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It was a Thursday, and Yoo Joonghyuk was dead. His body lay in a casket, pale and cold.
Sangah had an academic knowledge of these facts, but she had not actually been to see him. She had seen corpses before, of course; you couldn't survive the end of the world without seeing one or a hundred. Without making some yourself, even. They all looked the same after a while, the sort of uncanny stillness that was how you knew the soul was all gone. Sangah didn't want to see Joonghyuk look like that.
His portrait was a candid photograph that Mia had chosen, because Joonghyuk hadn't chosen his own. (He was— had been— arrogant that way. He had never shied from the prospect of death, but he had always thought he'd know when it would come. Sangah supposed she couldn't blame him. That had been what she'd expected, too.) In it, he was pushing back hair damp with sweat, and he was laughing.
Someone in the reception hall laughed, too, a quick bright thing hurriedly choked off. Sangah looked away from the portrait with a shudder. She didn't see who had laughed, but it seemed a terrible thing to do when they would never hear Joonghyuk laugh again. And yet part of her was glad for it. The hall was so suffocatingly quiet, otherwise. Funerals were supposed to be noisy things, Sangah knew, but everyone was taking their cues from Dokja, who had been silently kneeling on his mat in front of the altar ever since the hall had been set up.
Kim Dokja, she thought, was not used to being the one left behind. He must have known something like it before, when his mother had been in prison, but she at least had still been alive. She, at least, hadn't been the love of Dokja's life. Dokja didn't know what to do after losing someone like Joonghyuk— there was no problem to solve, and no hidden cheat to discover, and his desperate confusion was heartbreakingly obvious.
"Have you talked to him?"
Sangah startled. She turned and found Sooyoung had come up to her side, her sharp black suit rumpled and hair hanging slightly lank. "To who?"
"Our idiot, who else?" Sooyoung crossed her arms, chewing on her lower lip. She didn't seem to realise she was doing it. "He's— I know that look, on him."
"Have you talked to him?" Sangah asked, instead of what she really wanted to ask, which was how do you know that look? She herself had never seen it on Dokja before, and that was even having been his colleague before the start of the scenarios. As far as she knew, Sooyoung and Dokja had only met after the end of the world.
But this, too, was probably one of those things that they shared, the two of them and Joonghyuk, one of those oddities that the rest of the company would never understand. Sangah had made her peace with it long ago.
"Have I— what the hell would I say? I can't comfort anyone, I'm the last person who should be—" Sooyoung broke off, and barked out a laugh. Sangah thought she might have been the one who had laughed, earlier.
"You know what I want to say? At least it was quick, the way he died, just a crash and then boom, dead. Fucking dumbass way to go out, but at least he didn't feel anything, right? What I wouldn't give to be in his place—" Sooyoung scrubbed her hands through her hair. They were trembling. "Selfish bastard, you know, leaving this fucking mess for me to clean up, huh? I'm fucking pissed at that sack of shit, so pissed I could die, you think that's what Kim Dokja wants to hear?"
Sangah wondered if it was even what Sooyoung herself wanted to hear. She spoke the words like they hurt her, like they tore out of her lungs and shredded her but that was the only way she knew how to be. In answer, Sangah felt a spark of anger kindle in the back of her throat. She could feed it, and she could destroy Han Sooyoung right here; she could say exactly the right things to make Sooyoung despise herself for how awful she was trying to be. But Sangah let it go. That was what Sooyoung wanted— to be hurt— and Sangah had made a hobby of doing just what Sooyoung didn't want.
"I think," said Sangah, as gently as she knew how, "you know exactly what he needs, don't you?"
It was uncomfortably private, the way Sooyoung's face crumpled and then smoothed back out as if nothing had happened. It wasn't a thing that Sangah had been meant to see. They just stood there, in a pocket of tense silence, breathing, before Sooyoung turned on her heel towards where Dokja knelt.
"I won't thank you," she said, harshly.
"Fuck off," Sangah said, sweet as sugar, and Sooyoung laughed again. It didn’t sound so terrible, now.
She watched Sooyoung stride over to kneel right next to Dokja and elbow him in the gut, rather harder than Sangah thought was friendly. He folded over low enough for Sooyoung to grip the back of his neck and whisper something in his ear. His hand came up to touch the black-striped armband on his sleeve, and then he clutched at Sooyoung's jacket.
Dokja didn't straighten back up. He stayed curled in on himself, and Sooyoung's hand stayed gripping him, and the noises that finally escaped him were so ugly that Sangah almost wanted to run out to the hospital proper and find him help. She had never heard a person make sounds like this, and she never wanted to again.
She took a quick glance around, and found that the room had emptied out. Perhaps they thought Dokja needed privacy. Mia, certainly, didn't need to witness any of this. But Sangah saw the way the two of them shook with it like paper boats in a hostile ocean, the way they were coming apart at the seams, and she steeled herself. They needed someone who knew, who had seen the yawning depths of their grief and wouldn't flinch away from it, who could see them broken and lashing out and could be kind to them anyway.
And Sangah, because she chose to be, was strong enough for this. She stayed, too.