Chapter Text
Kim Dokja is one arm into a sink full of suds when Yoo Joonghyuk puts a load of plates down, looks him in the eye, and very calmly asks a question.
"Can I kiss you?"
Kim Dokja considers dropping the plate in his left hand for dramatics. It almost slips from his fingers with how surprised he is, anyways. "Sorry," he says, his voice punctuated with a startled laugh. "What?"
"I asked if I could kiss you," Yoo Joonghyuk says evenly. Then, when Kim Dokja actually drops the plate into the sink and splashes him with water: "Don't get soap all over the place."
“I heard you fine the first time. I was just wondering if you’ve gone insane. Do you have a fever?” Kim Dokja raises a soapy hand and presses it to Yoo Joonghyuk’s forehead. Yoo Joonghyuk’s expression twitches violently at the touch. “Just because we aren’t in the scenarios doesn’t mean that you can’t get sick anymore. Remember when you had the flu? You thought you were dying.”
Yoo Joonghyuk scowls at the memory. “I’d never been sick before.”
Kim Dokja rolls his eyes. “Yes, yes, and you’d rather get your limbs cut off than suffer through that again.” It was likely that Han Sooyoung had just neglected to write anything as boring as basic illnesses into her book, but he decides not to mention that. “Your temperature is fine. So what is it? Did Han Sooyoung dare you?”
“No,” Yoo Joonghyuk grits out.
“Yoo Joonghyuk, you’re not a kid anymore,” Kim Dokja says. “I don’t need to kiss you goodbye like I do with Gilyoung-ie and Yoosung-ie, right?”
A terrifying moment of silence passes. Yoo Joonghyuk stares stormily at a point past Kim Dokja’s face.
“Yoo Joonghyuk?”
“Shut up,” Yoo Joonghyuk snaps. “Just tell me if this is okay.”
“Tell you what?” Kim Dokja starts, only for his words to stumble to a halt when Yoo Joonghyuk grabs him by the wrist and tugs him towards him. He flinches reflexively when he feels Yoo Joonghyuk’s arms close around him, trapping him against his chest. “Are you - “
Yoo Joonghyuk sighs somewhere over him. “Is this okay?”
“What?”
“This. Do you want me to let go?”
Of course I do, he almost responds immediately, but he pauses halfway through the thought, because it’s just dawned on him that Yoo Joonghyuk isn’t trying to kill him, he’s hugging him, and it doesn’t even feel half bad. It’s like hugging a wall, except warmer. Kim Dokja has settled for worse. “I don’t even know what you’re trying to do,” he says instead, making a half-hearted attempt to extricate his arms from where they’re pinned to his sides. “Use your words, Yoo Joonghyuk.”
“I did. ”
He looks up at Yoo Joonghyuk’s chin. From his position, he can’t really see any higher than that. “And your words didn’t make any sense. What’s the point of this?”
Yoo Joonghyuk doesn’t grace him with a response, nor does he move from his embrace around Kim Dokja. He’s stiff, but not awkwardly so. His posture just naturally resembles a metal pole. Resigned to his fate, Kim Dokja lets his head drop onto Yoo Joonghyuk’s chest. If he listens hard enough, he can hear his heartbeat under the garish Christmas sweater Yoo Joonghyuk has on.
His voice is muffled when he finally speaks. “...You’ve all changed a lot.”
Yoo Joonghyuk’s arms tighten slightly. Kim Dokja shifts so that his ribs aren’t in immediate danger of cracking. “It’s been years.”
“I know,” Kim Dokja says, the words catching against the sides of his throat. If he tilts his head up, he can see the gray streaks of hair in Yoo Joonghyuk’s hair. He doesn’t look old - he isn’t old, either, technically - but he does look whittled down by time. He looks tired, but only a snapshot of exhaustion, not the everpresent grief that had weighed them all down in the scenarios. Here, in the large house that Kim Dokja had wished for eons ago, the sky clear and full of silent stars, everyone looks freer. Happier.
If he closes his eyes for too long, the sound of Yoo Joonghyuk’s heartbeat is drowned out by the blare of the subway, lights exploding in his eyes and threading through the handles swinging from the ceiling.
“Is that what the hug is for?” Kim Dokja says. He wipes his still-wet hands on the back of Yoo Joonghyuk’s sweater, searching for a reaction in vain. “I don't need to stare at the hideous reindeer on your chest to know that things are different now.”
He feels a light pressure on the crown of his head, a firm press against his hair, before it disappears as quickly as it came. “Is it so hard to accept that I just wanted to?” Yoo Joonghyuk asks quietly.
Yoo Joonghyuk smells like the kitchen, like he’s dusted with flour and citrus, and his hands are warm against Kim Dokja’s back. Before, Kim Dokja had known all the scars on his hands. Now, he isn’t sure if he knows every line. They’re like a map to a place he doesn’t know, with symbols he doesn’t recognize. He boards a train that has no end point and does not know when he will get off.
He has missed so much. When he tries to answer Yoo Joonghyuk, he finds that he doesn’t know what to say.
“Stay,” Yoo Joonghyuk says, in place of his response. His voice lilts at the end. A faint, hesitant question. A way out.
For once, Kim Dokja does not take it. He rests his head on Yoo Joonghyuk’s chest and listens to the rhythm there.
Han Sooyoung slams a crate of cheap soju down. “The kids are on an overnight school trip,” she declares. “I expect this entire crate to be gone by the time they’re back.”
Even Yoo Sangah looks intimidated. “Sooyoung-ssi, there’s enough for several nights here. We shouldn’t finish it all today.”
“It’s not even dark outside yet,” Lee Seolhwa points out. Her argument is dulled by the champagne in her hand.
“Pussy,” Han Sooyoung says easily.
A graceful, furious fight wages across Yoo Sangah’s face before she reaches for a bottle herself, handing another to Jung Heewon. “Don’t be surprised when I drink you under the table.”
“I’d like to see you try!”
Yoo Sangah didn’t use to give in so easily, Kim Dokja thinks, nursing his cup of coffee and scooting away from the immediate vicinity of the three women. Lee Hyunsung, similarly, has excused himself to avoid becoming collateral damage.
“Not going to drink?”
He startles a little when Yoo Joonghyuk slips next to him. “I don’t drink,” Kim Dokja says.
“At all?”
“As much as I can avoid it.”
“We do need someone to stay sober,” Yoo Joonghyuk says dryly.
Kim Dokja laughs. “Hyunsung-ssi has that covered. Did you see the expression on his face when Jung Heewon got soju in her hands? I don’t think he’ll touch alcohol for a while.” He looks down and runs his thumb across his cup. There’s faded text on it: Most Okay Dad in the World. Some of the letters have been rubbed off. “What about you? Are you going to succumb to the temptation of alcohol? I wouldn’t worry if I was you. I’m sure you wouldn’t say anything too embarrassing.”
Yoo Joonghyuk’s brow twitches. “I don’t like soju.”
“Not classy enough for you, hm?” Kim Dokja drains the rest of his coffee. “Who bought this mug, by the way?”
“Lee Jihye,” Yoo Joonghyuk says. “As a welcome home gift.”
“Of course it was Lee Jihye,” Kim Dokja mutters. He falls silent when the rest of Yoo Joonghyuk’s words settle in.
“They missed you a lot,” Yoo Joonghyuk says quietly.
Kim Dokja fiddles with the handle of his cup. “They had me. For a little bit.”
“Not enough of you.”
There’s a little too much to unpack in that, so he decides to reroute the conversation to a more pressing concern. “The wallpaper,” he says under his breath.
Yoo Joonghyuk’s blank expression becomes even blanker.
“Jung Heewon has her sword,” he mourns. “Her sword, Yoo Joonghyuk. She’s going to gut the lovely printed flowers that I spent hours picking out.”
“You’re not worried about her gutting a person?”
“It’s just Han Sooyoung.” He pauses. “Ah, but there is Sangah-ssi. Maybe I should intervene.”
“Lee Seolhwa can handle that,” Yoo Joonghyuk says, the corner of his mouth flickering upwards for a second, so quickly that Kim Dokja barely catches the tail end of his expression. “We can buy more wallpaper.”
“I am not putting up any of it,” Kim Dokja says decisively. “One time was enough.”
“Hm,” Yoo Joonghyuk answers. “Do you find it strange that Lee Jihye thinks of you as a father figure?”
Kim Dokja pins him to the wall with a flat glare. Unfortunately, mimicking Yoo Joonghyuk’s normal dead-fish look doesn’t seem to get him the same results that it gets Yoo Joonghyuk. “I thought we were talking about wallpaper.”
“No, we weren’t. You’re just dodging the question.”
“I was not dodging the question. You didn’t even ask me one to start with.”
“I just did,” Yoo Joonghyuk says exasperatedly. “Isn’t that good enough?”
Kim Dokja stares at his hands. There’s a bright Hello Kitty bandage on his thumb from where he’d cut it trying to help Yoo Joonghyuk prepare lunch. “I thought she’d think of you as her dad. You know, considering the whole ‘Master’ thing.”
“I think she’d rather die than admit that.”
“Oh, so it was fine with me?”
“It was a compromise with Lee Gilyoung and Shin Yoosung,” he says. “They wanted a Best Dad cup. She said that best was a bit of a stretch.”
“So they settled on most okay ,” Kim Dokja muses. “Did they give everyone a mug? What did yours say?”
Yoo Joonghyuk’s face becomes even more expressionless, which either means that he’s trying not to laugh or he’s trying not to maim someone. Kim Dokja inches away from him.
“It can’t be that bad,” Kim Dokja says tentatively. “Was it #2 Teacher or something? Did you get replaced by someone from their school?”
Yoo Joonghyuk closes his eyes, like he’s steeling himself for his next regression. The resignation on his face does look like a man preparing himself for death. “Most mid dad.”
Kim Dokja raises an eyebrow.
“So it’s literally the same as my mug,” he says, “But with internet lingo?”
“Yes,” Yoo Joonghyuk says, painfully. Kim Dokja raises his other eyebrow. “Because I play video games with them, they thought I would appreciate the reference.”
“You’re thirty-three ,” Kim Dokja says in disbelief.
“Give or take a few thousand years, yes.”
Kim Dokja gapes at him. “Did you just make a joke? Actually, don’t even answer that. I’m still processing. I’ll laugh at you at a later time.”
“Thank you,” Yoo Joonghyuk says dryly. “I appreciate it.”
They settle into a comfortable silence. Kim Dokja gets himself another cup of coffee, adding an extra shot of espresso when he hears Han Sooyoung turn on the karaoke machine. Yoo Joonghyuk watches the water kettle on the stove, flames licking around the sides of it. The bottom of it used to be a light turquoise, but it’s been scorched black over time.
“So, Yoo Joonghyuk,” Kim Dokja says casually, “how do you feel about being perceived as a father figure?”
Yoo Joonghyuk glares back at him. It’s a little unfair how much more intimidating his stare is than Kim Dokja’s. “Shin Yoosung and Lee Gilyoung don’t think of me that way. It was a joke.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
Yoo Joonghyuk shakes his head. “Lee Gilyoung used to hate me.”
“Huh,” Kim Dokja says, frowning. “Why?”
“He blamed me.”
“For?”
“For not bringing you back.”
“...Oh,” is all Kim Dokja can say. His stomach twists, a knot pulled tight right under his ribs.
“He was hurt,” Yoo Joonghyuk says. Behind him, the water kettle lets out a whistle and begins to rattle. He turns off the heat. The light of the fire catches against his wristwatch. “It was easier for him to find someone to hate.”
Kim Dokja thinks back to the Disaster of Floods, of Shin Yoosung from the 41st regression, of Yoo Joonghyuk standing over her and saying, if you want, I will bear your hatred. Saying, survive this round for the sake of killing me. His throat is dry. His swallow feels like sandpaper against glass. “That’s not fair to you.”
Yoo Joonghyuk’s eyes flick up from the stove to meet his. “Maybe,” he says.
“I didn’t - “
“Want us to come back?” Yoo Joonghyuk finishes. He takes the kettle off from the heat. “I already told you. They missed you.”
“I didn’t want this to happen,” Kim Dokja says, his voice sharpened to a brittle point.
Yoo Joonghyuk pours the almost-boiling water over a small ball of tea. The leaves unfurl and bob gently to the top of his mug. “ This is what we’ve always wanted,” he says, gesturing at the house around them. “What you’ve wanted.”
“Is he still mad at you?”
Yoo Joonghyuk cups his hands around his tea. “Not as much,” he says eventually. “You made it better.”
“That’s reassuring,” Kim Dokja mutters.
“Kim Dokja. Don’t blame yourself for it.”
“You make it sound so easy,” Kim Dokja says. Yoo Joonghyuk reaches for the apron folded by the stove and shakes it out. “ Don't kiss the cook? Really?”
“Secret Santa,” Yoo Joonghyuk says briefly.
“I thought the ugly sweater you were wearing last week was a secret Santa gift.”
“That one wasn't secret. Han Sooyoung made sure to give it to me in front of everyone.”
“Sounds like her,” Kim Dokja says, smiling into his coffee cup. He wants to laugh at the Yoo Joonghyuk tying the comically small, hot pink apron on, his face permanently affixed in a vaguely murderous expression, but the sound gets lodged somewhere inside his throat. It's so… peaceful, even with Han Sooyoung screaming bloody murder at the television. He remembers reading about Yoo Joonghyuk’s second regression and marveling at the sheer domesticity of it. I didn't know that Yoo Joonghyuk would be so soft , he had written to tls123. I think it's something he has innately, that gentleness. Maybe that's what pushes him through his regressions and not some iron-clad will. I don't think that makes him any weaker.
And now, after witnessing it himself, he's all the more convinced of it. He looks down at the mug in his hand and feels guilt heavy in his stomach.
“Kim Dokja,” Yoo Joonghyuk says, his hand brushing against his wrist. He startles at the touch. “Stop thinking so loud.”
He can't actually hear his thoughts, he knows it, but all Kim Dokja can think about is the way he had watched his own stories peel from his fingers, sentences thick with shame and humiliation, words he'd tried to forget oozing up his arms and burrowing into his skin. He'd seen his thoughts in corporeal form, like birds on his shoulder. They had pecked at his ear and bit him bloody.
“They are loud, aren't they?” he says, half consciously, and Yoo Joonghyuk’s expression tightens.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing important.”
Yoo Joonghyuk’s fingers are unbearably tender. He cups Kim Dokja’s jaw and tilts his head up, his index finger resting over his heartbeat. It must feel like a bird is trapped in his throat. His thumb traces a faint scar on his cheek, brushing right against his lip. He opens his mouth, eyes intense and questioning, and -
Kim Dokja cuts him off. He slips out of his grip. Yoo Joonghyuk’s hand falls to his side, warm and useless.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says, forcing the brittleness out of his mouth. “You’re right. What does matter is that you’re all happy. I didn’t mean to - question what you all had done. I’m sorry.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Yoo Joonghyuk says. Something cracks in his expression. “Kim Dokja. You’re allowed to have this.”
“I know that.”
“No,” he says, setting his mug down. “You don’t.”
Frustration rises so quickly in Kim Dokja's throat that he almost chokes on it. “What do you want me to say, then?” He asks thinly. “Do you really think I can live like this -” he waves his hand. “Like normal people do? Like I could be a normal father to the kids and send them to school and attend their Parent's Day? That's not who I am, Yoo Joonghyuk. That's not -”
Who we are , he almost says, but that wouldn't be true. That wouldn't be fair.
“We're not in the scenarios anymore,” Yoo Joonghyuk says eventually. “If you wanted, you could have that.”
If he wanted. Maybe that would be true if he was anyone else - if he even knew what he wanted - but with the roar of the train in his ears, he can't even hear his own thoughts anymore. He looks at Yoo Joonghyuk and remembers a hug, the rumble of Yoo Joonghyuk's words against his chest, the question Yoo Joonghyuk had asked. Can I kiss you?
If he wanted something, if he could have something -
“I can’t have everything I want,” he says instead. Being able to leave the train was a miracle in and of itself; he couldn’t possibly ask for more than that. He’s already taken too much from his companions. “I don’t really care about it. Normalcy, I mean.”
Yoo Joonghyuk stares at him. “That’s what we’ve been striving for this entire time.”
“I meant for me,” Kim Dokja amends hastily. He can’t say anything right, can he? “What I can’t get doesn’t have to undermine what I have. You said it yourself; this is what I've always wanted. I don't need more than this.”
Yoo Joonghyuk’s mouth thins, an old sign of simmering anger. Beyond that, though, he doesn’t react at all; he just looks at Kim Dokja, oddly quiet, oddly knowing. The scrutiny almost makes Kim Dokja look away, but he holds his gaze. He’s curious as to what’s there.
After so many years away, he’s not sure if he’s the person who understands Yoo Joonghyuk the most anymore - if he even understands him at all. The thought leaves a strange taste in his throat.
“As long as you want it,” Yoo Joonghyuk murmurs. Between the graying strands of his hair and the unfamiliar, gentle tone in his voice, he looks a lot like himself from the 0th regression. From before he started looking for Kim Dokja. “You can have it, Kim Dokja.”
It isn’t the first time Kim Dokja realizes it, but it will be the one he remembers the most. Maybe it’s the way the dim kitchen light pools across Yoo Joonghyuk’s face, or the matching mugs they’re holding, or the sound of Han Sooyoung trying to outsing Yoo Sangah. It might be the way that Yoo Joonghyuk looks at him the way his 0th self did, as if he’s been freed from a great burden. He looks happier, despite everything, despite the fact that Kim Dokja is there. Kim Dokja is completely and utterly undeserving, yet -
I love you, Kim Dokja realizes. It is this moment that he will remember with the greatest clarity. I love you, Yoo Joonghyuk .
Somewhere between his first memory and his father’s death, Kim Dokja comes to terms with an undeniable fact: he was not made to be loved.
It isn’t a hard fact to swallow. It’s one of the easier ones to comprehend, actually. It’s easier to understand than why a father would beat his own family. It makes it easier to understand why a mother would publicize her husband’s murder, why her child would leap from a school building’s window because of it. He finds solace in those seven words. He buries himself in it.
He was not made to be loved.
“What are you doing here?” Yoo Joonghyuk asks, his shadow stretching across Kim Dokja’s lap. He closes the door to the roof behind him. The light above the door paints his cheekbones with gold, his eyes hollow in the uneven glow. “It’s almost three in the morning.”
Kim Dokja shrugs and pulls his knees up onto his chair. “Just looking at the stars. The skies are a lot clearer now; there used to be more pollution.”
“If you fall asleep here, you might catch a cold.”
“I’m not going to. I’ll go in soon.”
Yoo Joonghyuk says nothing, which is more than enough confirmation that he doesn’t believe him at all. Kim Dokja rolls his eyes. “You worry too much. I don’t always take the stupid way out, you know?”
Yoo Joonghyuk is noticeably silent.
“Hey. Yoo Joonghyuk.” When he gets no answer again, he kicks him in the shin. He winces at the impact. “ Hey. ”
“You keep on coming here,” Yoo Joonghyuk says finally. “Always in the early hours of the morning, too.”
“How do you even know that?”
“I’m a light sleeper. I can hear you walking around.”
“You should’ve told me earlier.”
“It doesn’t disturb me,” Yoo Joonghyuk says. Involuntarily, Kim Dokja’s fingers tighten around his knees. “I just wanted to know what you were doing.”
Kim Dokja laughs. “You know me, Yoo Joonghyuk. Thirty-three, former Minosoft employee, with the sole hobby of reading webnovels. What else would I be doing?”
Yoo Joonghyuk shakes his head. “I don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“I don’t know anything about you,” Yoo Joonghyuk says quietly. “You don’t tell us anything.”
Kim Dokja only notices the goosebumps that have risen on his arm when Yoo Joonghyuk brushes his hand across the crook of his elbow, his touch jolting him with pinpricks of warmth against the cool breeze. “Of course I tell you things,” he says. “You know I hate tomatoes. My favorite trope in fiction is found family. I used to play piano and cello in the school orchestra. I wasn’t even bad, now that I think about it. I just didn’t play for long enough.”
“I didn’t know you played any instruments.”
Kim Dokja’s train of thought stumbles to a halt. “Well,” he says, a nervous laugh pushing through his throat, “It’s not like it matters, does it?”
Yoo Joonghyuk doesn’t react. “Why’d you stop playing? Yoo Mia had a recital at her school, but you never mentioned that you played.”
Kim Dokja turns his hands over and splays his fingers out on his legs. “That’s because my father broke my cello when I was ten.”
Yoo Joonghyuk’s hand freezes against his arm.
“He, um, threw a wine bottle at it. The whole front of the cello just shattered. He snapped my bow as well. He didn’t like the sound of music.” He tries to meet Yoo Joonghyuk’s gaze, but from his seated position he can’t catch his expression. “But that’s just how he was. I couldn’t have played for much longer, anyways.”
“I didn’t,” Yoo Joonghyuk starts, falters. “I didn’t know your father did that.”
“It’s not important, that’s why,” Kim Dokja says flintily. “He isn’t alive anymore. Why would I waste my breath talking about him?”
“It’s important to me.”
“It’s important to you,” Kim Dokja repeats. His face is blank.
“It was your life,” Yoo Joonghyuk says. His hand lifts from Kim Dokja’s arm; his fingers curl into themselves, hesitant. “I wanted to hear about it from you.”
“Why? You’ve read Han Sooyoung’s novel. You know practically everything you need to know about me.” He smiles, jagged, his teeth sharp against the flesh of his cheek. “Son of a murderer and an abuser, right?”
“Kim Dokja,” Yoo Joonghyuk says softly.
Kim Dokja surges to his feet. “You know what?” he asks. His voice is unbalanced, trembling. “I will tell you, actually. It’s been long enough, I’ve moved on, I even had the Fourth Wall to help me sort out all my issues in the apocalypse. So what do you want to hear? Let me think - there was this time I brought home a good grade on a test. My mom was proud, right? She patted me on the head and ruffled my hair and everything, and for some reason, that was the trigger for my dad that day. So do you know what he did?”
“Kim Dokja,” Yoo Joonghyuk says, more insistently this time.
“He took my textbooks and hit me over the head until I passed out. I had a concussion and everything, but I didn’t even notice until I woke up the next day and couldn’t stand upright. I never figured out what he was so mad about.” He gasps for air and continues, his words landing in heaps around his feet. He can hear the whistle of the train in his ears, the roar of it exploding in his ears. “But that’s too depressing, right?”
“Kim Dokja!”
He startles so hard at Yoo Joonghyuk’s touch that he stumbles backwards, his foot sending rocks skittering off the edge of the roof. Yoo Joonghyuk grabs him by the wrist to pull him forward, yanking him away from a four-story drop. He looks more scared than Kim Dokja feels.
“Yoo Joonghyuk, I’m fine,” Kim Dokja says, his breath coming out in chunks. “Let go of me.”
“Don’t - “ Yoo Joonghyuk hisses, but he cuts himself off. “Don’t say anything. Just - shut up.”
Kim Dokja shuts up. Numbly, he lets Yoo Joonghyuk tug him away from the edge of the roof. His grip is bruising around his wrist, but he doesn’t comment on it. He doesn’t really feel it at all. His senses feel like they’ve been muffled with wool.
Yoo Joonghyuk is silent until they reach the kitchen. Moonlight feathers through the windows, throwing lines of silver across his legs. When he turns to look at Kim Dokja, his expression has smoothed out, but there’s still hints of fear bleeding into it. He still hasn’t let go of his hand.
“I don’t want you to tell me anything you don’t want to tell me,” he says eventually. “I know that might be everything for you, or at least everything you consider important. I just wanted to hear things from you. Not through Han Sooyoung’s novel and not through the story fragments that I read before. I don’t care if it’s something as stupid as your favorite color or what animal you’d want to be if you turned into one.” His other hand falls to clasp Kim Dokja’s hand, and his voice is quiet, ragged. “Did it ever tire you? Being half of yourself?”
Kim Dokja opens his mouth, stunned into quiet. It takes him a while to answer. “I don’t know,” he says honestly. “It was hard sometimes. The memories I made with you all - I knew I had them, and I could recall them like books on a shelf. But there wasn’t any feeling behind them. I knew that I woke up to Yoosung and Gilyoung hugging me the first night they met, but I couldn’t remember how it felt. But it wasn’t horrible.” He smiles, shrugs. “All books feel like that, right? And this was the story I loved the most.”
Yoo Joonghyuk doesn’t say anything. Kim Dokja takes it as an invitation to continue, but his words are less hurried this time, less desperate. He leans into his touch. “People always used to tell me I looked like my father. So when I was half of myself, I - “
He remembers, suddenly, seeing himself in the reflection of the subway. First at the beginning of the scenarios, going to wipe blood off his cheek before realizing it was on the window, and then at the end of his story, his reflection distorted by eternity. At some point, he had become so sickened by his own appearance that he had hung his coat over the window across from him. His stomach plunges to the ground, sick and fluid.
He was not made to be loved.
“I wasn’t nearly as much like him,” he manages after a second. “He was an alcoholic. That’s why I don’t like drinking. You asked me about that earlier.”
He laughs, the sound splintering in his mouth. “So now you know. But you already figured out some of it yourself, didn’t you?”
Yoo Joonghyuk simply looks at him, holding his gaze quietly, and he thinks not for the first time just how undeserving he is. Somehow, though, he can’t bring himself to break himself out of Yoo Joonghyuk’s grip.
He has always been greedy for love he didn’t earn. Yoo Joonghyuk knows this more intimately than anyone. And yet he’s holding his hand. And yet he doesn’t let go. His warmth bleeds like syrup into Kim Dokja’s hand, trickling through the lines of his palm, the crescent marks of red where he had dug his fingernails in too hard. Not for the first time, he looks at the unmarred skin of his hand against the scars on Yoo Joonghyuk’s fingers, and thinks of those seven words. I was not made to be loved.
“In Han Sooyoung’s novel,” he says, his voice threading through the thin silence between them. “When you read about me… what did you think?”
Yoo Joonghyuk shifts to hold his hand more securely. Kim Dokja almost pulls away. His touch fragments the sentences in his head, ink spilling out of the tips of his fingers and crumbling against the breeze. Yoo Joonghyuk is so very warm.
“I think,” Yoo Joonghyuk says, exhales. “I think I understood you a little bit more.”