Work Text:
Kim Rok Soo thinks he understands, even if the exact words are foreign to him.
He was never one to know when to stop, survival never gave room for respite, always moving, always forward. Stopping was an option but not a pleasant one, stopping meant that tomorrow after that day would be hopelessly more difficult, stopping meant that there would be a high chance of not eating the next day and losing his job and the roof over his head. Yes, stopping was not an option he was going to choose while he had the chance.
Well, now he had an idea of how to stop, he couldn't say he didn't know anymore. It just didn't feel right? There was so much to fix first, so many things to deal with, a whole mountain to cross. But he knows, stopping isn't alien now, not like it used to be at least.
He supposes it's yet another thing to thank Lee Soo Hyuk and Choi Jung Soo for, maybe he'll risk boosting their egos by saying "thank you" out loud.
Yes, especially since it's thanks to them that he can understand the weight behind the words addressed to him today: “You saved me. Thank you.”
Kim Rok Soo had only said that phrase once in his entire two lives, half-drunk and in the middle of the apocalypse. He was not someone who wanted to die, he really wanted to live and enjoy a peaceful life until his inevitable end. But sometimes wanting to live wasn't enough, when the winter was especially harsh; or the walls creaked for hours the same way his bones did; or when the fever struck and there was no one to take care of him.
When wanting to live was not enough he liked to think of his family, he liked to think of the brothers who had put a roof over his head, who teased him and called him by name, of the people who had saved him and when they made plans for the future included him in them as if it were a matter of course that they would stay together until then and much longer.
Sometimes, it dawns on him from time to time, it is no longer only them he thinks of when wanting to live is not enough.