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When it happens, it starts and ends in the same breath.
It’s the most groundbreaking realization that’s ever hit him. It’s also the dumbest thing he’s ever thought, so Kim Dokja closes his mouth that was open mid-laugh and sinks slightly into the car seat. He swallows tightly, Adam’s Apple bobbing as his mind stutters and tries to start again.
His eyes are trained on the sliver of skin peeking from the curve of a jacket sleeve. He traces it up, following the sharp line of a wrist leading into a large palm, bony fingers closed into a loose fist as the man sitting in front of him peers at the side mirror and slides into another lane. The man’s elbow is propped up against the edge of the car’s window, the blue fabric catching against the groove, and Kim Dokja swallows again.
He doesn’t know why he suddenly feels so parched, only that he does, but it’s impolite to suddenly start drinking in a senior’s car when the odds of spilling water are exponentially high. With how shaky Kim Dokja feels all over, he’ll probably drop his bottle the moment he takes it out of his bag.
“Oi,” Han Sooyoung says suddenly, ignoring the loud laughter echoing from the two other passengers, and she raises an eyebrow at Kim Dokja. If he didn’t know her as well as he did, he would almost say she looks concerned. She’s probably judging him, he thinks dazedly, and blinks slowly at her. “Why did you go quiet all of a sudden?”
“Huh?” His mind feels sluggish. He tries to keep his gaze on Han Sooyoung, on the frown starting to stretch over her face, the way her brows furrow in the center of her forehead, but his gaze inevitably draws back to that distracting arm pressed up against the translucent window that could really use a good cleaning, the sun catching against the messy blond hair and lighting it up, the way his side profile comes into view every once in a while when the man checks the side mirror.
Kim Dokja shakes his head, trying to get his bearings, and forces a smile onto his face. “What, Han Sooyoung, are you worried about me?” The banter comes easily to him. Seeing Han Sooyoung’s face makes him laugh, the smile turning into a shit-eating grin. “I’m perfectly fine.”
Han Sooyoung doesn’t look convinced, but Kim Dokja keeps the smile on his face, fingers clenched into fists so tight he can feel the indents of his nails digging into his soft flesh, and his friend finally looks away with a scoff.
“Dumbass!” She says, fond irritation ringing through her voice. “See if I ever get concerned about you again.”
He laughs, leaning back to rest his head against the headrest, and Kim Dokja judges the way his eyes immediately fall back to that tiny space between the window and the seat in front of him. The arm has disappeared, and all that’s left in view is the slip of white fabric of the upper half of a windbreaker, a glimpse of a hand on the steering wheel, and sunlight dancing off golden strands of hair.
This is the dumbest thing ever, he thinks with utmost prejudice, and tries very hard not to think about the steady jolt in his heart when he hears Sun Wukong speak.
They first met during orientation. An essential, terrible, useless part of university that required Kim Dokja to meet people and bond.
It’s not that he’s a quiet, anti-social nerd who prefers to stay holed up at home rather than go out and interact with people- alright, Han Sooyoung might say that’s a perfect description of him, but Han Sooyoung has absolutely no right to talk when she’s not much better. What’s a reader compared to an author when both can just be found lying around in random positions in their room surfing the net?
Glass houses and black kettles. They’re cut from the same cloth, and Kim Dokja takes everything Han Sooyoung says with a pinch of salt.
But the point, the point is that Kim Dokja already has a steady group of friends. He isn’t quite sure how it happened, but everyone he vaguely considered a friend in school followed him to university. When all his friends went to a variant of an engineering course, they might as well have ended up in the same faculty.
The camps were the same, they requested to stay in the same dorm, their lessons were in the same building; Kim Dokja could just sustain himself on interacting with everyone on his floor and be done with social interaction for his entire university life.
Of course, that isn’t allowed. Orientation must still happen. He gets thrown in a group with a guy who looks like a wannabe gangster and a girl who can probably tear them both apart with one punch. There are these two other prodigious children or something who look far younger than twenty and they have… fifteen pets? Or something?
Kim Dokja doesn’t bother remembering. People who can be ignored should be ignored. Brain space is better used on reading webnovels rather than trying to connect new faces to new names.
The seniors, however, can’t be ignored. Two of them have shocking golden hair that makes Kim Dokja’s eyebrows rise up in surprise, one of them looks fifty rather than twenty-two and the last one looks like a wannabe gangster but with slightly more self-respect.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the wannabe gangster in the group becomes fast friends with the senior wannabe gangster. Both dress in copious amount of black even though the sun is out, achingly hot and terrorizing them with its rays for the entirety of the camp. Both are paler than Kim Dokja, who spends most of his time indoors. Both of them look like they could be found at an anime convention spouting nonsense lines from one of those extremely popular transmigration novels.
The girl with blonde hair, well, she’s kinda cute. Kim Dokja appreciates her aesthetic. A bubbly senior to set the mood and encourage the quieter members of the group to participate actively in games? That’s a critical part of making the mood for orientation. Kim Dokja can respect her, even if he will never understand what sort of person would willingly subject themselves to this.
He finds a kindred spirit in the senior who looks fifty years old. They’re both quiet, more wallflower than anything else, and the senior always keeps a watchful eye out on him but still lets Kim Dokja do his own thing. It’s an unique freedom he didn’t think any sort of orientation camp would have allowed him.
But the last guy- Kim Dokja doesn’t know what to think of him. He carries himself well, exuding confidence with every step he takes, but there’s a certainty to his words. It’s not just someone tooting his own horn at every chance he can get and talking up an empty storm. He’s not a golden empty vessel lying at the bottom of the ocean trying to entice stupid divers to swim to him.
Sun Wukong doesn’t leave much of an impression. He hypes up the group when he has to, scolds them when he has to, swears liberally like a normal university student, but he’s not loud. He’s not what Kim Dokja expects of a guy with blonde hair and a sturdy frame.
Or rather, he’s not what Kim Dokja expects at all. Isn’t university all about doing stupid masculine sports and showing off? Don’t people flock to rugby and soccer, trying out for varsity teams so they can brag about it? Who goes to wushu and becomes the captain of that team? Who takes up dancing in his free time because he can? Who rolls his eyes and cracks dumb jokes under his breath to himself that end up startling Kim Dokja into laughter because of how stupidly funny they are?
At the end of four days, he’s almost sad to say goodbye to this boisterous group. He wants to study Sun Wukong. There’s something about him, something strange, and Kim Dokja wants to figure it out. He lets himself regret missed chances for over a minute, and then decides the enigma of Sun Wukong probably wasn’t worth it anyway.
Then it’s revealed that orientation actually spans two months long. The news is almost enough to make his knees buckle beneath him. He had plans, plans like reading the next fifty chapters of a webnovel he’s recently come across, plans like tearing apart Han Sooyoung’s latest draft, plans like making a new game during summer with Yoo Sangah right before school properly started.
He is not convinced about this whole dancing gig. Frankly, he’s not sure why anyone is interested in it. Dancing for two months is a scam. The fact that there are no auditions is even more of a scam, because it means there’s no sort of standard. Everyone and their mother are invited to join. The dance squad of forty people is just a mesh of different standards of trash.
As someone who has absolutely shit coordination, Kim Dokja can confidently conclude he’s probably somewhere near the flaming pile of trash that’s dumped away to decompose over two hundred years. The only coordination he has is when he’s playing games, and that takes a maximum of four fingers.
Jung Heewon, however, is a fortuitous woman of immense conviction, and Kim Dokja is man enough to admit he gives in to whatever she wants the moment she raises both eyebrows of doom.
“I just didn’t think you would be interested in this at all,” he says in a complaining voice, and huffs out a weak smile when Jung Heewon scowls. Yoo Sangah politely hides her laugh behind a hand, but Han Sooyoung openly cackles at his misfortune. “Okay, pretend I never said anything!”
Kim Dokja is very good at one thing, and that one thing is self-preservation. He knows when he’s lost a fight. Not that he’s ever won a fight with Jung Heewon, but it’s the principle of the matter. Jung Heewon has been a dancer for five years and if she wants her entire clique to join dance for two short, painful months, Kim Dokja will suck it up and sell his soul to the devil.
“It’s just two months,” Jung Heewon says in the end, and Kim Dokja softens when he sees the way she fiddles awkwardly at the ends of the high ponytail she’s pulled her hair into. “You’ll do fine. I’ll help.”
“You better help,” Han Sooyoung bites out, and darts away when Jung Heewon feints and pretends to grab at her. “I’m just saying, if I start flailing around like a drowning woman in the Pacific Ocean, I expect to be able to call for a helpline and receive it!”
“You can’t be worse than me,” Kim Dokja says wryly, and Han Sooyoung looks at him for a long, considering moment.
She grins, eyes lighting up, and shrugs. “You’re right. You have absolutely zero coordination.”
Yoo Jonghyuk makes a noise that sounds like it could be either a threat or a laugh, and shakes his head. He also sighs, fairly deeply, and takes a visible step away from them.
It’s not fair. Han Sooyoung has the natural flexibility of a gymnast even though she’s done absolutely nothing to upkeep it, Yoo Sangah has the grace of a swan just from existing, Yoo Jonghyuk has boxing experience and Jung Heewon is a dancer. All Kim Dokja can do is scroll quickly.
If anything, it’ll be a good laugh. He shifts on the spot, reaching up to rub at the back of his neck and-
“Oh,” a familiar voice sounds behind him, and Kim Dokja turns.
Sun Wukong stares back at him, a slightly surprised look on his face, before he breaks into a smile. “I didn’t know you joined.”
Kim Dokja blinks, opens his mouth, and finds that nothing comes out. He coughs to the side, playing it off as shock, and shrugs lazily, pointing at his friends that are trying to… he squints, leaning forward. They seem to be trying to teach Yoo Jonghyuk how to bounce? How to club? Yoo Jonghyuk looks like a swaying board in a tsunami, rocking back and forth stiffly while on the verge of falling apart.
“They made me join,” he says slowly. “I figured two months might as well be the time I do something new, right?”
There’s a brief pause, and Sun Wukong grins. “Yeah. That’s good.”
Good? Kim Dokja blanches and stares suspiciously at his senior. Is this guy purposefully trying to be elusive or something? That’s incredibly lame. What is he even doing here? Seniors aren’t supposed to be involved in this, unless they’re – Kim Dokja inhales sharply, his eyes going wide.
Sun Wukong moves to the front of the room, and snaps his fingers sharply, catching the attention of the entire room with one simple sound. He smiles again, a hint of teeth showing beneath red lips, and Kim Dokja makes a face.
“You know the instructor?” Han Sooyoung whispers as Sun Wukong forces them to stretch, and Kim Dokja’s frown deepens.
He considers renouncing his relationship with Sun Wukong, and then reconsiders it. “Yeah,” he mutters, wincing when he tries to touch his toes. “Sort of. He’s not bad.”
Nothing changes. Sun Wukong is as elusive as ever, teaching as much as needed until the session is over, and then the juniors drift out in small groups to go home. The senior stays for a while, stretching in the corner by himself, listening to some strange music playing on the speaker, and leaves once everyone else has left.
It gets to the point where Yoo Jonghyuk, man of no facial expressions, emotional capacity of a teaspoon, Mr. Rock Wall - even he thinks maybe someone should try to talk to Sun Wukong outside of practice.
Not to say that Sun Wukong has no friends. Kim Dokja has seen the guy on his phone more often than not, smiling at something stupid his friends must have sent him. And he just doesn’t seem like the type to not have friends. It’s not like Sun Wukong is an ugly weirdo.
Look at Kim Namwoon. Arguably an ugly weirdo, with his disastrous fashion taste and questionable intelligence, but he has friends and a girlfriend. If Kim Namwoon can achieve that much, there’s no reason Sun Wukong shouldn’t have hordes of girls chasing after him.
It must be the long hours of the practice sessions. They span a full day, taking up most of his summer, and it must be difficult for him to schedule meetups with his friends.
But before they approach him, Sun Wukong ends up accidentally approaching them first.
The situation is hilarious. Han Sooyoung is dragging them to eat dinner with their other group of friends, but the walk to the train station is arduous, long, and Kim Dokja complains about it. Loudly and obviously, just because it irritates Han Sooyoung.
Then Sun Wukong stumbles across them, raises both eyebrows at the sight of Han Sooyoung trying to murder Kim Dokja in cold blood while Jung Heewon and Yoo Sangah watch on calmly, and offers to give them a ride to the train station.
Until now, Kim Dokja hasn’t had much of an opinion of Sun Wukong. Yes, the man is his favorite senior thus far, but that’s because he’s never spoken to the rest after orientation with that group ended. Yes, the man is quite respectable, being so adept at dance and patiently teaching them all the moves. Yes, the man is funny, making lame jokes that consistently surprise Kim Dokja because he doesn’t expect them from him, but that just puts Sun Wukong on the same level as a Yoo Jonghyuk on a chatty day.
It’s nothing special. It’s nothing life-changing. Kim Dokja honestly doesn’t think of Sun Wukong as anything other than a pretty nice senior and a potential friend until that damned car ride, where Sun Wukong’s windbreaker rides up on his arms and exposes his wrist.
If Han Sooyoung knew that was the turning point where Kim Dokja discovered emotions for the first time, she would never let him live it down. He will take this secret to his grave.
He becomes hyperaware of everything Sun Wukong does. Kim Dokja finds himself sitting on the figurative edge every day, legs dangling off the cliff as he stares into the abyss and sees Sun Wukong behind his eyelids. His heart trips and rolls and doesn’t stop rolling down the mossy hill.
Every little thing the man does, every stupid thing the man says; it fixes itself into Kim Dokja’s mind, filing itself away neatly into a massive cabinet labeled Sun Wukong and the rest of his mind’s library is a fat mess.
One day, Sun Wukong wears colored contacts. It’s so dumb, it’s something Kim Namwoon would probably do. It’s something Kim Namwoon has probably done. If Kim Dokja checks his memory, filtering out all the random thoughts about Sun Wukong, he can probably pick out a few moments where he stared and squinted at Kim Namwoon before closing his eyes and praying for strength because he’s encountered someone who wears something as lame as colored contacts.
Then, under the bright, harsh fluorescent lights of the dance studio, Sun Wukong’s eyes look strangely blue, and Kim Dokja’s heart stutters in his throat.
There’s no way that’s normal, he thinks desperately, trying to hold his position as his mind races faster than Yoo Jonghyuk could ever dream of sprinting. People’s eyes aren’t that blue. Even if Sun Wukong is mixed blood, that’s not possible. Were his eyes always that blue?
Shit, Kim Dokja thinks wildly, and ends up asking him about it.
“You noticed?” Sun Wukong replies, a smile pulling at his lips, and Kim Dokja’s traitorous heart does something death-defying inside his chest cavity. “I wear them sometimes, yeah. They look good, don’t they?”
“Yeah,” Kim Dokja agrees dumbly, and his lips curve up of their own accord. Is this normal, he wonders, feeling like a parched man in the middle of a desert stumbling across an oasis. “You look- you look good.”
Sun Wukong looks- Kim Dokja’s fingers twitch, and he has to physically restrain himself from reaching up to pinch himself. Sun Wukong looks delighted, his eyes going big and excited. The blue is even more prominent now. “I always worried people wouldn’t notice if I wore them. That would defeat the purpose of wearing them, wouldn’t it?”
“Oh,” Kim Dokja says simply. He doesn’t know what to say. No one else noticed because only he was silly enough to be this infatuated, maybe. He noticed, because how could he not notice anything about Sun Wukong? “Trust me,” he adds faintly, “they’re noticeable.”
The smile on his senior’s face is really enough to fuel Kim Dokja to survive over the weekend. Webnovels did not do this justice. Infatuation is a far worse disease than anything in the world. Every night, Kim Dokja returns home to sit on his bed and self-reflect on how pathetic he was in front of Sun Wukong, but every morning, he doesn’t change.
“Hey, you don’t wear spectacles either, right?” Sun Wukong asks abruptly. Kim Dokja shakes his head, heart spasming at the thought of Sun Wukong remembering something like that. Dumb, he chastises himself. So dumb. Stop being so dumb.
Sun Wukong reaches for his bag, pulling it over, and fumbles in it for a moment. Then he pulls out a small pair of contacts. “Want to try them on for yourself?” He asks, and Kim Dokja will go home later to give praise to any god out there who listens that he didn’t spontaneously combust on the spot.
He wears them the next day. Five different people tell him he looks good in them, but they aren’t the person he wants to hear those words from. Kim Dokja goes through the first half of the day in a daze, and snaps awake when Sun Wukong steps into the studio.
It takes him a while. For over an hour, Kim Dokja’s hopes sink further and further until he starts to kick himself for even hoping in the first place, but then Sun Wukong starts numbering them off for a new formation.
Sun Wukong ends up before Kim Dokja, staring for a heartbeat longer than normal, enough to make Kim Dokja shift awkwardly on the spot and tilt his head in question. A smile lights up his senior’s face. It feels a lot like he’s entering cardiac arrest.
“Nice contacts,” Sun Wukong says wryly, and Kim Dokja’s mind whites out.
“Thanks,” he coughs, his mother’s teachings on manners kicking into him on auto-pilot.
Still, Sun Wukong doesn’t move from the spot. This entire interaction has probably only lasted a meager three seconds, but it feels like an eternity. Kim Dokja will go home and properly replay this for two hours afterward. He can die happy. He seriously can.
“Sorry,” Sun Wukong says abruptly after another two seconds. There’s a strange light in his eyes. “I stared for a bit too long.”
Kim Dokja stops breathing, forces out a short hysterical laugh, and the smile on his face stays there for the entire day.
When he tells Han Sooyoung about his crush on Sun Wukong, she screams so loudly in the middle of the shopping mall that they almost get reported to the security guards.
As it is, they end up running out, gasping and panting for breath as they look over their shoulders to ensure no one chased them, and Han Sooyoung socks a painful right hook into Kim Dokja’s shoulder.
“Oi!” He says, wincing as he grabs the wounded arm. “We have PT tomorrow!”
“You suck!” Han Sooyoung says, with great feeling, and the look in her eyes looks creepily close to insanity.
“Shut up,” Kim Dokja replies, and feels abject fear at the cackle she replies him with.
Orientation comes and goes, and Kim Dokja is still a foolish fool who decides maybe destroying his peaceful future of computer science isn’t such a bad thing in the face of love.
He sincerely regrets his decision when he shows up for the open wushu class with Yoo Jonghyuk and Jung Heewon in tow. They’re still blissfully unaware of the way his heart does acrobatics whenever Sun Wukong lurks near, and Kim Dokja isn’t about to enlighten them. The fewer people know, the better.
The wushu class is too ambitious. For people like Yoo Jonghyuk, it’s a breeze. For people like Jung Heewon, it’s like a brief winter chill that nips at the fingers, but is still comfortable. For people like Kim Dokja, it’s like walking out into a Canadian winter in nothing but underwear.
He suddenly understands what it means to crash and burn. It’s embarrassing, but at least he doesn’t color easily, because Sun Wukong is standing a few meters away and watching them try some sort of kick set.
The instructor is- he’s a joke, simply put. He just started jumping around and kicking and expect people to follow? They advertised this class for novices, not for people who were doing martial arts in the womb, like Yoo Jonghyuk!
At least the other members of the club are self-aware. They’ve spread out, splitting the students into smaller groups to teach them the set, but Kim Dokja’s attention is elsewhere. Yoo Jonghyuk and Jung Heewon are patiently, obediently learning the whole thing from the seniors, but Kim Dokja’s eyes are on the cameraman wandering over to him, a smile on his face as he picks his way through the eager students to find his way to Kim Dokja.
“How is it?” Sun Wukong asks, and Kim Dokja is sure there’s a silly smile on his face.
“It’s utter shit,” he says frankly, waving his hand at the instructor’s back. Sun Wukong stifles a laugh, eyes bright with humor, and Kim Dokja feels emboldened to continue. “He can’t teach for shit.”
“Yeah, well,” Sun Wukong replies, and shakes his head. “Come on, I’ll teach you the set.”
Teach him? Like, as in- Kim Dokja feels like he’s floating. Forget Yoo Jonghyuk and Jung Heewon; those two prodigies can live and die by their own rules, Kim Dokja came for one reason and one reason only, and that one reason is standing before him right now, teaching him the entire idiotic set.
It takes a while. He isn’t joking about his lack of coordination. He’s not extraordinarily strong either, so he struggles with some of the moves. He can’t jump as high. He can’t kick as hard. But Sun Wukong says he’s doing a good job, so Kim Dokja supposes he’s doing fantastically.
“Go do it.” Sun Wukong nudges him forward, his palm large and warm against Kim Dokja’s right shoulder, and it takes a lot of effort to stifle the shudder that threatens that run through his body. “Practice it!”
“I’d rather die,” Kim Dokja says honestly, and gives a sheepish smile when Sun Wukong turns an unimpressed look at him. “I’d look dumb. Terribly dumb. There are enough bad pictures of me out there on the internet from Han Sooyoung, I need to start curating my image a bit better.”
Sun Wukong raises the camera in his hand. “If I do it with you, the one holding the camera is going to look even dumber. Come on.”
Well. Well, Kim Dokja thinks helplessly, and shifts his weight to one leg. If Sun Wukong says it like that, what is he supposed to do? Say no?
The set goes horribly. He almost falls, but catches himself at the last minute, and Sun Wukong beams at him. The senior runs a hand through his hair, the golden strands catching the harsh light and glittering in the mirror; Sun Wukong motions for Kim Dokja to go towards him, to do the entire set once again, and Kim Dokja goes.
They have another event. A horror night, or something, where the seniors dress up in masks and scare the living daylights out of them.
Kim Namwoon, although he looks like a chuunibyou moonlighting as a gangster, is actually afraid of things like ghosts. Kim Dokja isn’t particularly scared, but he isn’t particularly unaffected either – he briefly glimpses at his watch before his turn starts, and his heartbeat is thumping away at 102.
Probably lower than when he’s around Sun Wukong, he thinks, and readies himself for a screaming Han Sooyoung that will cling to him for the entire walk.
He ends up laughing more than screaming. The face masks are done quite well, with large white full-face masks artfully drenched in blood covering the senior’s faces. They appear out of rooms, out of corners, out of lifts, even, and terrorize the life out of Han Sooyoung. Kim Dokja ends up dragging her more than anything else.
They’re in one of the corridors on the higher floors. One of the rooms hold a clue for them, supposedly, and they’re supposed to enter it and find the exit. With how dark it is, and how the people around him are screaming like they’re in serious mortal peril, Kim Dokja thinks it’s perfectly normal to lose one’s bearings and get lost.
He seriously can’t recognize any of the seniors. He has suspicions, of course, because some of them really just look too unique to be anyone else, but he’s been keeping an eye out for the seniors he knows. And one in particular.
Then they stumble across a room guarded by someone, a high cackling voice echoing through the corridor, a hand reaching out to snap in their faces, and Kim Dokja’s mouth falls open before his brain catches up.
“Sun Wukong?” He asks, faintly, a laugh building up in his throat. What the heck, he can’t help but think, and Han Sooyoung screams next to him, clutching at Kim Dokja’s shirt. “Sun Wukong, that’s you, right?”
His mouth prattles on without permission from his brain. But there’s no way that isn’t him. The build, the frame, the wrist- it’s all familiar. It’s the person he’s been thinking about for the past month. There’s no way Kim Dokja wouldn’t recognize Sun Wukong if he stood in front of him, even if Sun Wukong was hidden by a mask.
Later, after the event, Han Sooyoung asks if Kim Dokja recognized Sun Wukong because of how attuned he is to the senior’s presence.
Kim Dokja finds out two things. First of all, he turns red when he thinks about Sun Wukong. Second of all, he’s actually strong enough to bodily tackle Han Sooyoung into the ground and force her to shut up.
They’re sitting on the floor and talking about something. About nothing. Something that can’t be relevant, Kim Dokja decides, because he is zoning out, scrolling through another webnovel on his phone. Jung Heewon hasn’t reached over to smack the phone out of his hands, so this can’t be that important.
Something lands lightly against his head, pressing down gently. He tilts his head back, raising an eyebrow in confusion – anyone who would try to get his attention in such a weird way is already sitting in the circle before him. He wouldn’t put this past Han Sooyoung to mess with him, and Yoo Jonghyuk might try it because he’s that emotionally stunted, but they’re sitting in front of him.
Kim Dokja tilts back, looking up, and meets the clear, blue eyes and messy blonde hair of Sun Wukong leaning over him.
“You can go into the hall now,” Sun Wukong says. His eyes flicker up momentarily, taking in the entire group, and then they drop back down to Kim Dokja. The corners of his lips curl up in a smile, and Kim Dokja isn’t sure if he’s breathing. He’s honestly not sure.
“Okay!” Han Sooyoung announces immediately. Her voice sounds like a faint buzz in Kim Dokja’s ear. He’s not registering any outside feedback right now. “Let’s go!”
“What about-”
“Sometimes, Yoo Jonghyuk,” Han Sooyoung says loudly, “you need to know when to quit. Let’s go! Now!”
It ends up as the two of them. Kim Dokja swallows, breaking eye contact, and turns around to pretend to look for his things. “I’ll be going in, then,” he says awkwardly, and picks up his bag.
A shadow falls to the side, and he turns to see Sun Wukong kneeling next to him. It takes all the strength inside to not reel back and press himself against the wall. Kim Dokja blinks a few times, doing his best to steady himself, and pastes a confused look on his face.
“Did you want something?”
Sun Wukong tilts his head, and opens his mouth. For the first time in a long time, he looks hesitant. “I’m just curious, but- Kim Dokja, do you like me?”
There’s a silence, and then- “What?!” Kim Dokja asks, his voice faintly shrill. “I- what? What?!”
He is going to kill Han Sooyoung. Ballpoint pens can be used to kill, can’t they? At most, Kim Dokja will brain her to death with his laptop. He knows it can be done. He won’t stop until Han Sooyoung is dead.
“I’m just asking,” Sun Wukong says abruptly, and shrugs. “Because I like you.”
Kim Dokja’s mental tirade of killing Han Sooyoung screeches to an immediate stop. The train crashes horizontally, killing all fifteen people involved in the trolley problem, including the driver. He- he doesn’t know what’s going on. Webnovels never prepared him for this sort of thing.
“Yes,” he answers eventually. It’s stolen out of his mouth before he can even think about it. How is he supposed to figure out a lie right at this moment? Especially when Sun Wukong went and said something like that?! “I- yes.”
His mind is crashing. It’s failing. The Windows startup noise echoes in his brain, and Kim Dokja prays for strength.
“Oh.” Sun Wukong looks relieved. Immensely relieved. And pleased, Kim Dokja notes with growing confusion. “Good. That’s good.”
Good. It’s good that Sun Wukong is happy, Kim Dokja thinks dazedly, even though he’s still not very sure what’s going on. He probably left his brain in his dorm when he went to class today. It happens every once in a while, when he gets too caught up reading and ends up not sleeping at all.
Is this a conscious hallucination? There’s nothing else it can be.
“I’ll text you,” Sun Wukong says, finally, and stands. He grins down at a dumbstruck Kim Dokja, and nudges him with the side of his knee. “Your class. You’re late.”
“I’m late,” Kim Dokja agrees dumbly. His mind is catching up. Slowly, slowly, slowly- “I’m super late.”
Han Sooyoung almost throttles him with joy.