Work Text:
It’s been seven hours since Yoo Joonghyuk entered the subway station.
Seven hours, since he moved from where he stands frozen on the platform.
Around him, the world bustles with life. People come, and people go. They make money, find work, find happiness—they live, and live, and live, as if when the world ended they hadn’t died with it.
Yoo Joonghyuk watches, as the doors of the trains open, and close. Open, and close.
So brief.
So meaningless.
Open, and close, and never does it show him what he wants to see.
But Yoo Joonghyuk is nothing if not patient. He’s lived thousands of years. Endured thousands of years. He could wait forever.
He’s been waiting forever.
Open and close.
The trains keep coming, the trains keep going.
It’s never the one that Yoo Joonghyuk waits for.
It’s never Kim Dokja, on the other side of those doors.
It’s never that damned train that took with it what was left of Yoo Joonghyuk.
It’s been seven hours.
Yoo Joonghyuk can wait forever.
/
For a world that’s been rebuilt—Yoo Joonghyuk has never felt more empty living in it.
It’s not like he hasn’t been alone before. He’s been alone almost his entire life.
But perhaps it was easier to be alone before he knew what it was like to have a companion by his side.
Perhaps it was easier, when he knew that no matter how many times he failed, he could grit his teeth and make it back to the end all over again.
It was easier, when the world would end over and over, giving Yoo Joonghyuk nothing but time to fix it.
When his life had filled itself with meaningless failures, drawing out his existence into frayed threads until he could finally, finally meet someone who could put him back together again.
Who could put him back together—only to tear him apart mercilessly.
If Yoo Joonghyuk stares at the trains hard enough, he can remember that he hates Kim Dokja.
He hates him with all of his heart.
That bastard of a man, who was never up to anything good—who fell out of Yoo Joonghyuk’s grasp no matter how tightly he tried to hold on to him.
Kim Dokja, who Yoo Joonghyuk had lived this long for, who had turned his back on him as if to say enough.
As if to say, don’t live for me any longer.
The doors of the train had shut, and Kim Dokja had gone with it.
Yoo Joonghyuk doesn’t know what Kim Dokja called it in his head. A sacrifice, an atonement, an eternity of suffering to exchange for the happiness of everyone he’d learned to love.
He doesn’t know what he called it, in that foolish head of it.
But what it is, is a curse.
What it is, is shattering what’s left of Yoo Joonghyuk’s heart.
Don’t live for me any longer.
What else was Yoo Joonghyuk supposed to live for?
What else could he do?
/
Sometimes, at the worst of times—Yoo Joonghyuk wishes that Kim Dokja was dead.
He doesn’t say this to anyone.
He knows that they would kill him for it.
But sometimes, when he watches the trains come and go from the station, and is too paralyzed by fear to get into a single one, he truly wishes that Kim Dokja was dead.
He wishes that he had a corpse, to bury in the ground.
A grave, to mourn.
A reason, to lie down next to it, and die right next to him.
But he has nothing left in his hands except the haunting, terrifying thought that he might never know if Kim Dokja will be back or not.
He might live forever, waiting for his companion to return—the way he has every time before this, no matter how many times he left Yoo Joonghyuk behind—but he may be waiting for nothing at all.
He might just live, and live, and live, and never see Kim Dokja again.
Yoo Joonghyuk has lived for thousands of years.
Too many long, cruel, traumatizing years.
But nothing has ever scared him more than having to keep living in a world where there is nothing left to save, and no one left to see this peace with.
Nothing has ever scared him more than the thought that Kim Dokja really, truly, might never come back.
It would be easier, perhaps, if Kim Dokja was dead.
If he was dead, Yoo Joonghyuk would no longer need to force himself to put one foot after the other.
If he was dead, then Yoo Joonghyuk, too, could let go.
Maybe they’d meet again in another world.
Maybe they wouldn’t.
At least Yoo Joonghyuk wouldn’t be here anymore, forced to look at this empty world that’s devoid of life without the man who worked so hard to build it.
/
On the better days, Yoo Joonghyuk thinks that this is fine.
On the better days, he thinks that this might be the only way Kim Dokja could live at all.
Yoo Joonghyuk wanders through the streets of people putting their lives back together from nothing, watches them revert back to a time where everything was still wrong but there was no common enemy to fight. He watches these people piece themselves together and he remembers—Kim Dokja would have hated this.
For all his talk about wanting a happy ending, Kim Dokja had no idea how to live in one.
He would have hated this. A world with no escape from living with himself would have been a nightmare for him. Yoo Joonghyuk wouldn’t have been surprised if the man threw himself out another window just to get away from having to live in the absence of a story.
So maybe it’s a good thing, he tells himself, that the man is gone.
Maybe it’s a good thing that he won’t have to try to stay in a world that they both know he couldn’t live in.
Maybe it’s a good thing that he’s been torn into so many thousands of pieces, because now Yoo Joonghyuk can hope that some of those pieces have forgotten how much they tend to want to die.
Those are the better days.
But then there are worse days.
On the worse days, Yoo Joonghyuk is afraid that Kim Dokja wants to come back even more than Yoo Joonghyuk wants him back.
On the worse days, he imagines Kim Dokja in the train, wide eyes staring out the window as endless, terrible worlds pass by, waiting for Yoo Joonghyuk to save him.
Because Yoo Joonghyuk has always saved him.
From when he was a child, with no one to look up to.
That’s where this mess started—from the fact that Kim Dokja could look up at him and think this is a person who could save me.
What if he’s waiting, now? For Yoo Joonghyuk to return?
What if he’s spent centuries alone in the dark, just waiting, never losing hope because Yoo Joonghyuk has never let him down?
What if, as time stretches too thin and Yoo Joonghyuk doesn’t come for him—
What if he thinks that Yoo Joonghyuk has left him there?
/
That’s what haunts him the most.
The fact that the Kim Dokja out there, shattered in a million pieces—has no idea that Yoo Joonghyuk forgives him.
He has no idea that they all forgive him.
He’s lost somewhere out there and doesn’t even want to return, because he thinks Yoo Joonghyuk hates him.
He doesn’t know that Yoo Joonghyuk can’t even live with him gone.
He doesn’t know that Yoo Joonghyuk has nothing to do.
Nowhere to go.
No one to be.
There’s nothing left of him but the empty shell of someone who had never been human to begin with, just watching. Waiting. Hoping.
For Kim Dokja?
For death?
He doesn’t even know anymore.
All he knows is that he’s been staring at the trains in the station for far too long.
That he’s been staring at his watch, as it ticks through second after excruciating second.
Kim Dokja had once told him to keep his eyes on his pocket watch. To watch it moving forward, when he felt like turning back.
It was just the sort of messed up thing Kim Dokja would do—to force Yoo Joonghyuk to learn to live in a present just so that he could abandon it himself.
It was just like him.
And Yoo Joonghyuk knows that this time, there truly might be nothing he can do to bring him back.
As stupid, as bullheaded, as uncompromising as Yoo Joonghyuk is, there might be no way that he can change this.
There might be no way to undo what has been done.
Kim Dokja might be gone.
Forever.
Yoo Joonghyuk might never see him again.
But if that’s true, if Yoo Joonghyuk has to live like this, with everything about him ripped out of his heart—then he wishes at least, he could tell his companion one thing.
Just one thing.
Just so that he can be sure that the man isn’t crying alone in the dark, staring at this damned story to try and forget how much he doesn’t want to be alive.
He just wants to tell him—
Kim Dokja.
You fool.
Don’t you know that I forgive you?
You fool, can you let yourself be happy?
/
It’s been twelve hours since Yoo Joonghyuk entered the subway station.
Twelve hours, since he moved from where he stands frozen on the platform.
Around him, the world bustles with life. People come, and people go. They make money, find work, find happiness—they live, and live, and live, as if when the world ended they hadn’t died with it.
Yoo Joonghyuk watches, as the doors of the trains open, and close. Open, and close.
So brief.
So meaningless.
Open, and close, and never does it show him what he wants to see.
But Yoo Joonghyuk is nothing if not patient. He’s lived thousands of years. Endured thousands of years. He could wait forever.
He’s been waiting forever.
Open and close.
The trains keep coming, the trains keep going.
It’s never the one that Yoo Joonghyuk waits for.
It’s never Kim Dokja, on the other side of those doors.
It’s never that damned train that took with it what was left of Yoo Joonghyuk.
It’s been twelve hours.
Yoo Joonghyuk can wait forever.
/
Yoo Joonghyuk has to wait forever.
/
There has never been another way.
/