Chapter Text
2006
When Kim Dokja was fifteen years old, he thought Yoo Joonghyuk was probably the coolest person in the world.
It helped that Yoo Joonghyuk was just about the only person who never, ever made fun of him. Most people didn’t bully him, not as badly as Song Minwoo used to, but they’d make the odd jab. He couldn’t blame them. He was an easy target: skinny, awkward, too quiet and obsessed with webnovels. (The son of a murderer.) His classmates were bright enough to know if they didn’t pick on him, people would pick on them . It was an act of self-preservation, and it was a smart one.
Yoo Joonghyuk didn’t believe in self-preservation, apparently, or maybe he was just too untouchable for it to matter.
After Kim Dokja had—after that day on the school rooftop, after he’d disappeared for a week and come back with his arm in a cast—Song Minwoo was ready to make sure he bruised even worse. “Come on,” he snickered, shoving Kim Dokja back into the wall. “Won’t even put up a fight anymore? Your mommy didn’t teach you her ‘self-defense’ skills? Huh?”
Kim Dokja stared at the floor, eyes vacant, thinking of hero after hero from webnovel after webnovel and landing just short of inspiration every time. They weren’t as pathetic as him. They weren’t as alone as him. He couldn’t pretend, even for a moment, to be like them, so he might as well just—
“What are you doing,” a voice said.
“The hell’s it look like?” Song Minwoo replied without looking away. “Mind your business and get lost.”
“No,” the boy said. Kim Dokja glanced over, confused, and jolted when he saw who it was: Yoo Joonghyuk. The guy all the girls were always giggling about. The model—or maybe he was an actor or an athlete. Kim Dokja didn’t remember. He was glamorous enough that Song Minwoo and his friends had attempted to earn his favor early on in the school year only to be rebuffed without comment, and when they’d tried to bully him into submission, he’d punched one of them hard enough to break their nose and that had been the end of it.
“Christ,” said Song Minwoo, turning around, but when he saw Yoo Joonghyuk’s cold, furious gaze, he took a step back from Kim Dokja with both hands up. “Hey, hey. No need to freak out.” Yoo Joonghyuk looked like he might punch him again. Kim Dokja blinked rapidly, and Song Minwoo laughed, nervous and a little high. “We were just joking around. Right, Dokja-yah?”
Yoo Joonghyuk’s eyes turned to him. They weren’t so angry anymore, but they weren’t exactly warm, either: assessing, maybe. They dropped to his cast and then flitted back up to his face. Slowly, minutely, Kim Dokja shook his head. Song Minwoo snarled and moved to hit him, but Yoo Joonghyuk took another step forward and he flinched back.
“You’re pathetic,” said Yoo Joonghyuk. “And a coward. Don’t touch him again or I’ll kill you.”
“Dramatic as fuck,” Song Minwoo muttered, but he jogged off without arguing.
For a moment, Kim Dokja and Yoo Joonghyuk just stared at each other: Yoo Joonghyuk beautiful and golden and an already imposing one hundred and seventy-four centimeters tall, Kim Dokja sallow and mottled and barely one-sixty. “Thanks,” Kim Dokja said, mostly because he didn’t know what else he was supposed to say. His voice cracked halfway through. It had been a strange and ugly few weeks, but he’d never felt more pathetic than now.
Yoo Joonghyuk just shook his head and walked off.
It would be a lie to say it was entirely a coincidence that they kept seeing each other after that, but it was at least mostly a coincidence: they were two of the only people in class to never have partners for group projects—Yoo Joonghyuk because he kept flatly rejecting anyone who tried to adopt him and Kim Dokja because no one wanted him to begin with. They’d been sat next to each other in a few classes, too, and Yoo Joonghyuk was always conspicuously around as soon as Song Minwoo and his friends started to get brave.
But they also kept seeing each other because Yoo Joonghyuk was his savior and Kim Dokja liked having someone to hang around that wouldn’t beat the shit out of him. He never rebuffed him, either, not in the same way he did everyone else. They were both too quiet—Kim Dokja too shy—to speak much to each other, but they’d sit at the same table in the cafeteria. Yoo Joonghyuk always seemed to pack himself a little too much food, and he shoveled it onto Kim Dokja’s plate without comment every day after their first week together. It was nicer than anything Kim Dokja had experienced in the last six years.
“Joonghyuk-ssi?” he asked one day, picking the tomatoes out of his school lunch and watching Yoo Joonghyuk’s eyes track the motion. He had meant to ask what exactly it was that he did, whether he was a model or actor or athlete or musician or something else, but somehow what he ended up saying was: “Why don’t you hate me?”
There was a long, terrible moment where the two of them were silent. Kim Dokja was about to apologize—or maybe run away into the safe arms of the library, where he couldn’t do anything as stupid as ruin the one acquaintanceship he hadn’t fucked up by existing—but before he could, Yoo Joonghyuk just said, “Why would I hate you?”
“You hate everyone else.”
“I don’t.” He glared at his food. “They just talk too much.”
“And everyone else hates me.”
“That has nothing to do with me.”
“Oh,” said Kim Dokja, oddly pleased that Yoo Joonghyuk really cared as little about what other people thought as it seemed. Then, consideringly, he added: “So I don’t talk too much?”
Yoo Joonghyuk didn’t reply to that verbally, but he gave him a stare so flat it might as well have said you don’t talk at all, idiot .
“Then if I started talking too much, would you hate me?”
“No.”
“How come?”
“This is pointless,” said Yoo Joonghyuk, and he pulled out his chemistry homework and started glaring at that instead. It was the only subject where Kim Dokja was better than him, so he ended up distracted teaching Yoo Joonghyuk about mole conversions until they got ushered back to class and the conversation was long-forgotten.
2018
Yoo Joonghyuk was difficult to avoid even before he moved back to the country. Now that he knew where Kim Dokja lived, it was practically impossible to outrun him. Kim Dokja realized this when a bright-eyed Shin Yoosung said, “Ahjussi, you didn’t tell me you knew—”
“I don’t know anyone,” Kim Dokja interrupted, maybe a little more loudly and quickly than he had to.
“Then why’s Yoo Joonghyuk outside?”
“I,” he began, resisting every impulse his body was sending him to lock himself in his bedroom until the idiot left. “I don’t know,” he said again, and he took three short steps to the door, ushering Shin Yoosung back inside despite her obvious curiosity. Yoo Joonghyuk was leaning against the wall on the opposite side of the hallway, his face turned sideways toward the elevator. If he were any vainer, Kim Dokja would think it was an attempt to show off his side profile (which was as annoyingly statuesque as ever) but Yoo Joonghyuk wouldn’t—
—He should stop assuming what Yoo Joonghyuk would or wouldn’t do. It wasn’t like he knew him well enough to say anymore. “They’re not supposed to let you in,” he said aloud. Yoo Joonghyuk just shrugged. He’d done that back then, too, always so annoyed about special treatment except when it let him get somewhere more efficiently. Kim Dokja stopped thinking about it. “And I don’t—I’m busy,” he lied, “so I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“No.”
“We’ll catch up another time.”
“We won’t.”
“That wasn’t a problem for the last decade,” said Kim Dokja, and Yoo Joonghyuk had apparently discovered shame while he was abroad, because he looked a bit cowed. “I don’t know if you’re trying to make up for—” He remembered the summer sunset, the grass field, and swallowed thickly before the picture got any clearer. “Whatever it is you think you have to make up for,” he finished lamely. “But I’ve… I’m not holding a grudge. You don’t have to do anything except—be famous and keep making your gun movies.”
“Kim Dokja,” said Yoo Joonghyuk. There was a note in his voice Kim Dokja didn’t recognize. He wasn’t sure what to do with it, with the quickly stacking reminders that Yoo Joonghyuk was a man he didn’t know and would never know again.
“Hey,” said Shin Yoosung, tugging on his sleeve while they stared at each other, wide-eyed. “Before you kick him out, can I get a picture?”
She turned her big, baleful eyes at Yoo Joonghyuk, who suddenly seemed caught off-guard at the thought of interacting with someone too young to be rude to but too old to win over with well-cooked snacks. (Or caught off-guard at anything else, Kim Dokja reminded himself; he didn’t know . He should stop pretending he knew.)
“Please,” she continued, rocking back and forth on her feet. “Everyone’s gonna be so jealous.”
“I don’t know if that’s the best reason to get a picture,” said Kim Dokja, but when Shin Yoosung turned her big, baleful eyes at him , he sighed. “Can she?”
“Is she yours?”
“Do you think I could have fathered a kid in high school without anyone noticing? I know you were always at those stupid photoshoots, but even then, that’s a big thing to miss—”
“I assumed she was a stepchild.” Yoo Joonghyuk’s mouth had slid into something slightly annoyed like it always did when Kim Dokja picked on him too much. Kim Dokja was suddenly struck with such strong nostalgia his heart ached a little: just enough that for a second, he was tempted to invite Yoo Joonghyuk inside and talk about old times after all.
“Ah,” he said aloud. “No. Not my step—there’s no step-anything. I haven’t stepped anywhere.” Shin Yoosung looked like she was trying very hard not to tell them to hurry up and let her take the damn picture, so Kim Dokja made the same expression at Yoo Joonghyuk, who sighed.
“One picture,” he said. Shin Yoosung beamed at him, pulling out her phone and angling it so both of them were in frame. She was wearing a picture-day smile, and he looked a little disgruntled and tired, mostly, though Yoo Joonghyuk’s version of disgruntled and tired was closer to artfully disheveled and charmingly surprised.
He looked good, Kim Dokja thought, using the moment to take him in up close without being analyzed in turn. He’d broadened out since high school, the lean lines of him filling out into muscle. His hair was a little longer, too, curling around his ears and the nape of his throat, sunkissed bronze by years in LA. Kim Dokja wondered if he looked different enough from high school to be intriguing, even though he knew, objectively, he did—just not in a way that turned him into a supermodel. In that respect, Yoo Joonghyuk had always been luckier than him.
…And Yoo Joonghyuk was staring at him again, clear and intense, which meant he’d been caught. He cleared his throat. “Did you say thank you?”
“I’m not Gilyoung ,” Shin Yoosung said. “I have manners.”
“Be nice,” said Kim Dokja, though he couldn’t quite keep back a grin. When he looked up, Yoo Joonghyuk was still staring. He couldn’t read his expressions at all anymore. He wasn’t expecting that to make him as upset as it did. “Look, I—”
“You’re still angry,” said Yoo Joonghyuk.
“I’m not .” Kim Dokja said it a little too loudly, so he cleared his throat and tried again. “I’m not. There’s nothing to be angry at, anyway, and I—”
“Then go to dinner with me.”
Kim Dokja snorted. “And deal with the cameras?”
“I’ll get rid of them.” Yoo Joonghyuk’s mouth was turned into a small frown. At times like this, he looked like a kicked puppy. Kim Dokja always felt bad saying no to him—partially because he asked for so little and partially because whenever he did, Yoo Joonghyuk would make that kicked-puppy face and he’d give in within moments.
“One dinner,” he said aloud, massaging his temple. “And after that we… we go back to our normal lives. No more of this. I don’t care how guilty you feel about—about whatever. All right?”
Yoo Joonghyuk nodded once before turning on his heel and leaving. Kim Dokja sighed and closed the door.
“Are you sure you didn’t know him?” Shin Yoosung asked, and Kim Dokja just ruffled her hair until she started giggling and forgot about it.