Chapter Text
Kim Dokja is fifteen when he decides he loves Yoo Joonghyuk. It’s a swift, easy conclusion, trapped under the weight of his choked sobs and staring at one web novel, searing the words on his glaring phone screen into his head. He is fifteen when he jumps and wakes up in a cold hospital, when he discovers that it doesn’t matter if no one loves him as long as he has a reason to live.
Days after he finds the novel, Kim Dokja thinks about it a little more and realises that he’s found his purpose. Yoo Joonghyuk is the protagonist, and if Kim Dokja were to be fully honest he thinks Yoo Joonghyuk is much like the cockroach you can’t stamp out. It’s the sickening persistence that draws him back to the story time and time again; the first chapter he reads with scepticism and by the start of the fifth, Yoo Joonghyuk has Kim Dokja completely in his palm. If he were to compare it, it’s the same way someone would eventually set the cockroach on fire if pesticide fails—every time he dies, Yoo Joonghyuk deserves to go out with a louder bang.
Kim Dokja thinks that he wants to see Yoo Joonghyuk burn.
But then he looks a little closer, and dozens of chapters later, the truth is that he admires him. After all, they are, in some ways, cursed with a similar fate. Both of them have irreparably lost and scarred from being forced to learn how to walk through hell. But where Kim Dokja keeps his head down amongst the scorn, Yoo Joonghyuk keeps fighting. There’s something to his resolve that Kim Dokja thinks he should learn from. All it took was the pages of his mother’s book to be thrown in his face for Kim Dokja to take the leap of faith.
In the last week of his hospitalisation, Kim Dokja reads like he’s possessed. Not that he hasn’t already been doing that, but he consumes paragraphs of words with a flame burning in his eyes. He reads each chapter completely, commits them to memory and recites each scene in his head and formulates theories on how things could’ve gone better because he wants to learn. Kim Dokja wants to dig his fingers into Yoo Joonghyuk’s psyche, to understand how he can pull through that hellscape of a world.
It’s almost invigorating, he could say, Kim Dokja ends up without sleep for days. The nurses note the bags under his eyes but maybe there is more life in him than when they first spoke, so they try not to mention it.
“You’re a sensible boy,” they say, “Just don’t take it too far, alright?”
But would any sensible person have jumped three stories to their death? Kim Dokja had done it from his classroom window—like he’d been begging to be seen. It was some sort of petty revenge for him, no matter how futile. Would they feel something if he’d really gone and died like they’d asked him to?
No, because the only time they’d ever regret it is if they were under his…
That is not a very sane train of thought.
But Kim Dokja isn’t quite so sensible as they all claim he should be. He remembers the teachers, they’d make it a point to pull him to the staffroom while he was mottled in bruises and blood to tell him to “be quiet and be sensible”. Sensibility doesn’t equate to acquiesce. Kim Dokja is the furthest thing from sensible.
He’s just a coward. And that’s where Yoo Joonghyuk does better.
One and a half months of stale food and mandatory therapy later, Kim Dokja leaves the hospital with a new role model. Yoo Joonghyuk is strong and resilient and every bit the person he wants to be. He is forceful in a way that doesn’t allow himself to be stepped all over; there is a silver of kindness laced in every interaction; he is eloquent if need be and talks his way out of situations where violence may land him in another regression. It's almost how impossible how perfect a man can be, and yet.
Yoo Joonghyuk is hurtling down the path towards completing the scenarios at an astounding speed, and he’s only in the second turn. Somehow, despite everything, he has companions that would die for him and a happy little family in the centre of the apocalypse.
It’s so unrealistic. Perhaps there might’ve been a time when he would be jealous of this man, but The Fall must’ve nicked a few wires in his brain. Kim Dokja only knows it’s unrealistic because he’s never had any of it. In actuality, he envies Yoo Joonghyuk—respects him—because he’s able to keep the things that he wants.
They say humans thrive off ambition. Yoo Joonghyuk becomes his reason. That one story plays in his head like a broken record and Kim Dokja watches over Yoo Joonghyuk’s life like the constellations he so hates.
But Kim Dokja is no fool. He recognises when an obsession has taken root. Admittedly, it’s the only thing that keeps him going. It’s the dam to his tears and the water that mutes his rage. It’s what distracts him from the grating snickers, the pummeling blows, and if he had his own personal bible this would be it. Yoo Joonghyuk is his ideal of strength, his new way of life, something to emulate, and, much like the novel’s title, this is Kim Dokja’s Ways of Survival.
On the eve of his sixteenth birthday, Yoo Joonghyuk is betrayed by Anna Croft and enslaved like a dog. Kim Dokja stabs Song Minwoo in the eye with a pencil.
“I-I didn’t mean to!” he stammers smoothly through his practised lines, as though he hadn’t just purposely put a piece of 0.5-centimetre lead through his bully’s eye. “He’d put his-s h-hand down my pants and I p-panicked- ” because he’s finally done it. He’s finally done what he’s been dreaming about since his first day in high school.
Song Minwoo stays in the hospital for weeks before transferring schools. His parents kick up a massive fuss with the principal, threatening to sue, but there’s not much they can do without their son being implicated for sexual violence. Unlike somebody, Kim Dokja has been quiet. It’s one of the biggest reasons why he gets off with the whole issue of “attempted murder”, and if that isn’t the world’s biggest overstatement.
It’s frightening. Kim Dokja thought it’ll take him longer to snap. He’s always told himself that he’d never be like his mother, never be the psycho that everyone says he is. But if those bullies were right about one thing, it’s that it runs in his blood. Now, he could pretend that the stress of being a murderer’s son had simply built up and boiled over, that he’s tired of being reduced to a circus animal because acknowledging that something’s wrong would make him the bad person (this was self-defence, Kim Dokja was the victim).
But everything had been going so well, then Yoo Joonghyuk lost it all just like that. Kim Dokja felt bad for him. He didn’t want to be sitting duck.
When he goes to school the morning after, everyone is breathing down his neck, but it’s nothing he isn’t used to. Unsurprisingly, his homeroom teacher singles him out during first period. “Like mother like son,” she says, then she glances down at Kim Dokja’s desk where a familiar pencil sits and promptly trails off. Good.
Later he realises that the incident was like a rite of passage. Kim Dokja had spent so long strapped to a leash and begging for leftovers that when the lead had skewered Song Minwoo’s eyeball like a knife through butter, he felt relieved. He’s capable of doing something—of defending himself—he’s one step closer to Yoo Joonghyuk.
The following June begins with the worst downpour Kim Dokja has ever seen. It ends up working in his favour when another accident happens, leaving too much blood on his face to completely wash away. No one sees it happen, but they extrapolate, and everyone knows to avoid Kim Dokja when he’s holding anything sharp after that (after all, he’s learnt from the best).
For a moment he’s taken back to that fateful day in his old apartment, his mother standing over his father's corpse and Kim Dokja covered in crimson all over and over. Kim Dokja was a child back then, fear scraping his throat raw, the stench of iron hazing his mind. But at the same time, a line of dominoes began to fall. High school may have been difficult so far yet Kim Dokja manages to survive anyway, and on graduation day, staring at the class photograph with several heads missing from the picture, Kim Dokja realises this: if there’s no sense of death, then the value of life also disappears.
Thankfully, no one bothers him at University, all too concerned with their Grade Point Average and too rural to have heard of Kim Dokja’s backstory. Military service and the rest of his education are completed without a single casualty; Yoo Joonghyuk makes it to the 999th round and dies, closest to the end of the scenarios than he’s ever been. As expected of the protagonist—he still has the capacity for human empathy.
Truthfully, Kim Dokja does not know where, or what went wrong. He no longer cares for the finer details, and he likes to think he still retains a modicum of morality amongst everything. When Yoo Joonghyuk threw his dreams and his literal body away for his companions, Kim Dokja would be lying if he said he didn’t feel anger. Are a mere few people worth the eternal hell Yoo Joonghyuk is cursing himself to once again? Could a single person even be worth his continued suffering?
「“But, but why did you, for someone like me…”」
「“It’s because all of you also did that for me. That is all.”」
「“I wish for all of you to see the end of this world.”」
But of course, that’s where a lesson is to be learnt. Yoo Joonghyuk always teaches him something valuable. Kim Dokja smiles to himself as he bookmarks the end of the 999th round.
After he becomes a contract employee at Minosoft, after he meets a friendly female coworker who is overly objectified by the entirety of their workplace and Han Myungoh, Kim Dokja is left locked in a bathroom stall and counting to ten. Almost—he almost comes close to the age-old method of arsenic in tea. Yoo Sangah may have noticed his turmoil, if the furrow in her brow as Kim Dokja twirled his pencil while being yelled at was anything to go by.
They say you should look out for the quiet ones. Kim Dokja has seen what he looks like in a mirror, and to say he’s scary wouldn’t be accurate. He’s unassuming, like his presence has been obscured by a veil, but Kim Dokja has seen what his face looks like in a mirror spotted with blood, too. The previous statement applies. It’s also what proves the statement last false and makes it worse.
Perhaps he is a little insane. But it’s not like he killed anyone.
And then the apocalypse starts. Fiction becomes reality; Kim Dokja becomes a player in the same game as Yoo Joonghyuk. The world may not have expected it, and neither did Kim Dokja, but he takes to their new reality like fish to water. By the commencement of the first scenario, there is blood on his suit, mottling his face, stirring his calm, bubbling up in his gut—all of it is stripping away at his carefully maintained facade of peace, the biggest, harmless little loner that is Kim Dokja.
Once upon a time, he could not have afforded to be cast in the spotlight, but things are different now. Kim Dokja has fully come out of his shell and the whispers have died into a telling silence. The other few survivors look at him with no little amount of horror, but that can’t really be helped, can it? There weren’t enough grasshoppers in the box.
“Dokja-ssi, you…” Yoo Sangah uneasily says.
“Would you rather I have died, Yoo Sangah-ssi?”
Yoo Sangah flusters immediately, somehow keeping her manners before a killer. “That’s not—no, I would not.”
“The world is no longer the same one we used to live in,” Kim Dokja tells her, as it is. “This is our new reality. All we can do is adapt.” And he watches her finally process this, eyes flickering between fear, despair, and resignation. Yoo Sangah doesn’t have to like what Kim Dokja does, because Kim Dokja will do what he wants anyway.
Kim Dokja will be strong. Kim Dokja will be a murderer, in his own right.
A dokkaebi appears in the air, and everything it says is a mirror of what Kim Dokja already knows. It’s another reminder that this is real now— ‘he’ is real, and everything comes to a grinding halt when the dokkaebi says,
[The number of survivors is quite high? The fellow in the next carriage was a nutter as well…It seems that things are quite interesting today.]
The fellow in the next carriage.
Kim Dokja looks at the door connected to the carriage in the front. Could it be?
He looks up at the floating dokkaebi. “Hey. Which carriage are you talking about?”
[3707. Why, what are you…]
“By any chance, is there a sole survivor who massacred the entire carriage of people?”
The dokkaebi panics at that. [W-Wh—how did you know that?! Impossible…a prophet? But there shouldn’t be more than one with-]
Clang!
A large dent appears in the thick iron door. No normal human being can be responsible for causing that, and the fact alone is evidence enough to confirm Kim Dokja’s suspicions.
Beyond that door…yes, this is who he has been waiting for. A shaky smile crawls onto his face. Which regression turn exactly this world might be is unsure as of now, and Kim Dokja’s fate no clearer if he rushes in there. Still, the maddening desire to meet the protagonist pulls on Kim Dokja like a puppet on strings, and, he’s Lee Sookyung’s son, isn’t he? Ever the impulsive one.
Clang!
Kim Dokja is scrambling for the door before anyone can caution him. Someone shouts his name, but even then he doesn’t stop to think. No one is allowed to get in his way.
CLANG!
Soft hands meet cold metal, digging into each dip and crater. Kim Dokja’s palms set ablaze with pain, wets with red, and he all but grits his teeth and wrenches the door apart—
—and meets the sharp bewildered eyes of a handsome face. Dark, wavy hair fall over thick brows, grazing eyelashes, framing the jaw, with a jet black coat to complete the look. Kim Dokja’s breaths run short. After thirteen years. Thirteen long years later, Yoo Joonghyuk finally has a face, and it’s all he’s ever imagined it to be.
Maybe author-nim really does spoil him.
A breathless laugh escapes Kim Dokja. Then another. “Yoo Joonghyuk. Yoo Joonghyuk—ahaha…!”
A scarred hand lunges for his neck—ah, the protagonist and his propensity for violence—Kim Dokja barely squirms as he’s lifted-slash-strangled into the air, and for a split second wonders, now that the door is down, how horrifying a glimpse into the bloody carriage in front must be if his companions are dead silent.
And then he glances to the side, at his reflection in the subway windows.
Oh. He’s smiling.
“You. Who are you?” Yoo Joonghyuk demands, quick to recover. “How the hell are you alive?”
Kim Dokja beams. Sickly, sweetly. “I am alive because you saved me.”
Yoo Joonghyuk looks completely taken aback. Standing in the carnage, the glittering eyes of the constellations fall on him flatteringly despite it all. And Kim Dokja understands. It’s the novelty of death. Perhaps this is why so many people were drawn to his mother’s book.