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Chapter Text

Yoo Jonghyuk knows that he isn’t a good father.

It isn’t that he’s an alcoholic or that he’s abusive or that he doesn’t care about his daughter. He cares, he cares so much about his daughter and his wife (ex-wife, a voice whispers to him) but caring isn’t enough. Caring wasn’t enough to keep Lee Seolhwa, and he understands that! Somewhere along the way, the romance fizzled out and Lee Seolhwa put her career first. He would never blame her for it, nor would he trap her in a loveless marriage.

In the same vein, simply caring for Yoosung isn’t enough. Yoosung, his beloved daughter. Yoosung, who deserves more than a single father who has no idea what he is doing half the time.

Still, he thought he was doing fine. That a year after the divorce, he was slowly getting the hang of things.

Apparently that wasn’t the case, Yoo Jonghyuk thinks as he receives a call from Yoosung’s teacher, telling him that Yoosung has been leaving school early for the past few days, was she feeling okay?

Yoosung’s school is a five minute walk away from their apartment. At seven years old, Yoo Jonghyuk had assumed that she would be fine walking back and forth on her own. He never thought that she would start skipping school so early.

He manages to do his job, manages to stream something decent, but his mind is wandering the entire time. Soon, it’s afternoon, and Yoosung is home.

The father and daughter duo eat their dinner in their normal silence and Yoo Jonghyuk takes the time to observe Yoosung. She doesn’t seem like she’s been hurt or bullied, and it’s obvious she hasn’t been kidnapped.

Then why did she leave early? To play with friends? Yoosung never keeps secrets from Yoo Jonghyuk. She tells him everything.

Then again, her mother used to tell Yoo Jonghyuk everything too.

“Yoosung.” Yoo Jonghyuk breaks the silence and waits for Yoosung to look up in acknowledgement before continuing. “I’ve been hearing from your teacher that you have been leaving school early. I’m not angry at you, I would just like to know why.”

“Oh.” Yoosung’s gaze flickers to the side and Yoo Jonghyuk knows that she’s deliberately been keeping it a secret from him. His heart hurts but he forces himself not to pay attention to it.

“I’m not angry,” Yoo Jonghyuk repeats. “I’m just worried. It’s dangerous to walk around without adults.”

“It’s not dangerous! The park dokkaebi is with me!” Yoosung blurts out and Yoo Jonghyuk blanks.

“Park… dokkaebi,” he echoes out loud, trying to make sense of his daughter’s words. Was it perhaps one of those imaginary friends she had? One that lived in a park? Yoo Jonghyuk had assumed that Yoosung already grew out of that phase but he could always be wrong.

“Yes! Today, the dokkaebi gave me this!”

In front of Yoo Jonghyuk’s eyes, Yoosung takes a textbook out of her bag. The same textbook that Yoo Jonghyuk keeps forgetting to get for her. She starts to take more and more things out of her bag, like cute erasers, pencils, and notebooks. Yoo Jonghyuk stares at the growing pile, a singular thought growing louder and louder in his head.

Fuck. My kid is being targeted by a kidnapper.

-o-

“He won’t show up if you’re here.” Yoosung is sulking but Yoo Jonghyuk can’t really process it over the alarm bells ringing in his mind.

“Why? Did he say that the both of you could only meet when you were alone?”

“No, but it’s common sense, Papa! Dokkaebi only show up to one person at a time!” Yoosung stamps her feet and, sure enough, when they reach the spot that Yoosung usually meets the ‘park dokkaebi’ at, there is no one there.

“Papa scared away the park dokkaebi,” Yoosung grumbles. “Papa is the worst.”

“We can always come to meet him another day,” Yoo Jonghyuk says, because there is absolutely no way that he is going to leave this possible threat to his daughter alone. “How did you meet him?”

“I was hungry on Tuesday,” Yoosung says. Yoo Jonghyuk remembers, with a pang of guilt, that he had forgotten to pack Yoosung’s lunch last Tuesday due to sudden changes in his schedule. With Yoosung being the way she is, she definitely would not have told him about it either. “And then I left the school to buy something to eat. Remember the ice cream place you brought me to after the first day of school? I wanted to buy food there but I got lost.”

Yoosung points at the bushes in front of them. They are almost tall enough to reach Yoo Jonghyuk’s chest.

“I was crying and then the park dokkaebi came out of there! And he was eating gimbap so I told him I was hungry and he gave it to me! It was delicious, so I came back.”

“More delicious than my cooking?” Yoo Jonghyuk asks, a little annoyed that his daughter was more willing to approach a complete stranger rather than ask him, her own father, for food.

“No, but…” Yoosung mumbles the rest of her words. At Yoo Jonghyuk’s urging, she finally spills her thoughts. “Papa is always so busy all the time and I don’t want to bother you.”

Another pang of guilt. It was true, he had been busy lately, with all the streams and competitions, but he knows a large part of it is him overworking himself to dull the pain of his separation with Lee Seolhwa.

And it had caused him to neglect his own daughter.

“Look, I promise that I’ll cook more and we won’t eat takeout so much,” Yoo Jonghyuk tells Yoosung. Yoosung nods but doesn’t look at his face. Yoo Jonghyuk can’t blame her; the promise tastes like ash in his mouth, because how many times has he already made this promise? How many times will he continue to break it?

This time, he tells himself for the umpteenth time, this time will be different.

(It is telling when he is no longer able to deceive even himself.)

-o-

Yoo Jonghyuk manages to keep his words for two weeks before the hollowness in his heart overtakes his willpower and he finds himself falling back into his bad habits. This time, he is painfully aware about it but he can’t seem to bring himself out of his swamp he’s fallen into, where everything is a haze and he is simply going through the motions.

He thinks that if it wasn’t for Yoosung, he probably wouldn’t even get out of bed for days at a time.   

This time, when the school calls Yoo Jonghyuk about Yoosung’s truancy, he doesn’t bring it up to her. Instead, he stays near the park that the ‘park dokkaebi’ is supposedly in and waits.

At a half past one in the afternoon, Yoosung arrives at the park and makes a beeline towards the bushes Yoosung had pointed out to him two weeks ago. Yoo Jonghyuk quietly follows her a distance away and manages to find himself a vantage point that allows him to see everything but the ‘park dokkaebi’.

“You have tteokbokki today?” Yoo Jonghyuk hears Yoosung cheer. “Thanks, ahjussi!”

“It’s gungjung tteokbokki.” The voice is dry, mostly deadpan, but there is an undercurrent of fondness lacing the words. “I don’t know the how much spice you can take so it’s better to be safe than sorry.”

“I can take lots of spice! Papa said that I’m the princess of spice!” Yoosung is puffing her chest out in pride and Yoo Jonghyuk can’t help but smile at the memory.

There is a lull in conversation and Yoo Jonghyuk can hear rustling from the bush as both Yoosung and the ‘park dokkaebi’ partake in their meal. After a while, Yoosung speaks again.

“Ahjussi, I want to eat gyeran mari tomorrow, can you make it for me?”

“Can’t you ask your father to make it for you? From what you’ve been saying about him, he seems like a nice guy. I’m sure that if you ask, he’d do it.”

“Ah…” Yoo Jonghyuk can see Yoosung visibly shrink into herself and he feels the guilt again. He is trying, but he knows that it isn’t enough.

His daughter deserves better than him.

“Papa is very busy. I don’t want to make him busier. What if he leaves, like Mama?”

“I see.” Yoo Jonghyuk couldn’t decipher the emotion in the voice. He doesn’t like it. What if this ‘park dokkaebi’ uses this information to drive a wedge between them?

Thinking about this, Yoo Jonghyuk can’t allow himself to stay where he is. He quickly steps out of his little hiding place and into the light.

“Papa!”

“Yoosung,” he says and then freezes upon seeing a man sitting, half-merged with a bush, and staring at him with wide eyes. Yoo Jonghyuk has just enough time to notice that the ‘park dokkaebi’ had rather long eyelashes before the man literally disappears into the bushes behind him.

“Ahjussi, don’t be scared! It’s just my Papa!” Yoosung yells. It is that that springs Yoo Jonghyuk into action and he lunges forward to shove a hand into the shrubs to search for the man. Unfortunately, despite his best efforts, his search is in vain.

The man is gone.

-o-

Yoo Jonghyuk doesn’t understand it. The man, while not as tall as him, was definitely average man-sized. It’s near impossible for Yoo Jonghyuk to have been unable to find him, and yet…

Yoosung said that the ‘park dokkaebi’ disappeared to the dokkaebi realm. Yoo Jonghyuk was almost inclined to agree with her.

Dokkaebi don’t exist… right?

Yoo Jonghyuk can’t deny that the ‘park dokkaebi’ was actually, genuinely, helpful to Yoosung and him. Ever since Yoosung met with him, she seemed to be in a better mood, she no longer needed help with her homework, and anything she was missing was given to her by the ‘park dokkaebi’. If Yoo Jonghyuk hadn’t seen him with his own two eyes, he would have genuinely believed that the ‘park dokkaebi’ was divine intervention. And even now, Yoo Jonghyuk doubts his eyes.

Just to be sure, Yoo Jonghyuk googles ‘dokkaebi’ one more time.

-o-

The next few times Yoo Jonghyuk spies on Yoosung and the ‘park dokkaebi’, he doesn’t interfere. He observes as the ‘park dokkaebi’ reaches the park at around one in the afternoon and plants himself in a large shrub, only emerging when Yoosung arrives.

And then when Yoosung leaves, he takes out a packet of instant noodles and starts eating them dry. When he is done, he heads back to the nearby Mino Software company building, where he probably works. Through his surveillance, Yoo Jonghyuk really can’t find any evidence at all that the ‘park dokkaebi’ might be harboring negative intentions towards his daughter. In fact, he seems to care about Yoosung a lot.

By the eighth time Yoo Jonghyuk sees him crunch down on uncooked instant noodles after already giving Yoosung a beautiful homemade packed lunch, he’s had enough.

-o-

“I have work, you know,” says the man. His tone is calm and conversational, contrasting greatly with the fact that he’s covered in dirt and leaves, and currently slung over Yoo Jonghyuk’s shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

“Take a half day,” Yoo Jonghyuk replies.

“My pay would be deducted.”

“I’ll compensate.”

Silence then promptly descends and continues until Yoo Jonghyuk reaches his apartment. He opens the door, strolls in, and drops the ‘park dokkaebi’ on the couch. The ‘park dokkaebi’ doesn’t seem fazed at all by the sudden turn of events and even looks around the house in mild curiosity. If Yoo Jonghyuk hadn’t seen the initial flash of complete and utter shock when he first picked the ‘park dokkaebi’ up, he would have believed the ‘park dokkaebi’s’ act.

Yoosung walks out of her room to greet Yoo Jonghyuk and immediately stops dead in her tracks.

“Papa,” she asks faintly. “Why is the park dokkaebi here?”

“Is that what you’re calling me behind my back?” The man raises an eyebrow and Yoosung flushes.

“You never gave a name,” Yoo Jonghyuk answers him. He then turns to Yoosung. “I brought him here because I wanted to talk to him.”

The man pauses and looks down. “Huh,” Yoo Jonghyuk hears him mutter softly. “I actually never introduced myself.” He looks back up with a serious and solemn expression on his face, and says, “My name is Kim Dokja.”

“I am Yoo Jonghyuk,” Yoo Jonghyuk introduces himself in turn. Something about Kim Dokja’s expression tells him that he already knew that. It isn’t much of a surprise; as one of the more attractive professional gamers, his image has been used a lot in campaigns and advertisements.

“I’m Yoosung!” Yoosung says cheerfully from where she is standing. Kim Dokja gives her a smile. In Yoo Jonghyuk’s opinion, the smile is a little weird but Yoosung seems to like it so Yoo Jonghyuk doesn’t say anything.

Yoo Jonghyuk takes a seat opposite Kim Dokja and looks straight at him.

“So,” Yoo Jonghyuk says, cutting straight to the chase. “Why were you squatting in the bush in the first place?”

Kim Dokja replies in a manner that Yoo Jonghyuk will later find out to be his default -- completely and utterly incomprehensible.

“You see, I didn’t want to eat lunch with my boss.”

Chapter Text

Every time Kim Dokja opens his mouth, he remembers why he doesn’t.

“Your girlfriend?” Han Myungoh repeats and there is a quirk to his lips that tell Kim Dokja that he doesn’t believe his words. Kim Dokja feels a flash of annoyance at that before he quickly buries it down because, well, Han Myungoh is right; Kim Dokja doesn’t have a girlfriend, he just made one up in order to get out of eating lunch with Han Myungoh.

Ever since Han Myungoh found himself in custody of his daughter, and Kim Dokja accidentally let slip that he takes care of children on the regular, Han Mungoh has been insufferable at his attempts to try and bond with Kim Dokja. It’s almost as if he thinks that they can suddenly be friends over the whole “taking care of children” thing.

“Yes,” Kim Dokja confirms, face as blank as possible. “I will be having lunch with my girlfriend, so I cannot join you.”

“Well, why don’t you introduce me to that… girlfriend of yours?” Han Mungoh says, completely not buying Kim Dokja’s lie for a single second. Kim Dokja continues to persist.

“We’re not at the stage where we introduce bosses,” Kim Dokja says. He feigns feeling a vibration from his phone and pretends to check it. “I’m running a little late, so I’ll see you later.”

Without waiting for an answer, Kim Dokja slips past Han Myungoh with the grace that comes from years of experience and scurries off.

-o-

As Han Myungoh is knowledgeable of all the food places near the office, there is really only one option for Kim Dokja if he wishes to remain unfound throughout the entirety of his lunch break. It is not the option one would easily come to, but that only makes Kim Dokja more certain that it is the right one.

Sure, leaves and twigs might fall into his food, but he’s had worse.

A few moments later, he hears the soft but unmistakable noise of someone crying coming from right outside the bush he is hiding in. For a moment, his mind flashes to the young boy living in his apartment, Lee Gilyoung, and he cannot help but stick his head out of the bush to see what is going on.

What he sees is a young girl crying in front of the bush. As he is currently kneeling and bending down, he is around the same height as her. The young girl looks up and freezes, her tears stopping due to the sheer shock of seeing a, for all she knows, disembodied head sticking out of the bush.

Her gaze trails down and Kim Dokja’s eyes follow.

Well, a disembodied head and a disembodied hand carrying a half-eaten packed lunch.

The child points to Kim Dokja’s lunch.

“Is that gimbap?”

“......yes.”

“Can I have some?”

Kim Dokja takes one look at her tearstained face and gives in.

-o-

The girl, who introduced herself as Yoo Yoosung, comes back the next day. And the next. And the next.

So, this is going to be a thing, huh?

-o-

Kim Dokja would think Yoosung’s caretaker to be incredibly and utterly incompetent if she hadn’t told him stories of how hard they have been trying. He simply thinks of them as someone who is only averagely incompetent when it comes to taking care of children, and that he simply has to pick up the slack. It isn’t the first time Kim Dokja is doing it and besides, most of the things that Yoosung needs are things that Lee Gilyoung no longer does.

Waste not, want not, right?

-o-

Kim Dokja wants to curse Han Myungoh out but he is aware that it’s not Han Myungoh’s fault and that he is equally busy. No, they are currently united against a larger enemy that is Han Myungoh’s boss’ boss, and they have to work through multiple lunch periods to complete the sudden deadline imposed on them.

Kim Dokja feels incredibly guilty. What if Yoosung goes to the park to meet him, only for him to not be there? How would she feel?

Thinking about that, Kim Dokja pens a short letter telling her he will be busy over the next two weeks and won’t be going to the park. Then, he takes a “smoke break” to run down and place it in the bushes.

Yoosung doesn’t say anything about his absence when they meet again, so he assumes she got his message.

-o-

“Papa is very busy. I don’t want to make him busier. What if he leaves, like Mama?”

Kim Dokja takes in Yoosung’s body language, the way she curls in on herself, the tenseness in the entirety of her small frame, and way her gaze is fixed onto the floor and she bites her bottom lip. It’s almost similar, Kim Dokja thinks, but it wasn’t what he went through. He may vaguely know her pain, but he can’t understand it the way she does. No one can.

“I see,” Kim Dokja says, acknowledging Yoosung’s words. He thinks about what he can say to make her feel better but also simultaneously does not dismiss her fears but before anything can come out, a tall, handsome, wellbuilt man appears out of nowhere.

He looks like that popular professional gamer Yoo Jonghyuk.

“Papa!” Yoosung says.

Yoosung’s dad is the popular professional gamer Yoo Jonghyuk.

“Yoosung,” Yoo Jonghyuk says, and the looks up from her and straight at Kim Dokja, who is half-fused with bush behind him. The intensity of the stare is enough to raise Kim Dokja’s hackles and, before he knows it, he’s slid his entire body back into the bush.

Kim Dokja stays in the bush the entire time Yoo Jonghyuk searches for him, his experience with hiding from people in the entire twenty-eight years of his life providing him with ample expertise in dodging Yoo Jonghyuk’s attempts.

It takes a while, but Yoo Jonghyuk finally gives up and leaves. Just to be sure, Kim Dokja waits another ten more minutes before crawling out of the bush.

Wow, that sure was intense.

-o-

One moment Kim Dokja was crunching into his instant noodles and the next moment he is being lifted up and placed over the shoulder of some unfairly attractive incompetent father. Kim Dokja knows he can’t win in a fight against Yoo Jonghyuk -- he’s seen his muscles -- and so Kim Dokja simply goes slack and hopes that the full weight of his body is enough to make Yoo Jonghyuk feel mildly uncomfortable in carrying him. It doesn’t. Life is unfair.

Yoo Jonghyuk brings Kim Dokja to his apartment and Kim Dokja spares a brief moment to worry about Yoosung. Damn, Yoo Jonghyuk really brought random strangers to his apartment just like that? What if Kim Dokja was a murderous serial killer? It turns out that Yoo Jonghyuk is a lot more incompetent as a father than Kim Dokja thought he was.

“So,” Yoo Jonghyuk asks Kim Dokja once introductions were done. “Why were you squatting in the bush in the first place?”

“You see,” Kim Dokja answers easily, “I didn’t want to eat lunch with my boss.”

There is a lull in conversation. Yoo Jonghyuk frowns at Kim Dokja.

“You… didn’t want to eat lunch with your boss,” he repeats. Kim Dokja nods. There is another brief silence and it is almost as if Yoo Jonghyuk wants Kim Dokja to say more. Kim Dokja has no idea what Yoo Jonghyuk wants to hear though, because he has already told his story and that was all.

Kim Dokja is not going to be the one to break the silence. Since he was more or less dragged here against his will, he is not going to make things easy for Yoo Jonghyuk.

They stare at each other for a long while, neither of them refusing the back down. In the end, it is Yoosung who comes to the rescue, saving them from dry eyes.

“Papa, did you bring ahjussi here to take care of me?” Yoosung asks. There is a flash in Yoo Jonghyuk’s eyes and Kim Dokja doesn’t know what it is, but he doesn’t like it.

Yoo Jonghyuk turns to Kim Dokja.

“I want to hire you as Yoosung’s babysitter,” Yoo Jonghyuk says. The only thing that keeps Kim Dokja from outright rolling his eyes is that Yoo Jonghyuk is very much capable of capable of pulling him apart like a twizzler and his current status of being in Yoo Jonghyuk’s house simply means that there will be no witnesses to his possible demise.

“I have a job,” Kim Dokja starts, mild annoyance in his voice.  

Yoo Jonghyuk gives him a quotation of his salary.

“And having a second one is not much of a problem for me,” Kim Dokja continues smoothly. “As long as I am notified in advance.”

Yoo Jonghyuk nods. “It is settled, then,” he says.

“It sure is,” Kim Dokja replies.