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The Yoo Duchy was a place of mourning.
This was the first thing Dokja noticed upon his return.
He could count all the people outside on one hand, each and every one of them dressed in white from head to toe. When the cafe owner, a gentle-looking eldery woman, caught him staring at them, perplexed, she offered him a genial smile.
To honor the late duke, she told Dokja as she took the cafe menu away from him. It’d been his favorite color when he was still here.
The Joonghyuk Dokja knew didn’t like white at all.
He was a dark, broody bastard who couldn’t act polite to save his life. He hated reading, only ever touching a book when he absolutely needed to. He didn’t have a sense of fashion, always dressed in black from head to toe. He was a workaholic.
But he liked spending afternoons lazing around with his head on Dokja’s lap too—in the garden, in the library, anywhere they could stay hidden. He liked staring at Dokja in silence, breathing him in.
He liked early mornings, and then liked afternoons even better. He liked the days where he could do anything he wanted to. He liked spending them with Dokja.
There was a piece of Joonghyuk everywhere Dokja went.
In the air, engraved in everything that wasn’t him—a flower, a cup of coffee, a book.
A book.
Near the countertop, there was a shelf. Sprawled across the surface was a small stack of books. Dokja caught sight of the book at the very top: pages yellowed from age but recently opened, a navy cover.
A memory.
“You have books.” He turned away, sipping his coffee. No one else besides him and the cafe owner were in the cafe. “Do nobles frequent this cafe?”
“Pardon? Oh, not at all!” Ducked behind the countertop, the cafe owner laughed, rummaging through the cupboards. “This Duchy’s a bit special. Everyone here knows how to read, noble or commoner. That’s why I’ve got some books here.”
“You like reading, then?”
“Depends on the day.” She rose, placed something on her workstation, and stretched her arms. “Amazing, isn’t it? It almost sounds like a lie, how commoners here can all read. But it’s not, and it’s all because of the late duke.”
“Really?” Dokja murmured, “I thought the duke was just like all the other nobles.”
The cafe owner frowned. “Like?”
“Like—a brute, or something. The stereotypical noble: greedy, egotistical, a piece of shit—”
“Heavens, no!” the woman interrupted, horrified. “The late duke wasn’t that much of a smiler and he never laughed, sure, but he was a good man!”
Dokja knew that better than anyone else. “The rumors of him suggest otherwise.”
“The tabloids?” the woman scoffed, crossing her arms. “Absolute bullshit, all of them. I’d say no one really knew the duke, but I know for a fact that the tabloids outside the Yoo Duchy knew him least.”
“All rumors start from some kind of truth.” Dokja slid his fingers around the handle of his cup, brought it up to his lips. His reflection in the coffee stared back at him tired, exhausted, scalding. His breath trembled over the rim of the cup. “Perhaps you didn’t know the late duke as well as you thought you did.”
“As I thought I did—? Oh, no—you misunderstood me, young man. I didn’t know the late duke at all,” the cafe owner’s eyes crinkled. “But he was a great lord, I can guarantee you this. Maybe not ‘kind’, but he was no monster.”
The cafe owner approached his table, snatching something from the bookshelf as she passed it. There was a soft thud and Dokja turned his head to the table between them.
“The late duke’s favorite book.”
It was the book he was staring at earlier. The cafe owner tapped on its title.
“Surprising, isn’t it? From the rumors alone, you’d never be able to guess that such a romantic book would be that brutish duke’s favorite, but things happen, and what happened to the late duke was something simple. Something cute, even.”
“...Something cute?”
“Love is a cute thing, child,” the cafe owner huffed out a laugh, “and that was what happened to the duke. That man was just in love.”
“How…” Dokja turned away, flushed. The mid-morning light grazed his cheeks from the outside, melded with the pink dusted across. There was a flower shop across the cafe. “How would you know that?”
“Why, it was obvious!” the cafe owner exclaimed. “It showed in everything he did and eventually, everything he came to be. Slowly, over time, the defining things about the duke changed: his favorite color, his manner of speech, his favorite food, his hobbies… His parents bragged so much about these that word of them even reached the slums. I don’t remember when the late duke started changing so much, but a couple of years ago, his favorite book was revealed and, well.”
Opening to a random page, the cafe owner ran a finger under a line of text, smiling sadly and lingering for a moment, before turning to the next.
“It was mass-released when word got out of it, all across the duchy. Not long after, the late duke’s parents sent out their own personnel to teach everyone how to read because of this, even if we were commoners. It helped a lot of us get jobs—and did you know? The slums here have ceased to exist because of this.”
“It sounds to me that the duke was only riding on his parents’ coattails,” murmured Dokja.
“Perhaps in his younger days,” the cafe owner smiled, “but when he succeeded his father, there wasn’t a day where he didn’t gift us commonfolk anything less than a miracle. Jobs, homes, education…” She turned to the next page. “Every day was nothing short of a miracle.”
Dokja let his mind linger on the revelation. “...The duke sounds like a great lord,” he muttered. “A good person.”
“And he was. Everyone loved him.”
“Did he know that?” Dokja paused. “That he was loved.”
“I’d like to think so,” the cafe owner answered. “Though I’m inclined to believe that a thousand love confessions would matter little to the late duke. When he was still here, he’d turn down any noble lady no matter their beauty or social standing.”
“Knowing him, he’d only glare and dismiss the ladies, manners be damned.”
“That was precisely what he did!” the cafe owner burst out laughing. “Every time! I pity the young ladies. Their attempts were futile from the start—not that I could blame them for trying, no. That man had a face chiseled to perfection!”
“Even then, his personality would be his downfall,” Dokja mustered a laugh. It hurt, talking about Joonghyuk. “The noble ladies would faint if they found out what he was like.”
“Heavens, you speak as if you know him well, young man,” she turned to the next page, smoothed out a creased corner of the paper, “It’s unfortunate, but the duke had a first love he couldn’t let go. A shame that hardly anyone from the nobility has heard of this. Us commonfolk can’t get enough of it.”
“A story?”
“A popular romance story starring the duke himself. Exciting, isn’t it? A maid with loose lips let it get out, and us commonfolk were having a field day! Those nobles don’t know a thing about this, and I reckon it’s the same for the tabloids outside the duchy.”
“You’re making it sound like some kind of local folktale.”
“It might as well be one, though rather sad.” The cafe owner pursed her lips. “The duke was well in love with someone from his younger years, and he’d never moved on, I think. He must’ve not been able to.”
“...He never moved on?”
“When you fall in love, you never really stop sometimes,” she said. “This was the case for the duke, and it showed in everything he was. Did you know what was revealed right after his favorite book?”
Dokja’s mouth dried. “I don’t.”
“This.”
The cafe owner turned the book to face Dokja and pushed it towards him.
“I heard that this was his favorite line.”
“Ah…”
Reaching for the book, Dokja pulled it towards himself.
He pressed his thumb against the fine print, dug his nail into the paper, as if it’d do something, and starred.
Etched in paper were memories.
This was something he’d never be able to get used to: the recurring reminders that Joonghyuk was gone, leaving too many instances of what they had in his wake. Proof that they had existed and despite all the time that had passed, how Joonghyuk had never forgotten about him.
Not once did he forget.
Dokja never did, either.
He clutched the book to his torso, and the cafe owner turned her eyes away. Perhaps she knew already what he was to Joonghyuk, or how the outline of a grieving lover looked like, and had pieced things together from there.
Dokja breathed in the scent of old books, tasted something bittersweet in the air, and hid himself between printed-out sentences.
He wanted to sink to his knees and scream until his throat hurt. He wanted to go back to years ago and ask Joonghyuk to hold him again, tightly, until he couldn’t slip away. Never, ever again would he slip away.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Ah, realized Dokja. Right. The cafe owner was still here.
He didn’t know if she was looking at him now, could only hope she wasn’t.
He peeked an eye open, read the printed line once, twice, over and over again:
— In the dream I don’t tell anyone, you put your head in my lap.
A memory echoed in his mind.
Dokja, it sang. Kim Dokja. Do you like books more than you like me?
“It’s...” Something stained the letters pressed up against his cheek. “It’s really beautiful.”
“When will you put your books down and pay attention to me, Kim Dokja?”
Uncannily, the tousle of black hair spilled over his lap matched perfectly with the line from the poem he was reading. Laughing, Dokja placed the book away and slid his fingers between soft, dark curls.
“Are you jealous, my lord?”
“...Mother and Father should’ve never taught you how to read.”
“You ungrateful brat,” Dokja smacked Joonghyuk’s head lightly. “You know I only read a lot of the novels I like because the protagonists remind me of you. If not, because of… you, some other way. Always because there’s something that reminds me of you.”
“But I’m right in front of you right now. In the flesh.” Joonghyuk frowned. “Not like those stupid protagonists.”
“Did you just call my protagonists stupid?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have a death wish, Yoo Joonghyuk?” Dokja tugged at Joonghyuk’s scalp playfully. “Careful with your tongue, you bastard. You’re completely vulnerable right now. On my lap.”
“And?” Joonghyuk challenged.
“And…”
A beat passed.
“And?” Joonghyuk repeated, cocking an eyebrow.
“And…!” Dokja’s face reddened, embarrassed. Childishly, he messed up Joonghyuk’s hair. “And this! I could make you bald if I wanted to!”
“Wh—hands off my—hair—Kim Dokja!”
“Ow, ow, ow—”
“Shit—”
Joonghyuk had shot up from his lap, grabbing his wrists, but he must’ve been too hasty, because their foreheads hit hard, and Dokja was clutching the bump from the aftermath painfully, gritting his teeth.
“Dokja—”
“Shut up. I hate you.”
“...Don’t cry, you fool.” Joonghyuk clicked his tongue. Despite his words, he brought his fingers up to Dokja’s face and brushed his bangs to the side, inspecting the bump on his forehead. “Does it hurt?”
“I hate you.”
“I said don’t cry.” Joonghyuk glared at him like always, but there was the absence of any venom in his gaze. He scoffed, rubbing Dokja’s forehead soothingly.
“You… I just… I was just reading and you…”
It must be because he was 15, still young and sensitive, that he felt like crying a little. Fuck—was Joonghyuk’s head made of iron? He closed his eyes, leaned into Joonghyuk’s touch, and sniffled.
At the sound, Joonghyuk stiffened.
“Dokja, hey,” Joonghyuk mustered a softer tone. He shifted awkwardly, because even after years of being acquainted with each other and having parents that loved him to the moon and back, he never could do ‘gentle’. He lifted his fingers, wiped his thumbs under Dokja’s eyes. “I… I didn’t mean to do this. I’m…”
He physically struggled with apologizing.
“I’m sorry,” he grunted.
“Liar,” accused Dokja, tearing up. His eyes were stubbornly screwed shut. “It—It really hurts, fuck—is your head made of bricks or something? What the hell have your chefs been feeding you? Do you—do you even know how much this hurts?”
“Dokja—”
“And what… what kind of half-assed apology was that? You—” he hiccuped, “You didn’t even sound like—like you were sorry—”
“Dokja,” whispered Joonghyuk. Dokja felt something soft press against his eyelids. Then, his forehead. “I’m sorry. Does it hurt?”
“...Like I’m about to die.”
“Don’t be dramatic.”
“Yoo Joonghyuk.”
“Right—it’s—fuck,” Joonghyuk’s expression twisted. “I meant—sorry. I’m sorry.” He pressed a kiss on a corner of Dokja’s eyes, thumbing his jaw and wiping away his tears before they could roll down his cheeks. “Can you open your eyes?”
Reluctantly, Dokja obeyed.
“I hate you,” murmured Dokja, sniffling. “It… my forehead… it really hurts…”
“I know,” said Joonghyuk, hushed. He cradled Dokja’s face in his palms, kissed his forehead. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re a goddamn brute,” Dokja said.
“I am,” Joonghyuk agreed, wiping away Dokja’s tears. He pressed his lips against them, and then his nose.
“And a rude bastard.”
Joonghyuk kissed his cheeks. “I am.”
“And you’re—so, so goddamn rude. And infuriating.”
His forehead. “I am.”
“I hate you.”
The corner of his mouth. “Mn.”
“...So much. I hate you so, so much, you bastard.”
His lips.
Dokja looped his arms around Joonghyuk’s neck, and melted.
“Yoo Joonghyuk,” said Dokja, ceasingly, after too long of a second after they separated, his face hidden in Joonghyuk’s shoulder, “I hate you.”
“Mn,” Joonghyuk kissed his earlobe, circled his arms around his waist, and pulled him closer. “I know.”
“You’re here.”
Dokja recognised that voice, however bitterly. “Saintess.”
Anna Croft took a seat beside him. “Are you here to pray?”
“Are you?” snapped Dokja. “The church is awfully empty today.”
“It’s a day of mourning. Haven’t you heard?”
“That’s why,” Dokja said, “there should be a crowd. There should be people filling this place up to pray for him.”
Anna Croft clasped her hands together in prayer, closing her eyes. Dokja turned away with gritted teeth.
“I pulled some strings,” she murmured. “I saw you in a vision. I saw you and this day of mourning. I saw his death, too.”
“You knew that we’d end.”
“I warned you.”
“And I heeded your warnings,” Dokja said. “I ran away. We still met our end.”
Anna Croft frowned. “Won’t you join me in praying, Kim Dokja?”
“I’m not sure if you can tell, but I don’t really have a reason to like whatever God you’re hoping to reach with your prayers,” Dokja leaned against the bench, slumping backward and huffing out a bitter laugh. “If He even exists—”
“Your tongue hasn’t dulled even after years,” Anna Croft cut in sharply. “Blasphemy is still punishable by death here, Kim Dokja. Bear that in mind.”
“That’s what you told me all those years ago, too.” Dokja looked up, took in the sight of the sunlight flooding in from tinted glass, slowly. The sunset was right outside. “Remember? You approached me, told me how you knew about Joonghyuk and I, and how sodomy was punishable by death, too.”
“You regret running away,” Anna Croft said.
“I regret leaving him too quickly,” he snapped defensively, “I regret never reaching out to him to at least stay as something less than what we were back then, because of you and what you said to me. I regret not staying a bit longer, and not being there for him when I could. I regret even considering to listen to you—”
“Kim Dokja.”
“I was seventeen,” Dokja dropped his head to his palms, trembling. “And I was happy. Happy. But then everything was ruined because of what you said to me. What you told me—”
“I saved your life.”
“For nothing!”
He took a second to try and steady himself—to no avail.
“Yoo Joonghyuk is gone.” His voice cracked open, petered out into something weaker. Something no less painful. “He’s gone—dead. He didn’t take any concubines, any wives. Never messed around in any brothel. He never moved on—and do you know how devastating it is to find out that he never did? That he never stopped,” his breath staggered, “loving me.”
Dokja gripped his hair, white-knuckled. “I could’ve spent 18 with him,” he said. “19, 20, 21—his birthdays, mine, everything—” He struggled with getting anything out, tried too many times to steady his breathing. “You took it all away.”
“I saved you.”
Irritatingly, Anna Croft’s voice remained calm.
“Him, too. All those years ago, I was only trying to save the two of you from death. You two would’ve been beheaded if your relationship was discovered.” She unclasped her hands and placed them back on her lap, opening her eyes. “I only gave you the choice to leave. You took it yourself, Kim Dokja.”
“I took it because I wanted Yoo Joonghyuk to live,” Dokja rasped. “Because I thought he’d stay alive as long as I did, at the very least. Or that he’d live longer than me, and then find someone else to love for the rest of his life.”
“But now he’s gone.” Anna Croft briefly glanced over Dokja’s shoulder, at the statue placed at the very front of the church, before looking back at him, quietly. “He’s gone, Kim Dokja.”
The words settled slowly in him.
It showed on his face: the realization, the finality, how it sunk in, and how he couldn’t manage it all in one breath. How he crumbled.
Anna Croft looked away after a few seconds too many, and then stood up.
“The duke was the happiest when he was with you.”
“...Are you trying to console me?”
“I find you pitiful,” she answered simply. “You don’t have much time left, don’t you?”
Dokja let out a long, strained exhale.
“You really are an all-knowing saintess.”
Two nights after Anna Croft confronted him, Dokja found himself here: seventeen, being kissed too delicately for someone like him, embraced by Joonghyuk for the first time because he asked, with their sweaty limbs sprawled across white sheets.
Tan skin settled against pale skin, clasped by the edge of something too gentle and tender to be associated with the Joonghyuk everyone knew, but Dokja hadn’t known him that way, no.
He’d known Joonghyuk in a much softer privacy, with the rougher parts of him clumsy and aggravatingly endearing.
That didn’t mean he was used to this, though.
To be held like he was precious and forced to come to terms with the fact that he was known, too—because this was a mortifying realization, and he was afraid, terrified. Vulnerable, too, perhaps. And afraid of breaking and of the things that would come after all of this.
Dokja tried to focus on the things that weren’t too devastating. He forced his gaze away to the edge of Joonghyuk’s shoulder, focused on how his scarred hand pressed against his skin, and how it closed around his waist.
Joonghyuk was trembling.
If Dokja didn’t know him the way that he did, he wouldn’t have noticed.
“I’d hold you any day if you asked. Any night.”
Joonghyuk used that tone of his, the one that made Dokja forget about their reality. The one that reminded him that this was Yoo Joonghyuk, here with him, only a boy. Not the duke’s son, not a young lord, but Joonghyuk.
His Joonghyuk.
He swallowed thickly. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Joonghyuk tightened his arms around Dokja, buried his nose in the crook of his neck and breathed him in slowly, surely.
“I would hold you whenever you’d want me to. I would, I will.”
Pulling away, Dokja forced himself to laugh. He brought his fingers up to Joonghyuk’s jaw and grasped it. “What brought this on so suddenly?”
“You look like you could disappear at any moment,” Joonghyuk answered. His hand turned over to Dokja’s wrist. He tried slotting their fingers together before exhaling, pained, like his world had just crumbled. This, Dokja saw in his eyes when he finally stopped looking beyond him. “It feels like you will, if I don’t hold on to you. It feels like you’ll slip away if I don’t hold you tight enough.” Joonghyuk paused. “Sometimes, it feels like you want me to.”
Dokja’s expression faltered.
“Dokja,” Joonghyuk quieted, pressing his face back against Dokja’s collarbone and making sure to hold him tight, so tight, so that he wouldn’t be able to slip away. “Don’t leave me.”
Joonghyuk had him all figured out.
Or perhaps he’d only had a feeling, a premonition.
Still, he knew, somewhat, of what was going to happen, and Dokja felt the edges of himself fray.
This was the consequence of knowing each other, he supposed. This was the consequence of everything they were and everything they stood for and nothing they were allowed to do but did anyway.
He looked over Joonghyuk’s shoulder.
The curtains were drawn shut, covering the window. No one else in the manor was awake around this time; it was only them.
Only Joonghyuk could hear him, all the words he forced down his throat. And Joonghyuk had tried to hold him closer, tighter, but he didn’t reciprocate. He couldn’t. It’d be too cruel of him to, he thought.
Dokja grasped for the sheets and crumpled it in his fist, taking in one shuddering, delayed breath. Slowly, he closed his eyes.
He exhaled.
“...Goodnight, Joonghyuk,” was all he said, eventually.
Joonghyuk said nothing back.
There was a gap in his embrace.
Dokja’s breaths came out ragged.
He was struggling to walk straight and the rain was getting heavier by the second. His fingers bled against the thorns of the rose in his hand as he stepped forward, staggering, and dropped to his knees, one by one.
It was dark, with the clouds clumping together into a large gray mass overhead, covering the sun. It was dim and watery, and Dokja’s vision couldn’t really focus no matter how hard he squinted, so he reached out his free hand, and gripped the edge of the tombstone.
“Joonghyuk,” he exhaled softly.
His fingers slid over to the letters engraved in the stone. He let his eyes close for a moment, tried to make out the words under his fingertips like a blind man searching for answers, trying to make sense of things.
“Joonghyuk,” Dokja crumbled, quietly, with his voice broken and his chest cracked open for a hollowing, folded against the cold grave and the raindrops running down his skin. The grass was wet under his knees.
Yoo Joonghyuk, the grave read. Gone too soon.
Dokja’s throat tightened.
“Do you remember when we were 15?”
The rain fell over his hair.
“No, even before that… Even before that, I always loved you, you know? I never said it, no, not before you did, but ever since my mother brought me to live with her in the duchy as a child, I always admired you. Everyone did. You were a prodigy, a genius. You were everything everyone wanted to be. You were everything everyone wanted. The exact opposite of me, that’s what you were. What you are.”
He opened his eyes, slowly, and found that his vision was still blurred.
“I never could keep my eyes off you,” confessed Dokja, quietly, like it was his big secret, “Those protagonists in the books I’ve always liked reading—you remember some of them, right? You always reminded me of them, because you were never not cool to me, you know? Even if,” he recalled fifteen, the ages before that, and the ages after. Then he laughed, just a little. “Even if you got so easily jealous of them like a child. Like a boy.”
Because that was what he was, back then. That was what the both of them were: children, and boys. Fools.
“You were really brave at 15, I think. Braver than I ever was. Back then, I was awkward and shy and a nervous wreck, but it wasn’t all that bad, I think, because you, Yoo Joonghyuk—you, the coolest person I knew, were just like me when it came to—” Heat built up behind Dokja’s eyes. They screwed shut, and behind his eyelids he saw two boys smiling, hand in hand.
“When it came to me,” Dokja finished. “Me. Us. When it came to us, you were a mess, but the good kind. Nervous and awkward—and bashful, somehow. Like—like our first kiss, yeah? Do you remember it? Because I do. I remember it. I remember liking it a lot. I thought I’d never forget it, or you. I thought I’d never forget about you even before that, and I was right.”
A beat of silence passed.
“I don’t think I can let you go.”
Dokja breathed in the smell of the rain.
He took a second, then two, to let everything in him settle into something quieter, something more manageable.
“I don’t… I don’t think I’ll ever get over you. I don’t think I’ll ever forget about you. I don’t think I can, in the first place, because that’s how it is when it comes to you. To me, Joonghyuk—to me, that’s how it is. It’s how you’ve always been to me.”
Unforgettable, seared into his memories.
Dokja closed in on himself, pulled his knees to his chest and felt the raindrops drip down his jaw.
“Joonghyuk,” he said. “I don’t want to forget you.” He paused. “But that—this—” His mouth wriggled around the words he wanted to say, the words he’d been bottling up all the way since seventeen. “This doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing’s going to matter anymore. Nothing I’ve said, nothing I’ll say, because—” his throat burned, “Because I was too late, wasn’t I? I was too late, and it’s ironic, because here I am, pathetic and sick and desperate, and you’re not here and I’m—”
A violent cough rattled through his ribs. Dokja flailed, then gripped a fistful of grass, letting the rose in his hand go, finally, over Joonghyuk’s grave. It took too long for his coughs to subside, he was heaving.
His head fell back against the tombstone, the edge mercilessly digging into his cheek as his lips lifted into a wry smile.
“I’m dying, you know?”
A choked-up, strained laugh left him with a searing familiarity.
“I’m dying, and you’re not here.”
He coughed again, this time into his palm.
Something slipped past the gaps between his fingers and a splotch of red landed over the top of the tombstone, but Dokja didn’t worry about it. The rain would wash it away, all the traces of him.
“You died, and I wasn’t there.” He lingered on the sound of the raindrops against the far-away trees for a second. “I wasn’t by your side. For a long time, I couldn’t be.”
“But when I left you all those years ago, I thought I’d be able to come back one day. I thought the world would change someday. That you’d be able to kiss me under the sun, without the threat of death hanging over our heads. I thought I’d come back to you eventually, and I thought you’d still be here, but…”
The wind picked up, slipped past his skin and his hair.
“That doesn’t matter now either, does it?”
Dokja felt his anger start to pick up, too. At himself and at all the piled-up regrets, and at everything he couldn’t control. Silently, he cursed the world the two of them were born into.
“If the afterlife exists—” his throat strained, “If there’s anything after this useless fucking life—”
He retched.
It was pouring heavily.
He was dying. He was dying. He realized this as if it was the first time. As if it’d just dawned on him.
He would die here in the rain, with his chest feeling heavy and hollow at the same time while the world was a blur in front of him and the only body he wanted to cup with his own was colder than his, and far beneath where he lay.
Dokja’s lips parted.
“...Joonghyuk.”
He tried to breathe.
“I want to see you,” he whispered. “I want you to hold me again, damn bastard. You—you promised, after all. You promised me.” He pressed his lips together, trembling, and his mouth curled into something small, desperate, “You remember, don’t you? You told me that you’d hold me whenever I’d want you to. That you’d come running back to me if I called out to you. That’s what you told me, and that’s what you promised, Joonghyuk. And all—all I want—”
Slowly, Dokja’s eyes fluttered shut.
“All I want,” he exhaled weakly, “is to be with you.”
He tucked his limbs closer to himself before they could go completely slack and felt the raindrops against his cheeks. He felt cold.
If Joonghyuk was here, his arms around him, he wondered how much warmer he’d feel.
“Tell me…” Dokja murmured, “Tell me you’ll hold me again, Joonghyuk.”
The grave remained silent beside him.