched too thin and fragile, the hum of his unwinding stories ringing in Dokja’s ears. 

There’s more of him than Dokja remembers, though. He didn’t know it was even possible to see him separated from the shadows like this; he’d always assumed it was the pressure of the worldlines converging on the Oldest Dream, trying to fetch even one fragment of him back into the waiting train. 

But maybe that wasn’t it at all. Words echo in his head, insistent, louder than the call of the stars.

Enough with being realistic. You keep denying yourself things that are perfectly possible. You’re allowed to be happy.

“You’re starting to get it,” the Oldest Dream says. 

**

The day after he learns how to apologize, he gets a message from Sooyoung. 

han sooyoung

FUCKING FINALLY

i was going out of my mind reading the 16th banana milk letter

fuck u too

i accept ur apology. gags

and b/c i'm so nice you can just copy and paste the same exact thing to everyone else

actually i'll send an email to everyone

we'll slap it on the fridge and every door in all of our houses so that when u visit

u can remember the tvn drama realization u had

and u won't cringe out of ur skin like a weirdo when they say they love u

not me tho

b/c u suck. and u need to be humbled every once in a while

u can stop sending me letters now kim dokja i mean it i am so sick of ur fucking reindeer

Because he's spiteful even as he's learning new lessons about himself, Dokja takes out another one of the reindeer stationery letters and sends her a letter, short and simple: I love you too, Han Sooyoung.

**

It's thundering when he makes his way over to his mom's apartment, the rainwater splashing over his sneakers and soaking the hem of his jeans and into his socks. His feet keep squishing like he's stepping in mud, but Dokja ignores it, hurrying inside after another resident before the doors can close. He makes his way up to the fifth floor where his mother lives, anxious, heart loud in his ears.

In his hands, he's holding a house key and a letter, only slightly dampened by the rain. He hopes that it's still legible. 

If not, he'll write a new one. No big deal, Dokja thinks, and then thinks it again, just to make it stick: No big deal. 

There are a few choices he has here, though. He can slide the letter under her door; check if she's inside and hand it to her; or text her that there's a letter he has for her and wait until she returns to give her both of the items.

 "Why not try knocking?" the Oldest Dream asks. 

Dokja exhales. Even if his mom could see the Oldest Dream now, he doesn't think she'd be too startled. He could pass for human, at this point. Normal limbs, rain-soaked hair plastered to his pale forehead, fingers twisting in his school uniform sweater. 

"Right," Dokja mutters, and takes a few bracing exhales before he knocks.

His mom must be psychic; he hears footsteps a heartbeat later, and the door swings open not long after that, as if she'd expected him. She's shorter than he remembers. Her face is slack and tired, the lines on her forehead and cheeks more pronounced. Her hair is turning silver at the temples. 

"Dokja," she says, blinking.

He swallows. "Hi, Mom." Her eyes flicker down to the key and the letter in his hands, and in a hurry, he hands it to her, almost crumpling the paper in the process. "That's—for you. I got your letter in the hospital. I thought I should write one back. And the key—that's yours. I took it without thinking. Sorry. It's, um. I shouldn't have taken it."

His piece said, Dokja backs away a few steps. His mind is blanking. Bad plan. Bad plan.

"Don't be a coward," the Oldest Dream mutters. 

His mother doesn't say a word. She's simply gazing down at the letter with an unreadable expression, or maybe he's forgotten how to understand her. His jaw flexes. Time, he reminds himself. Everyone needs time.

"You didn't have to," his mother says finally.

Dokja jolts. "Of course I had to," he says. 

"No," his mother says, quiet, and then folds up the letter and puts it into her pocket, turning around, "you didn't."

Dokja's heart sinks. He can't move. He can only stand there, rooted to the floor, soaked in rain, watching her retreat into her apartment and away from him. Any moment, the door will swing shut, and this will be the end of it. He's convinced of it. He'll have fucked up his relationship with his mom too much for it to be salvaged now, too damaged to repair, and no amount of effort or time will fix this—

His mom stops. Her head cranes around to look at him, expectant. "Well?" she asks.

Dokja's mouth is dry. It takes him a few tries to remember how to speak. "Well what?" he croaks.

"Are you coming in for tea or not?" 

"You... you want me to come in for tea?"

"Unless you're busy." His mother pauses, and then, quieter, almost as if she's hesitant: "I did ask you to tell me about a book you're enjoying recently, Dokja."

Dokja can't tear his eyes from her face. Suddenly he's not thirty-four, but he's eight, twelve, curled up beside her on the couch with a book balanced between both of their laps, tucked into her warmth, her hand stroking soft and gentle into his hair.

"There's this one novel I've been reading," he says, tentative, and her smile is small but blinding.

**

     5. I want to make a good breakfast for someone else.

“Are you proud of me?” Dokja asks, teasing. The bandages are off, and his neck feels oddly sensitive without it, like he’s been wearing it for much longer than two weeks. There’s no scars or marks. He’d made sure of it, forcing himself to look in the mirror, then confirmed it again when Joonghyuk had traced his thumb across the hollow of Dokja’s throat, soft and tender. 

His breath catches when Joonghyuk gazes at him. He’s terribly handsome in the lamplight that pools warm and gentle over his cheeks, and the sight of him makes all the empty spaces feel full inside Dokja. 

There’s a curve to Joonghyuk’s mouth. Not a smile, but close. “Finish the eggs,” he says.

His cheeks flushing with heat, Dokja does. 

**

     15. I want to stay. 

There are days when Dokja wakes up and thinks: Any moment, I will wake up on the train. 

Today is one such day. Above him, the sky is dangling, and it hits him that they’re only a few scant centimeters away, close enough to grab and crush tight in his hand. The stars are muttering, indecipherable, but it sounds like the same bullshit: come back, you don’t belong there, you’re not wanted. 

He’s tempted to listen. He closes his eyes, and the wind splits into his skin, scatters him into tiny pieces. He is nothing. He is floating through the universe. He is slipping into the strings of what used to be a person. He is nameless, forgotten, and he will always stay that way— 

“Come back,” a voice says. It tugs at his core, and warmth floods through him. The shock of sensation settles, coalesces into the shape of a hand, calloused but familiar, grounding him back to earth. 

Dokja startles awake. This isn’t real, he thinks, frantic, hands fumbling out— 

Joonghyuk catches them. “You were having a nightmare,” he says, tone gentled by night. 

It takes him a moment to orient himself: he’s Kim Dokja, at home, in reality, tucked into Joonghyuk’s side in his bed. Doubt snakes through him, nonetheless. “How are you here?” he whispers.

Joonghyuk’s thumb brushes over his knuckles. “This is my bed,” he says. 

Dokja blinks. The haze of fear falls away. In its place is Joonghyuk, sitting up on the bed, the warmth of his thigh seeping into the blankets, his hand touching Dokja’s cheek. He wants to ask Joonghyuk why he came; if he thought Dokja was being too paranoid, jittery; if he was tired of Dokja being so fucking crazy. 

But all that comes out of his mouth is a hesitant, “Are you here for me?” 

“You idiot,” Joonghyuk says, and then, leaning in to press their foreheads together, anchoring him with another weight, present, tangible, there: “Yeah.” 

Dokja exhales. Something balls up in his throat. “I’m sorry,” he says. 

“For what?” 

“Being needy.” 

“You idiot,” Joonghyuk says again. “I came to you first, Kim Dokja.”

There are countless days like that, where Dokja wakes up unable to distinguish between reality and his dreams. But they become increasingly rare, and the illusions last shorter and shorter. In time he notices that a month has passed since he’s heard the stars calling for him; then a month and a half.

It’s two months before Dokja finds Joonghyuk sitting on the floor of the living room, surrounded by freshly dried laundry. He’s folding socks into little balls and tossing them on the couch above him. The sight of it is so endearing that Dokja’s stomach lurches with the affection bubbling inside him, uncontrollable.

It makes him cross the room, nudge the tower of folded shirts out of his way, and plop himself down right next to Joonghyuk, reaching for a bundle of socks himself.

“What are you doing?” Joonghyuk asks, startled.

“Joining you in your housewife era,” Dokja says cheerily, and pairs up the mismatched socks, just to see what he’ll do. 

But Joonghyuk doesn’t even try to stop him. Instead he huffs, ignores him, and continues to fold.

Accommodating him, once again. 

At that, Dokja’s hands falter. He lowers the socks into his lap.

“You know,” he says after a moment, “you don’t make sense to me, Yoo Joonghyuk.”

Joonghyuk barely gives him a side glance. “Why?”

“You're not supposed to do this."

"Do what?"

"You know."

"I don't."

"Don't play dumb," Dokja says, annoyed.

Finished with the socks, Joonghyuk throws the last ball on the couch and turns to him. "I don't make a habit of playing dumb, Kim Dokja," he says. "Tell me."

"Well, it sounds stupid if I say it!"

"Probably because it is." Dokja hurls a mismatched ball of socks that Joonghyuk catches easily, to Dokja's increasing irritation. He tosses Dokja's impromptu ammo on the couch cushions as well, then turns to him.

"I love you," Joonghyuk says.

Dokja's breath stutters in his lungs.

But Joonghyuk doesn't so much as blink. "Is that what you're talking about?" he asks. 

"You—" Dokja splutters. "How are you saying that so easily?"

"Because it's true."

"It's not! You're being a fool, Yoo Joonghyuk."

"Are you ever going to stop denying what I feel for you?" Joonghyuk asks, sounding genuinely curious.

Dokja moans and drops his face into his hands. "I'm not—denying, I'm being realistic!"

“You and your fucking realism," Joonghyuk mutters. Then: "Listen to me. I have loved you for the past year or longer. I don't know. You can't make me change that."

"I can try."

"No," he says, knowing, "because you're in love with me too."

A strangled noise rips out of Dokja's throat. "Wh—you can't confess on my behalf!"

"I can, because it's true."

"So what if it is!"

"Then there's no issue here," Joonghyuk concludes, like an asshole, and returns back to folding the rest of the laundry. 

Dokja stares at him, stunned. That can't be the end of the conversation. It can't. "Yoo Joonghyuk," he says weakly. When Joonghyuk doesn't respond, he kicks at Joonghyuk's thigh. It's like kicking steel. "Bastard. Pay attention to me."

"Why should I? You're just going to argue more."

"So you're telling me I have no way out of this?" he asks, disbelieving. "That's it? 'Oh, I love you, you love me, we live happily ever after'? Be real."

"You said I love easily," Joonghyuk says. He stops folding the laundry to stare down at his scarred hands, his fingers curling into the fabric, crumpling it. A heartbeat passes. Then his fists loosen. "You’re wrong," he says. "I choose who I love, and it’s not you or Han Sooyoung or anybody else that gets to decide that. It’s me.” 

“Are you saying I’m difficult to love?”

“I’m saying that I choose you as you are, Kim Dokja.”

It’s sweet, and more importantly, completely out of character for Yoo Joonghyuk to say. Genuine, soft, gentle. Never in The Ways of Survival did Joonghyuk spout flowery lines like this, dripping with sincerity. 

But—maybe that’s his point. Maybe they’ve both grown up, and Joonghyuk has learned a thing about being tender, about being human. Maybe Dokja has no right to dictate what he does or doesn’t feel; at the end of the day, he isn’t just a reader and Joonghyuk isn’t just a character. They’re their own people. 

The Yoo Joonghyuk who terrorizes Biyoo when he thinks Dokja isn’t looking and helps out Gilyoung with his calculus homework in the most antagonistic way possible and cooks the meanest kimchi stew Dokja’s ever tasted—the Yoo Joonghyuk who isn’t afraid to love and be loved back—the Yoo Joonghyuk who Dokja wants to see every morning and night, for the rest of his life—

That Yoo Joonghyuk has chosen to love Dokja with all of his stubborn will, knowing exactly what he’s getting into, and he’s diving in head first. 

It's frustrating to admit. Dokja still probably has years to go before he's capable of demonstrating affection as openly as Joonghyuk—miracle of miracles—is, but...

It's not fair to close off that door, either. Maybe it’s time that Dokja pays that courage and devotion back. Not as something transactional, but something simpler. Easy. 

Without thought, like breathing. 

Dokja sighs and knocks his forehead against Joonghyuk’s. “Sap,” he says, resigned. 

Joonghyuk’s expression shifts into affronted annoyance. “I’m telling you I love you—“

“And I’m telling you that you talk too much.”

Exasperated: “Kim Dokja—“

Dokja kisses the syllables of his name off Joonghyuk’s lips. For a moment they’re pressed together, mouths touching, sweet, unexciting.

Then Joonghyuk makes this little noise torn out of his throat, desperate. He mumbles, like he’s irritated and turned on, “Kim Dokja,” against Dokja’s mouth, and Dokja can’t help his laugh. 

Then he forgets how to laugh altogether because Joonghyuk is sliding his fingers into Dokja’s hair, his other arm wrapping around Dokja’s waist, pulling him close until Dokja’s breathing him in with his whole body, being drawn into it, being kissed, and kissed, and kissed.

It’s not their first kiss by a long shot, with the first one on the ferris wheel and a dozen tiny kisses between then and now, loving, quiet, soft, but somehow it feels like it: he feels himself fracture and split, and it feels wonderful. Like he’s floating away, away, and each time Joonghyuk calls him back with each kiss to his mouth, each murmur of his name—

“Dokja,” he says, almost like he’s saying it just because he knows he can, and Dokja will respond. “Dokja.”

They’re leaning against each other, now. Dokja's legs are shaky underneath him, and he’s so dizzy he hardly remembers how to breathe. Joonghyuk’s thumb is making absent circles on the edge of his jaw, right above his racing heartbeat. 

Joonghyuk hums. He looks—an awful lot like the 0th turn version of him. It’s partially those grey streaks, but more than that, it’s the openness of his expression, that rare half-smile of his. He looks happy. Free. 

“You kissed me first,” he says. 

Dokja laughs, bright and startlingly loud. “I did, yeah.”

“I didn’t think you would.”

“Does that mean you’re agreeing to date me?” Dokja asks, because he has to know. 

But Joonghyuk pulls back to give him an incredulous glance. “I said I was in love with you.”

“Well, yeah—“

“We live together.”

“I thought that was a roommate situa—“

“We sleep together,” Joonghyuk says, and Dokja should argue but the words are tossed to the wind because Joonghyuk is staring at him, gaze dark, intent, pupils blown, his mouth a kiss-swollen red. All Dokja can do, then, is give in. Because he can continue arguing, or—Dokja can kiss him again on the mouth, the nose, both cheeks, his jaw, his neck, and back up to his mouth again, and again, and again. 

And when they finally pull apart, curled into each other, sitting on the floor like useless adults who don’t know the functions of a perfectly functional couch a few meters away, Joonghyuk says, sounding dazed but exasperated, “Yes, we’re dating,” and Dokja laughs. 

**

     16. I want to stay. 

“Do you think you deserve this?”

Dokja doesn’t have to turn around to know who’s asking. He’s sitting outside on the balcony near their garden, with a pen wedged halfway through the manuscript of Sooyoung’s latest novel in his lap. Inside, Joonghyuk is whipping up lunch for their friends who’ll be coming shortly to celebrate—not for any special occasion, but because Dokja had wanted to, and thought that days were worth celebrating for no particular reason. 

He’s sure that Joonghyuk will call him inside in a few short moments to help with the prep. And then after he’s enjoyed his time with his friends and called his mother and cleared the dishes, they’ll settle down in bed, and Joonghyuk will be the aggressive bear who demands cuddling despite the sticky summer, and he’ll kiss Dokja so sweet and soft, and they’ll go to sleep, wound around each other. 

And thinking about all that, thinking about his life in this moment, and all the moments up ahead waiting for him, it’s an easy answer. 

“I do,” Dokja says, and sitting beside him, the Oldest Dream smiles.