Work Text:
Dokja has been in the attic since his return.
They don't talk about it much, she and Joonghyuk; they've been holding together in some fragile armistice but the moment they start a conversation about what they're going to do with him (like he's some sort of object, Sooyoung thinks, sickened) they're probably going to devolve into the kind of fight they can never quite come back from.
It isn't that they don't get along— far from it. They had both broken when Dokja left them, but their remaining pieces had fit together surprisingly well. That's probably why this is happening. There's no room for Dokja any more, no way to slip him into the space between them because it's already been filled. And some days, when Sooyoung is in their bedroom and she hears the low, croaking death-rattle from the floor above her— some days Sooyoung isn't sure she even wants to fit him back in at all.
The thing is, Dokja had died.
None of them had been prepared for the plague that swept the world, scant years after they'd saved it. Another heartbreaking shitshow, even after all the bullshit they'd gone through. It seemed monumentally unfair that they had worked so hard to get him back, to get him through his endless physiotherapy, to finally have their time together only for him to be wrenched away by something they couldn't fight. It would have been kinder, had it been a scenario. Instead they have this: the knowledge that they hadn't heard his last words, and his cold ashes in an urn, not even tears or a funeral to send him off.
It had been awful, the sickly red cherry topping off the bitter sundae of Sooyoung's life. All her money and her power, so meaningless in front of nature taking its course. It had driven her to rage. And the only one in all the world who could understand her anger instead of sadness was the only person whose life revolved around Kim Dokja as much as hers did.
Grief hadn't destroyed them. It had bound them— made them hard, diamond-like, sharp enough to cut everyone who tried to give them comfort. It had made them frighteningly brittle, too, but this truth they stubbornly ground to dust.
Some months after his death, when they had grown tired of fighting each other to work off the pain and restless in their forced inactivity at home, the resurrection had begun.
It had been a small thing at first, a video on the Internet that everyone had thought was obviously faked. But by now that first resurrector is famous the world over. Sooyoung remembers turning on the television that day with vivid clarity.
Shimizu Haruaki, from a rural seaside town in Kyushu. The beaches had been deserted since the plague started, and even months after viable treatment was available, no one dared to crowd them. There had almost been no one to encounter Shimizu at all if it hadn't been for the young fisherwoman out digging for bait clams, who had witnessed his head break water. Thinking it was a corpse, she'd moved closer to try and drag it to shore, but it had soon become clear that it was a person, slowly walking out of the ocean. The woman had pulled out her phone at this point, her frightened voice narrating over the video livestreaming to her social media account.
"I don't know what it is," she had said, zooming into the body. "Is it dangerous?" As Shimizu's torso came all the way out of the water, she had started to back away. "I'm going to call my husband."
The plague dead, it seemed, were walking out of the sea.
Sooyoung had been ecstatic at first. Hadn't they seen everything, by now? It hadn't mattered to them, they thought, what kind of Kim Dokja came back, as long as he came back at all. Not many of the Korean dead had come back yet, and all the governments were keeping very quiet about what was actually going on with the resurrectors— but it had looked like all of the dead were returning, with no exceptions. So day by day, their hope mounted higher and higher.
In the midst of all that wilfully ignorant hope, on one of Joonghyuk's oceanside vigils, Dokja walked out of the water, shivering like a drowned rat.
And they had still been overjoyed when it happened, the two of them, bundling him up and taking him to the villa where they used to live together, keeping him a little lovers' secret. Of course, they hadn't known, though. What the resurrected were like.
But now— but now, more and more, Sooyoung is doubting what they brought home.
Dokja's attic room smells vaguely like raw seafood, because that's all he will eat. When they open the door to let him out he stumbles around like he forgot how to walk; he presses his cheek to the floor when he trips, peers at the carpet like it's something strange and alien, perhaps like how Sooyoung sometimes peers at him. No matter where he is, every so often he freezes up and stares fixedly at nothing. Once, when Sooyoung forgot to lock the attic at night, Joonghyuk had come across him in the living room, and then hadn't spoken to her for the rest of the day. Sooyoung hadn't minded. She had been glad it hadn't been her to find him.
Their Dokja still knows how to smile, Joonghyuk had found out that night. It's just crooked in a different way than before. A way that, once she finally sees it, gently touches fingers of cold to the nape of Sooyoung's neck.
She and Joonghyuk, they've been through a lot together. They're handling it as well as can be expected, but their mental resilience is stretched so, so thin.
As of late, their favourite room in the house is the kitchen. The attic is directly above their previous favourite, the bedroom, and they can never escape the sounds there. At least in the kitchen, where Sooyoung sprawls out over the counter and gets in the way of Joonghyuk cooking, they have some sense of normalcy. Today Joonghyuk is making dumplings. He's been making them a lot, lately. Sooyoung drinks her extra-sweet instant caramel latte and tries not to think about what that means.
"What are we doing, Yoo Joonghyuk?" she asks, finally, because one of them has to.
Joonghyuk doesn't reply immediately. The kitchen is filled with the rhythmic sound of chopping, the acidic tang of onions threatening to make her cry. He can't chop things as fast as he used to, these days. Though his face is as heart-achingly handsome as ever, the grey at his temples and the slightly too-sharp cut of his cheekbones shows his age. Looking at him makes Sooyoung feel old, too. She thinks one of the worst things about the Dokja in their attic is that he looks just the same way he looked in his thirties, still aged beyond his years but so much younger than either of them are now.
"What else can we do?" he asks her back, at last. He sounds like he doesn't care. If Sooyoung wasn't too exhausted from this entire endeavour, she might get angry at that. Sometimes he hides himself so well she can't read him.
"We could— tell the others," she suggests, almost sure he'll never agree.
His shoulders hunch in a little, and he grips his knife tighter. He opens his mouth as if to protest. Sooyoung tenses up; here is the fight that's been brewing between them, at last ready to throw off their veneer of calm. She hopes they can come back from it.
Then Joonghyuk closes his mouth with a click of his teeth, and keeps chopping his vegetables in lieu of an answer.
Sooyoung aches for him. Sometimes, she can read him so well it makes her want to hide him away instead.
They don't tell the others, of course, because Joonghyuk doesn't want them to try and help— Dokja will always be their problem to solve. To be perfectly honest, after everything, Sooyoung might feel the same.
They've had to swallow so much pain; the numbing ache of loss and the specific misery of Dokja's clever mouth never saying their names again. The unnameable emotion of seeing something he would like and trying to share it, but not being understood. New and different agonies move into Sooyoung's chest every day, so numerous and heavy that she wakes up irrationally afraid her skin will burst from the strain.
Perhaps the others might know what she's feeling. They might even feel the same. Sooyoung doesn't believe it, though. No one could possibly know what she and Joonghyuk feel, because who else could have written for a decade with no certainty, just for one faithful reader? Who else had lived hundreds of regressions just to meet him at last? Who else had waited for years, had searched the infinite universe— who else knew him like they did, down to the last period on his plainest story, who else had shaped their selves around his small body and never let go?
Upstairs, the thing that was once Kim Dokja moans like a beast, and it tears the heart out of them.