Chapter Text
It’d been a while since Kim Dokja woke up screaming.
Even still, though it’d been weeks since his last episode, he couldn’t bring himself to be surprised. Not even when his heart tried to leap out of his throat, or when he pulled the bedsheets to his mouth to muffle his screaming.
When the nightmares first came, he’d thought that they would leave. Night after night after night, he woke to the same images: Mother’s limp hands; Biyoo, lifeless under the wheels of a car; Father’s twisted face. The last one felt almost unfair— Father’s eyes, his hands, even the sound of his breathing already haunted Kim Dokja’s every waking step. Did he really have to stray into the haven of Kim Dokja’s mind?
He should’ve known that there was no point complaining. The best way to deal with these things, he’d learned, was to take them as well as he could.
Kim Dokja had heard that a situation was only as bad as a person’s attitude towards it. He liked that idea— the thought that he could control a situation, no matter how subtly, was sometimes the only thing that drove him to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
He couldn’t change what Father chose to do. He couldn’t change the screams or shouts or even the silence, but he could choose how he responded to them.
(Sometimes, though, he hated that mentality more than anything else.)
Presently, he was standing in the darkened kitchen, pretending that pattering he heard against the roof of the apartment building was snow instead of rain.
Kim Dokja liked to do that sort of thing, to play with the verity of his reality. It was especially useful in other, more urgent circumstances. Once, he’d almost re-read the entirety of his favorite novel in his head while Father… dealt with Mother.
The kitchen clock flickered weakly, casting brief shadows over the room. 4:29. 4:30.
Four-thirty in the morning, Kim Dokja thought, pressing his fingers together to alleviate the cold. A bitter chill had crept into their apartment weeks ago, and it showed no signs of stopping. Sometimes, it felt as if they would never unthaw, and instead stay frozen in their seats one morning while the rest of the world continued turning.
“Well,” he said aloud, if only to distract himself from that train of thought. He hadn’t gotten up to induce an existential crisis.
No, he’d gotten up to read.
Over the past few months, Kim Dokja had developed a rather bad habit of using Lee Sookyung’s phone to read webnovels at night. It had all started when he’d accidentally clicked on one while using a school computer— he’d read the webnovel, yes, but not nearly fast enough to finish it in one sitting. In a moment of desperation, he’d snuck onto Lee Sookyung’s phone while she slept and completed it.
After the nightmares started, one thing led to another, and now…
No New Updates, read the text attached to his virtual inbox. Well, that was to be expected. He was subscribed to very few series— a product of his rigorous standards.
That didn’t mean that he thought himself too good to read anything else, though. After all, who was he if not a reader?
A cursory glance at the top ranking webnovels on the site told him all he needed to know: the rankings hadn’t changed a bit from the previous night. He’d read all of the top ‘Fifty Best Webnovels’ lists on the website, and most of them weren’t exactly… literary masterpieces.
Not that he needed something to be grammatically correct to read it. He wasn’t reading his current favorite webnovel because of the writing— instead, it was the protagonist who had first captured his attention.
Or, rather, the protagonist’s name.
What were the chances that Kim Dokja would come across a webnovel with a protagonist whose name was so similar to his soulmate’s? Yoo Jonghyuk, the main character of his favorite webnovel, was a regressor. Again and again and again, he rose and fell and battled against the cosmos, against fate, stopping only to resurrect and start all over.
Objectively speaking, Yoo Joonghyuk and Yoo Jonghyuk had nothing in common— barring their beauty and tsundere-esque attitudes, of course. But whenever Kim Dokja read his favorite webnovel, he couldn’t help but picture Yoo Joonghyuk in Yoo Jonghyuk’s place.
Regardless, if it was the name that caught his attention, the plot was what kept him reading. It was, in his humble opinion, a work of art: detailed, deeply nuanced, and one of a kind—
He blinked. Sitting under the “Today’s Hot Works” tab was an incredibly familiar looking synopsis:
—SSSSS-Grade Infinite Regressor—
-Follow the journey of protagonist Yoo Joonhyun as he faces the end of the world. Watch how he must regress in time over and over again in order to reach the end of the "scenarios", deadly challenges posed to those under the power of the Star Stream.-
What? Kim Dokja squinted at the screen for a moment, then clicked on the webnovel and opened the first chapter. If he wasn’t mistaken, SSSSS-Grade Infinite Regressor was looking a lot like a certain novel….
His eyes narrowed as he read the first lines, mouth sharpening into a thin line. There was no doubt about it— the author of SSSSS-Grade Infinite Regressor, Blackflame_empress, had clearly plagiarized Kim Dokja’s favorite novel.
He left the novel page to search in the user tab for “tls123”, the author of the story that SSSSS-Grade Infinite Regressor had plagiarized. Once he’d reached the page, Kim Dokja paused. He didn’t quite know how to explain the situation— not when there was a slick, oily feeling gathering in the pit of his stomach, choking the words that tried to make their way out of his fingertips.
Still, he had to try.
Hello, Author-nim, he typed rapidly, fingers tense. I just looked at the trending page, and someone who is blatantly plagiarizing your work is being featured there. Their novel is named “SSSSS-Grade Infinite Regressor”, and their username is Blackflame_empress.
He paused, then, trying to push down the indignity and righteous anger that was swelling in his throat. He’d heard about plagiarism before, but from what he’d seen, it was never usually so obvious. Yoo Joonhyun, Yoo Jonghyuk….
Calm down, Kim Dokja told himself, pressing his fingers together above the keyboard as his brows furrowed. It wasn’t as if the Yoo Jonghyuk from Ways of Survival was his Yoo Joonghyuk. He didn’t have to get so worked up.
Even still, the plagiarism felt like a personal attack. Maybe it was foolish, but Ways of Survival felt as if it were just as much his as tls123’s. Blackflame_empress had stolen something when they chose to upload tls123’s work as their own, and it wasn’t just from the author.
Please take action as soon as possible, dear Author-nim, Kim Dokja finally continued. Sincerely, your reader.
He didn’t bother waiting for tls123 to respond— if they were smart, they would be asleep, and the last thing he needed was to lose even more time in the earliest hours of the morning. Lee Sookyung’s phone was powered off and plugged back into the charger, and then Kim Dokja crept back to his bed and pretended he didn’t know what was coming.
The light was switched off, the blanket drawn, and his cheek pressed to the pillow. Kim Dokja breathed in, then out, feeling the soft, grainy brush of air against his face.
No matter how hard he tried to push the nightmares away, true sleep was always a distant thing.
Kim Dokja turned over onto his side, arms stretching, hands grasping. His fingers curled around the drafted warmth of lined paper. College Ruled, 9” x 11”, somehow made both manufactured and personal by a strange creature called Yoo Joonghyuk.
Yes, true sleep was a distant thing, but there was always the idea that there was someone out there for him— someone who cared if he continued to set one foot in front of the other, someone whose heart beat in rapid tandem with his own, someone who he could call his .
Sometimes, when the nightmares were particularly bad, Kim Dokja would force himself to stay awake and read every one of Yoo Joonghyuk’s letters. He knew to stop when the warmth of the red sun crept across the skyline and through his window, but only then.
And when Kim Dokja slipped into sleep, the sound of faint rustling could be heard throughout the darkened room.
(Sheet after sheet after sheet of paper, clutched loosely in the palms of two powerless hands.)
——————
When he got home from school later that day, a new letter was waiting for him on the kitchen counter, half-tucked under a collection of used take-out containers.
That would be his mother, then. Neither she nor Kim Dokja knew how Father would react to his letters, and so they’d developed a sort of game together. Whenever a letter arrived while he wasn’t home, Lee Sookyung would ‘hide’ it somewhere in the kitchen. He’d never yet failed to notice one— sometimes, it seemed that his eyes were specially attuned to spot the crisp white paper and sharp blue pen signature of his soulmate’s letters.
Kim Dokja rushed to it and tore it open, heart already leaping into his throat. It was only yesterday— Thursday— that he’d sent his last letter to Yoo Joonghyuk. This couldn’t possibly be his response, could it?
Dear Kim Dokja, the letter began, as usual. He could already tell that something was different— Yoo Joonghyuk’s handwriting was loose, messy, though the scrawl hadn’t lost its childish elegance.
I made a deal with Teacher. I told her that if she snuck me to the Gangnam Gaming Championships and let me keep the winnings, I would give her 100% profit from my next 5 tournaments.
Ah. Kim Dokja’s face broke into a wide smile, even as he rubbed it forcefully with his hand in an effort to restore neutrality. It was just so utterly Yoo Joonghyuk to automatically assume that he would be the one walking away from a competition with the first-place trophy.
She said yes (since she’s greedy for money), and I obviously won. My parents think I went to some kind of stupid school trip, and they think there’s another one on Saturday.
You know what this means, right?
Kim Dokja’s eyes widened, suddenly, and his gaze flicked faster and faster across the page.
I’m coming to Seoul. Meet me in the Ttukseom Hangang Park at noon on Saturday, okay? And don’t be late. I don’t have that much time.
A familiar warm sensation was building in Kim Dokja's chest. He exhaled sharply, trying to relieve some of the pressure, but found himself smiling so hard he could barely see the last lines.
From,
Yoo Joonghyuk
p.s.: Don’t be late. I’m serious. It’s fine if you’re shy or whatever, I don’t care. Just be there.
Kim Dokja set the paper back onto the counter, carefully smoothing it out until no creases remained. His chest felt tight, the air thick as wildflowers in his lungs.
After countless months of writing, countless hours of reading and drafting and learning and waiting, Kim Dokja was going to meet Yoo Joonghyuk.
He didn’t quite know how to feel. His arms moved once, jerkily, to fold the letter, but he couldn’t bring himself to. He read the words again. I’m coming to Seoul.
A sudden, sharp birdsong rang from directly outside the window. Kim Dokja jerked to the side, knocking a half-empty glass of water off the counter. He scrambled midair, trying to right it, but only succeeded in striking it harder—
Crash.
Kim Dokja dropped to his knees, frantically scooping the glass shards together. They were slick, wet with water and the faintest amount of blood from the haste of his fingers. He needed to get this up before Father arrived— he’d gone out ‘job-hunting’ again, but there was no telling when he’d be back.
And the letter. He abruptly dropped the shards, straining his neck to look up and make sure it was safe. Thankfully, it seemed that none of the water had spilled on it. He’d gotten lucky, if that was even possible.
All of a sudden, a dark shape lurched through the bedroom doorway. Kim Dokja choked, scrabbling backwards across broken glass until his shoulder blades thumped against the cabinet doors.
Father’s gaze landed on him, heavy as a blow to the chest.
Broken glass crunched under Kim Dokja’s own heels. Father lurched forward a few steps, but Kim Dokja’s heart was beating so loudly that he couldn’t even hear a thing.
Ba-thump.
Ba-thump.
A hand, raised, and then—
Heavy shoes toed the broken glass. “Tell me, Dokja: what the fuck is this?”