Work Text:
Joonghyuk woke up alone.
Everything registered a little too late: the sunlight, how it clung to all the wrong and empty spaces on the bed, the warmth beside him and how it stung, how no one was there beside him, now.
The curtains were drawn open, the blanket scrunched up, kicked into a corner of the bed. There was a dip in the pillow beside Joonghyuk and the window was slightly open, as if someone had left through it in a rush and couldn’t close it properly from the outside.
Joonghyuk noticed the smallest things; everything he couldn’t see and nothing he could accept; all of them burned into the back of his mind.
Dokja was gone, he realized. This realization happened too slowly.
Dokja was gone.
Joonghyuk started his day like this: grieving silently, quietly, knowing he’d lost the one thing he couldn’t afford to lose with his fists in his hair and tugging angrily at his scalp because he was a fool, a goddamn fool. Because he’d expected this, somewhat. Because he knew Dokja better than the back of his hand but hadn’t done anything to keep that fool here. He hadn’t done anything to keep that fool with him.
One moment blurred into another and another and another, and suddenly he was at his desk, gripping his pen so hard it almost snapped in half in his hand, a lone sheet of paper in front of him.
He lingered on the morning and the night before. He lingered on today, and yesterday, and two days ago. He lingered on this morning’s sunlight and how that warmth felt nothing like last night’s warmth when Dokja’s skin was pressed against his. He lingered on Dokja like he always did, even before all of this. And he thought, angrily, furiously: That fool. That idiot. That imbecile. Dokja. Goddamn Kim Dokja.
In a burst of anger, Joonghyuk dragged the tip of his pen from one corner of the paper to another.
You fucking idiot, he wrote, language not befitting someone of his status. You fucking idiot, Kim Dokja. I knew something was up. I knew it from the start, from the second I held you.
When I held you, you looked like you were about to disappear. When I held you, you looked like you wanted to disappear.
The morning before this you told me you wanted me to hold you; you told me how it’d be our first night together; I had accepted. You knew—know—I’d never turn down a request from you. But I should’ve never accepted; never. I would’ve never accepted if I knew you’d disappear immediately the day after.
He scratched these sentences out in one swift motion, tirelessly, with his pen. Erase, write. Erase, write. Again, and again.
And then, with quivering hands, he wrote: You told me you loved me.
Do you know how desperately I held you?
He crossed this line out, tried to rewrite it. Tried so desperately to articulate his thoughts better:
When I realized you could disappear at any moment. Did you realize how desperate I was?
He crossed out everything he wrote.
Then he tried again.
He wrote, and wrote, and wrote again and crossed out every single letter under his pen and repeated this over and over until eventually, his anger rose too sharp and melded with his frustration, and something ugly festered within him. Until eventually, Joonghyuk crumpled the letter in his fist and hurled it at the wall.
His letter, now an ugly-looking ink-stained ball of paper, bounced off the regal wallpaper. He watched it bounce off. He watched it roll against the floor back towards himself. He watched it until it stopped, slowly, and then he stared.
Finally, he strode forward and grabbed the balled-up letter, and uncrumpled it.
For a moment, he stayed squatting against his carpeted bedroom floor, fists clenched, thumb digging into the creases of his letter, staring. Only staring.
Dokja, his letter started off, at the very top. Following that was an amalgamation of black ink and crossed-out letters and unintelligible scrawl, of a visual representation of his thoughts. And then, at the very end of the paper, the one line he didn’t—couldn’t—cross out in the end:
You told me I’d never have to lose you.
Joonghyuk lingered there—on his own words and letters and the parchment paper yellow at its edges—and waited, and lingered, and then lingered some more. He’d end up spending forever like this, he thought, and dreaded, and anticipated. He’d linger and regret and never leave this one moment in time.
Uselessly, hopelessly, desperately—even though he couldn’t tear his eyes away from his letter—he reminded himself: A duke’s son does not cry; a duke’s son does not show any weakness.
Again: A duke’s son does not cry; a duke’s son does not show any weakness.
Joonghyuk hung his head low and convinced himself that these weren’t tears rolling down his cheeks.
“You’re the one thing I don’t want to lose.”
Joonghyuk eyed Dokja curiously. “Suddenly?”
“I just felt like saying it.” Dokja shrugged and smiled foolishly, resting his head against Joonghyuk’s shoulder. “You’re the one thing I can’t lose, I think. I don’t have a lot, but even then…”
Joonghyuk set down the book he was reading. “Even then?”
“Oh, don’t make me say it; it’s embarrassing. Just—don’t suddenly disappear from my life or whatever, okay? I don’t have a lot in the first place. I can’t lose you.”
Joonghyuk held back a smile. “Are you saying I’m all that you have?”
“Well.” Dokja pursed his lips. “Yes? No? Kind of?”
Joonghyuk glared.
“It’s a hard maybe.”
“A hard maybe,” Joonghyuk echoed dryly, unimpressed. “You’re ridiculous.”
Shaking his head disapprovingly, he huffed and opened his book again. He was no reader; he didn’t usually read unless he needed to, but Dokja had pestered him on and on about this particular novel for months and despite Joonghyuk’s reluctance in the beginning, he had conceded.
(But it had been a losing game for him in the first place. He never could win against Dokja.)
“Every day I wonder how you haven’t been kicked out,” he said.
“Cut me some slack. You get what I’m trying to say, don’t you?” Dokja grinned, poking Joonghyuk’s cheek, before pausing dramatically. “…Do you?”
“Do you take me for a fool, Kim Dokja? Besides,” Joonghyuk swatted his finger away, scowling, but his scowl dropped not even a second after, because as he turned the page of his book, momentarily silent, the protagonist reminded him of himself, ridiculously enough, and he was reminded of something Dokja had told him repeatedly ever since they were children: “I read a lot of books because the protagonists remind me of you,” Dokja had said thrice before they were 15. Then, once when they had their first kiss. And then over and over again across the years. A sweet little thing. A sweet little thing that made Joonghyuk’s ears warm. “I think the same, after all.”
Dokja shot him a confused look. “What?”
Joonghyuk grunted, head turned away, hoping Dokja couldn’t see how he flushed. Unfortunately, Dokja could still see his ears, and the moon showed it to him: the warm scarlet flush there, the hint of something delicate and bashful.
“I don’t want to lose you either,” Joonghyuk confessed.
There was silence.
Then, Dokja threw his head back in laughter.
He laughed hard, tears welling up in his eyes, practically radiating joy beside Joonghyuk. He grabbed Joonghyuk’s face, forced Joonghyuk to look at him, and kissed the corner of his mouth.
“God, you—” Exasperated and fond, his laughter petering out into something softer, Dokja pressed their foreheads together. “You big buffoon, Yoo Joonghyuk,” he exhaled. “You idiot. You fool of a man.”
Joonghyuk glared at him. “Kim Dokja.”
“Right, right, sorry,” said Dokja, his laughter coming out softer with each second, and Joonghyuk could never stay mad at him, no. He placed his hands on his waist. “Sorry, it’s just—wow,” said Dokja, “Wow, I love you.”
Dokja sounded bewildered and quiet and soft. But to Joonghyuk, he sounded like something a little more, sounded the same way he looked in this moment: breathless.
When Dokja nuzzled closer, his arms snug around Joonghyuk’s neck like it was the most natural thing in the world, Joonghyuk held him impossibly tighter. He listened closely to the sound of his breathing. His heart, then, too.
“You won’t lose me, Joonghyuk,” Dokja whispered. “Never.”
I lost you.
Joonghyuk opened his 41st letter with this.
The day he realized he had lost Dokja, he had written his first letter, and there were more after that: some less angry, less furious, some yearning, some begging, some reminiscing.
They’d piled up, over time. Joonghyuk stashed them someplace only he knew, someplace hidden and clever, where he was sure none of the staff would clean or stumble upon by accident.
Days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months and months turned into years. Joonghyuk grew from a desperate boy to an even more desperate man; he lived through these letters. Sometimes, he wrote his fantasies, and then lived through those. He imagined what life would be like if Dokja never left or if they reunited, or if they’d met in much easier conditions (not as a duke’s son and a gardener’s son but as commoners, as people who didn’t need to fear getting found out by the church).
By the 79th letter, he tried desperately to write everything he remembered about Dokja. The little things especially, like how he held spoons weirdly and how he hated tomatoes. How he liked his desserts and bread, and how they used to sneak into the kitchen and end up getting scolded by the cooks because they got discovered and were covered in flour from head to toe, and his mother would be mad but never too mad, with her hands on her hips, exclaiming, exasperated but fond, always: Again?!
Dokja would smile goofily. Foolishly. And Joonghyuk wouldn’t, because he was Joonghyuk, and he didn’t smile, not really, so Dokja would always smile wilder in moments like these to compensate for the both of them; he’d smiled wide enough for the both of them.
In his 81st letter, Joonghyuk talked about how he took up cooking.
He wrote about how he forced the family chef—Master, she’d forced him to call her; her name was Namgung Minyoung, a commoner—to treat him like an equal and hammer cooking skills and recipes into his skull.
It was a ridiculous request and an even more ridiculous sight to see: a noble—and not just any noble at that, but the heir to one of the only ducal families in the kingdom—getting spanked by a commoner woman thrice his size, yelling at him because he ‘cut the garlic the wrong way.’ But it paid off, eventually. Eventually, Joonghyuk got good at cooking.
After a while, he’d managed to create his own dishes. A lot of them followed a strictly no tomato rule, but a lot of them also had them, hidden between some bread or steak or fish, because tomatoes were good for the body—they made you healthy.
(Joonghyuk wondered if Dokja was taking care of himself.)
By the 100th letter, he’d concocted 91 different recipes tailored specifically to Dokja’s taste.
He released none of them to the public.
And then the days passed, and he had less and less free time. He couldn’t cook as much as he’d like to anymore, but he made sure to write, always; he never spent more than 3 days without writing a letter addressed to a lost man.
There was less and less space for him to store his letters.
Secretly, with the authority of being the duke that he’d gotten somewhere along the way, Joonghyuk built an underground storage unit just for this. He heaved all the letters into the unit and carefully arranged them by number all by himself: one, two, three; one hundred, one hundred and one, one hundred and two.
He told Dokja about the secret storage unit just for the letters in his 410th.
He dreamed about telling Dokja in person that night, but his face was blurry, with too much a likeness of a hazy memory, because it’d been years, and Joonghyuk was still only human. He couldn’t remember Dokja’s face as well as he’d like to, couldn’t imagine how he looked grown up after all these years.
I hired the best painter in the kingdom. Hired him to try to paint you, Joonghyuk wrote, once, long after his 410th letter. I had no pictures of you, no portraits nor paintings, he wrote.
I tried to describe you to the painter, but nothing he drew looked like you. Your jaw was always softer, never rigid, never sharp. Your cheeks were pinker than whatever he painted, your eyes boundless. You, with a book in hand, with the other in my hair; you, you, you.
(This letter had been one of the hardest to write. Joonghyuk’s grief had seeped into every word, every sharp curve of his scrawl; and he’d paused several times writing this letter, vulnerable in the way he only ever allowed himself to be while writing these unsent letters.)
Continued: I haven’t been honest writing this.
Scrawled, and desperate, and pathetic and hopeless: I tried to describe you to him, I really did. But as it turns out, I’m still only human, Dokja. I’m still only human, and I can’t remember your face that well now, because it’s been years since 17. It’s been years since you left.
Dokja. Hopeless. Hopelessly hopeless: Dokja, I can’t remember you.
I can’t remember how soft your jaw was, or how pink of a flush you had whenever we used to kiss, or anything else.
I can’t remember the right shade of your hair—it was black, but not exactly; I can’t remember how your lips curled when you smiled; I can’t remember how your eyelashes fluttered or how long they were; I can’t remember your hands, you, your warmth. I can’t remember, I can’t. I want to.
But I remember your eyes.
(His trembling grew reckless here—too much, too earth-shattering and heavy; his writing looked a mess.)
At least I think so. I’d like to think I do.
And despite his complaints, he didn’t throw away the paintings in the end.
The painter was given his payment, and Joonghyuk was left to stare at paintings dumped between piles of unsent letters, grieving.
His eyebags grew deeper. He couldn’t remember Dokja’s face, he realized. He couldn’t remember Dokja’s laughter.
By the 999th letter, Joonghyuk had grown into a foolishly pathetic man.
On the outside, he was the same: stoic, stone-faced. Noble women flocked around him constantly and sent love letters his way—because a maid had caught him writing one of his letters once, and rumors of him being a romantic who valued love letters promptly spread far and wide—and Joonghyuk had read through each letter meticulously.
By the off-chance that one of those wretched love letters was written by Dokja, Joonghyuk scrambled through each line of text carefully, desperate. But it was always to no avail; there wasn’t a hint of the man in any of those shallow, flattering words. Still, Joonghyuk hung onto the useless sliver of hope he’d retained all throughout adulthood ever since 17 years old.
Even after years, the fact that he’d do anything to get Dokja back didn’t change. No matter how stupid. No matter how foolish. No matter how ridiculous. It’d never change, he thought.
He wrote this all in his 999th letter.
By the end of that letter however, he’d crumpled like paper; he was hunched over, face in his hands, before his hands moved up to his hair, and pulled at his roots. There were his fists in his hair then, and his grief echoing between the thick walls of his bedroom like a record forever stuck on repeat.
They blur by: the days, the letters. Memories he could only vaguely cling onto in his dreams. He reread the first few letters he wrote.
Turns out, they were all too short, and he hadn’t written much of Dokja himself. He never wrote about how he looked in great detail, or how warm he was whenever they’d hold each other close, and Joonghyuk regretted this most, among many other things.
Fortunately—or rather, unfortunately—it seemed he didn’t have a lot of time to regret, because soon enough he had to take off to the battlefield at the request of the King and Queen themselves, with a sword and some ink and a pen slipped in-between the heavy metal plates of his armor.
For the next endless months he spent his days trying to win a ridiculous, pointless war. Sometimes he charged on horseback; sometimes he charged on foot. He killed, he survived; it didn’t take long for the newspapers to start calling Joonghyuk a hero.
Though the war was far from over, he’d brought victory upon victory, had slaughtered women and children alike belonging to the rival kingdom (no one cared for this), had been forced to reevaluate his morals (over and over again; repeatedly), as the tabloids fawned over him and as his fellow citizens cheered him on, as Joonghyuk could no longer wash the blood off his hands (it seeped through, made a home in the bones of his knuckles).
The Kingdom’s Main Protagonist, he’d remembered reading the title of one of the wretched newspapers he’d seen only once over the shoulder of a fellow soldier, Read All About The Kingdom’s Savior!
The title had struck him point-blank, had left a deep impression. It was because of the wording, he mused.
Main protagonist. Main protagonist. It reminded him of Dokja and his books.
Here, in a crimson sea, bathed in flecks of debris and surrounded by mountains upon mountains of corpses, this was the only thing Joonghyuk could think of to calm himself. Here, where no one could tell apart friend from foe because they’d all been using the same kind of armor and spears and bows and swords and had mounted the same kinds of horses.
The ground he was sitting on was coarse and bloodied, his limbs limp against puddles of scarlet, against the cold corpse of a dead horse. Joonghyuk’s eyelids were heavy and all around him was the reek of nothing but rotting flesh, but then, he noticed, suddenly: it was sunrise.
The opposing kingdom had won and had left no one but Joonghyuk alive this time around. His kingdom had lost this battle, and he was surrounded by cold to-be-carcasses of his comrades, people he knew.
He’d be the only soldier and knight and noble left behind to tell of his comrades’ deaths to their respective families. He’d be the only soldier and knight alive to shoulder the grief of a thousand, and then a hundred more. He’d be the only one to see mothers thrash and wail and fathers clench their fists hard beside their wives, shaking, upon receiving the news.
He’d be the only one who wouldn’t be able to mourn and grieve—he wouldn’t have the time; he’d be forced to charge into battle immediately after the last one over and over again even if he was pained, hurt, exhausted.
This was a cycle, he reminded himself, as if trying to convince himself to persevere. That he needed to persist. This was a cycle.
A war was a cycle. First: rejoice and hope. Second: charge into battles, do your best. Third: there would be loss, and you would mourn and grieve. Fourth: repeat.
This was a cycle, Joonghyuk repeated to himself. This was a cycle he was familiar with.
But who could blame him if he was tired? Who could blame him if he felt as if this whole thing about war was pointless, and that he would much rather desert his kingdom for a peaceful life isolated from the rest of the world? Who would blame him for running away? he thought, with closed eyes and ragged exhales. Who?
(He’s all bark and no bite though, because he doesn’t run away—he never does. Not then, not later on. He’s persistent like that, a trait he never could get rid of, but he can’t help it.
So he fights still, and tires even more, always, with each passing battle.
But he’s so, so tired sometimes. So, so exhausted. He wants to do nothing but rest, wants to do nothing but lie down and breathe in a bloodless air.
But even then, he reminds himself often in-between fields full of nothing but bloodshed, with scars all over his skin and wounds too large to dress with just one roll of gauze. Even then, even then, even then.
Even then, he never stops writing to Dokja.)
(The mighty never stay mighty; they fall, eventually, and Joonghyuk learns this the hard way.
I want to die, he wrote in his 1863rd letter. I want to die, I want to die, I want to die.
Nothing more, nothing less—just this one line repeated up and down the parchment paper because try as he might, he was still only human and humans had their limitations, and he was no different, and god—oh god, he was still only so human. How could he have forgotten such a simple fact?
Dokja would lecture him on this, he thought. Dokja would scold him, face falling, his hands cupping his jaw before moving up to his cheeks, where he would tell Joonghyuk, then: You’re only human. And then: Bastard. And after a pause and the softening of his eyes: I’m worried about you, Joonghyuk.
After, Joonghyuk would lean into his touch, he supposed, followed by Dokja sighing and leaning in and murmuring, with their foreheads pressed together: Stop making me so worried and rest, got it? I’m serious. Close your eyes and rest, you persistent workaholic bastard.
Then: one last sigh, fingers combing through his hair, his head on Dokja’s lap, eventually.
You’re only human, he imagined Dokja would say, and kiss him square on the forehead. You don’t need to be perfect anymore. You don’t need to fight anymore, he’d say. It’s enough that you’re my protagonist, he’d say. It’s enough.
Finally, Joonghyuk would close his eyes, would feel the most relaxed he’d felt since he was 17, and sleep, and rest, and wake to no more loss and no more demands for perfection. Then Dokja would greet him good morning with a kiss, with a smile, and everything would finally, finally be alright.)
“You son of a bitch!”
Magic slammed open the doors and a seething Han Sooyoung—a particularly strong sorceress, second only to the kingdom’s tower master, and somehow, by some odd twist of fate, Joonghyuk’s closest friend—marched in. She flicked away the dagger he’d put near his throat to the wall with a wave of her finger, watched in horror when a single prickle of blood near Joonghyuk’s adam’s apple fell to his sleeve.
“You stupid bastard! You stupid—fuck! You stupid fuck!” she shouted, more terrified, marching towards him before slapping him hard across his face and, right after, grabbing him by the collar.
(It didn’t matter how much taller he was, only that Sooyoung was furious and in disbelief and holding back something in her throat, and that Joonghyuk looked unbelievably exhausted and fuck. Fuck.)
“What the fuck were you doing?! What the fuck were you thinking?!”
“Han Sooyoung,” Joonghyuk said, the syllables coming out a little too raw and hoarse. His eyebags didn’t help his case, didn’t calm Sooyoung down in front of him any bit. “Why are you here?”
“Oh—no. No, we are not doing this,” Sooyoung felt this a little ironic, a little mind-boggling and ridiculous, “Stop that. Stop all that bullshit and just—just give it to me straight, bastard. Tell me what happened and why, Joonghyuk.”
“Why,” repeated Joonghyuk, “Why what?”
“Why I found you with a dagger!” answered Sooyoung, seething, helpless, “Why I found you almost slitting your fucking throat, goddamnit!”
Joonghyuk quieted.
He thought: You know why. He thought: You know why and you have since I was 17 and you 15. He thought: I thought you’d understand. I thought you’d let me.
Let the dagger run its course, he wanted to tell Sooyoung. Let me rest. Let me, let me, let me.
But he didn’t voice any of his thoughts aloud and said instead, “I have nothing to say to you, Han Sooyoung. Leave.”
“Leave!” Sooyoung shrieked. “I just saw you almost slit your own throat open and you tell me to leave?!”
She was screaming, and Joonghyuk had been tired as is but he was even more exhausted now, and he missed, he so desperately missed, the years before he was 17. Missed being able to rest and think everything was nothing but swell, too. Missed Dokja most—first and foremost.
And god. God, he was exhausted. He wanted to cry—so completely unlike him—and he wanted Dokja back—so completely like him.
“Don’t—” he started, but his voice cut off by itself, and he swallowed down something stuck in his throat, “Don’t scream,” he told Sooyoung, quiet but not the usual Yoo Joonghyuk quiet. Something more vulnerable, more broken, and that both agonized and horrified Sooyoung because this was Joonghyuk—Yoo Joonghyuk!—they were talking about. Yoo Joonghyuk!
“I’ve had enough of people screaming. I hear it enough on the battlefield,” he didn’t realize he was trembling, although only slightly, when he said these words, “so lower your voice if you don’t want yourself kicked out and blacklisted from the duchy for the rest of your life.” And then, tacking on at the end, as if to wholly abandon their friendship, the casualness between friends, “Sorceress Han.”
This—the verbal line he drew between them, the silent declaration and warning he’d given, this sudden formality, this sudden detachment—shook Sooyoung to her core.
Shaking, and stumbling backwards just a little bit, she let go of Joonghyuk’s collar. It looked as if she didn’t know what to say to that, or what to do in response, and her hands hovered around her, unsure of everything, and it was a long few seconds after when she turned around and kicked the peg of a chair, angered, frustrated, and screamed, “Fuck!”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” she shouted, then swivelled her entire body back to face Joonghyuk again, and there were tears running down her cheeks, Joonghyuk noticed.
Sooyoung began: “You and that guy”—Joonghyuk winced—“are exactly the same, fuck! Would it kill you to tell me anything?”
Joonghyuk‘s fingers curled into his palms. His fingernails pressed deep enough to draw blood, almost. “You wouldn’t understand,” he said.
“But I do!” yelled Sooyoung. “I lost him the same day you did! I lost him the same morning, the same month, the same week and month and year—”
“He wasn’t to you what he was to me!” Joonghyuk snapped.
“He was dear to me too!” Sooyoung’s hands tried desperately to wipe away her tears—to no avail—and eventually settled on her hair, clutching the strands, pulling at her roots. “Fuck, Joonghyuk! Dokja was dear to me too—and you knew that! You know that! I grieved for him the same! Mourned for him just as you did, Joonghyuk!”
Sooyoung felt the increasing heat around her eyes and tilted her head up.
“God—fuck—” She pinched the ridge of her nose, before rubbing her eyes and looking away. “I’m not—I’m not going to lose another friend, okay? I can’t, I don’t want to, alright? So just—just—listen. Listen, for a bit, Joonghyuk. Can you do that? Please.”
Joonghyuk was silent—though his brows were furrowed, and his jaw clenched hard—and Sooyoung took his silence as an answer. An affirmative.
The silence persisted for a moment. Sooyoung inhaled sharply, tried steadying her breathing after, counting each breath and second that passed. “Dokja…” her mouth trembled, “Dokja is alive, Joonghyuk.”
Joonghyuk saw red. “Don’t fuck with me, Han Sooyoung.”
“I’m being serious!” Sooyoung stressed. “Shit. Just—just listen, okay? Listen. I don’t—” her lips pulled into a line, “I don’t know where he is. I don’t know his exact condition. Okay? I just—I just know that he’s alive. That he’s out there.”
Dread reached Joonghyuk first. What was I about to do? he thought. But then there was hope, which was good, but then a million feelings he couldn’t name, and his world began to spin.
“He’s out there, Joonghyuk,” Sooyoung said, before continuing to explain in a rush, “I’m not sugarcoating things, I’m not just guessing—I know for sure that that bastard is still alive. I know this because I had a spell put on the two of you long ago to confirm your health somewhat, when we were still so young, and it’s—and it’s still working, I guess. Faintly.”
Sooyoung’s words were too hard to digest.
“I thought…” Joonghyuk began, voice wavering. It dawned on Joonghyuk: the realization, the possibilities, the future. He thought back to his letters, the dagger, the dread. The morning after, the night right before. “I thought he was dead.”
“Joonghyuk,” a sob left Sooyoung’s throat, and though she was so much smaller than Joonghyuk, she put her arms around him and hugged him tight, “No, no, no. God, no. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. The spell was quiet for so long that I forgot about it until you almost died recently on the battlefield. And after I found out and checked on the spell I placed on Dokja, I immediately went here, and fuck. Fuck. If I had been just a second late, you would’ve—” her eyes stung, she couldn’t bear to say the words.
“Fuck, Joonghyuk,” she said. Whispered, then: “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
This didn’t feel real; the truth hadn’t quite hit Joonghyuk even now.
Dokja was alive. Dokja was alive. How was he supposed to react to that? How was he supposed to function, after hearing such a thing, such a confirmation? Happy, probably, and he was. He was.
“Sooyoung,” he eventually said.
“Joonghyuk,” Sooyoung replied.
“Han Sooyoung,” he said, crumbling, his voice cracking, him breaking, and then sagging into the hug, “I’m exhausted.”
“I know.”
“I’m sick of this.”
“I know.”
”I’m sick of the war, and the tabloids, and the slaughtering. The killing.”
“I know.”
“I miss cooking,” his voice broke, just as he did at 17, at 1863, “I miss making new recipes and cooking for you and Sangah and Seolhwa and Hyunsung and everyone else we know.”
“I know.”
There’s a short pause. “I,” Joonghyuk began again eventually. His mouth trembled, wriggled around the words he wanted to say and eventually, eventually forced out, “I thought he was dead.”
“I know. God, I know,” Sooyoung wept. “And I’m sorry, fuck—I’m so, so sorry for not telling you sooner, Joonghyuk. We’re—we’re going to find him, okay? We’re going to find him and yell at him for being a goddamn idiot and interrogate him on his health and whether or not he’s been eating his veggies like he promised us when you two were 13 and I was 11.”
There were constant streams of tears and snot seeping into Joonghyuk’s sleeve, of which was made of fabric worth hundreds of thousands of coins, but Joonghyuk didn’t shake Sooyoung off. He almost started crying too, he realized, behind his eyelids a heat, and he’d hugged Sooyoung almost too tightly back.
“We’re going to find him and tell him everything he missed out on and tease him for it. We’re going to find him and feed him your new recipes—every single one of them, especially the tomato-specific ones, especially all the ones you made for him—and introduce him to Namgung Minyoung and the rest of the new staff at the duchy, and he’ll be wow-ed. He’ll be wow-ed, and we’ll see him and his smile again.”
That sounded nice, Joonghyuk thought. He would like that. He would like that very much.
“We’re going to find him, Joonghyuk, so—” Sooyoung hiccuped, “so don’t give up. Don’t give up, alright? You’ve always been a persistent, tenacious bastard since childhood, so giving up would be unusual. It would be weird; it wouldn’t be you, so—”
“So I’ll hang on,” Joonghyuk cut in, finished for her. Then, firmer, and with more conviction: “I’ll hang on.”
“Yeah,” Sooyoung laughed a little, and a smile stuck to her face right after, even though she was still crying. “Fuck yeah you will. That’s what I’m talking about, bastard.”
“I’ll find him,” Joonghyuk said. “We’ll find him. We’ll find him, and we’ll drag him back home and yell at him for all his bad habits and feed him poorly disguised tomato soup as revenge.”
“Yeah, that—” Sooyoung nodded, sniffling, and grinned. “That’s exactly what we’ll do.”
Dokja,
I almost gave up on you.
I am guilty of this, and I am ashamed, and only after Han Sooyoung had slapped some sense into me had I realized how ridiculous I was being.
Forgive me, Dokja. Just this once, forgive me.
This is my 1864th letter to you and the last. Like the others, this too will remain unsent (I hope for this to change someday, and for you to forgive me again, and again, and again if you ever do come across them), but just know, Dokja, and never forget anything I write here. Let this letter be my sole witness. Let me vow to you with ink and paper and pen and quill and heart all these things:
One, that I will say to you everything I want to say when I finally find you again. When I can reassure you and keep you in my arms and finally convince you that what we have is okay, and that you’re safe—we’re safe.
Two, that there will come a time when you are in my arms once more and I in yours, and we will never lose each other again after that. I’ll leave no leaf unturned. I’ll search every kingdom, every fiefdom, every nook and cranny, for you.
Three, that I will tell you how much a fool I had been, and how much a fool you had been. I will tell you too many things I’d held back and regretted holding back. I will, I will, I will. I swear to you, Dokja. I promise you everything. I promise you all these things, and I promise you me, and I promise you anything more. The moon, even, if you asked for it. Anything.
Lastly, for good and forever, and for as long as I live, and for our next lives and whatever that may come next, I swear to you this, Dokja:
I will never give up on you.
—Joonghyuk.
“...And that’s the infamous story of Duke Yoo’s first and only love. Romantic, isn’t it? From how he looks, you wouldn’t expect him to be such a devout, romantic man or how it’s one of the things he’s most known for, other than being a war hero, or the protagonist of his time…”
“...His letters to his lover—whose name, Reader, was only recently undeciphered—were discovered long after his passing. You can see them all over this wall, right beside the duke’s portrait. It’s said that they heavily impacted the old kingdom’s laws and beliefs. It’s no exaggeration to say that Duke Yoo immensely helped in the assimilation and acceptance of homosexuality into society in the past—and thanks to him and many others, we’ve been able to freely love who we love for years. Now, if you look to your right…”
Dokja tunes out the guide’s rambling and squints at the painting of Duke Yoo.
Some of the other museumgoers like Dokja have paused here to admire the duke’s notorious good looks. There’s a pair of highschoolers on Dokja’s left giggling and taking photos and distant murmurs of awe coming from a small cluster of young adults.
The duke’s very handsome. Dokja can’t help but agree, but that isn’t the reason he’s staring at the portrait so intensely, no. Something else had pulled him in.
His fingers tingle when he looks at the duke’s eyebrows. He feels some sort of phantom sensation, as if he’s gone over them with his thumb tens of thousands of times, and his chest aches just slightly, and everything about him just feels too familiar. And it’s wrong, Dokja finds himself thinking. The painting is wrong.
The duke’s nose is too high, his skin too white, his eyes too brown. His skin should be rougher, and his clothes should be more black than white. This is not Duke Yoo.
Dokja doesn’t know why he knows all of this.
As if in a trance, he reaches out a hand towards the painting.
“Hey, Dokja—”
Dokja stops in his tracks, wakes from his sudden, momentary trance, and embarrassingly takes his hand back and catches Sooyoung’s look of mocking disbelief.
“…Were you about to vandalize a famous painting?” she asks. “Dude, that thing’s worth as much as the Mona Lisa.”
“I was not. Shut up. What were you going to tell me?”
Sooyoung rolls her eyes, gesturing to the hallway leading to the museum entrance just behind Dokja with a tilt of her head. “My girlfriend,” she reminds him pointedly. “She just texted me, told me she was somewhere at the entrance, now heading over here. Don’t tell me you forgot? We went here just to meet her and her cousin—”
“Who you want to set me up with.”
“—who is very handsome and definitely your type.” Sooyoung sighs. “Seriously, where’s the gratitude in this friendship? I help you get out of those shitty blind dates your mom pesters you forever to go on and this is the thanks I get? No, ‘Thanks, Sooyoung. You saved me,’ or, ‘I owe you,’ or, ‘I can’t wait to meet the guy you’ve approved of and know will be good to me. I’m so lucky to have you as my best friend’?”
It’s Dokja’s turn to roll his eyes. “You’ve been hyping up Sangah-ssi’s cousin so much I’m starting to doubt he’s even real. Is he really so handsome?”
“Hey, I didn’t say he was some kind of Greek God,” Sooyoung says, “I just said—word for word—that he’s your type. Like, if you asked me, I don’t think he’s that handsome, but he’s exactly your type.”
“Exactly my type?”
“Tall, broody, emo, looks like he could star in one of those shitty adaptations of your favorite novels as the main protagonist—exactly your type.”
Dokja narrows his eyes at her. “I don’t believe you.”
“Okay, fine, have it your way. Just don’t end up drooling over the floors when you see him—and don’t tell me I didn’t warn you, because I definitely did.”
“Is he some big shot in the publishing industry?” asks Dokja, shooting Sooyoung a suspicious look. “Is that it? Is that why you’ve been kissing his ass so much?” In mock horror, he gasps. “Sooyoung, even if he was my type and we got into a relationship, the most I’d do is slip in a good word or two about you in passing; I don’t support nepotism, you vile woman…”
“It’s not that!” Sooyoung half-shrieks half-whispers. Then she manages to compose herself in record time, face scrunching and her looking like the personification of a groan. “Jesus, Dokja, what the fuck do you take me for? I’m not kissing his ass, and the guy’s not in the publishing or writing industry at all. Hell—he doesn’t even like reading novels.”
He doesn’t even like reading novels? “Huh.” Dokja blinks. “Minus five points.”
Sooyoung groans for real this time.
“What? Novels are my life. You know this,” he defends himself. “If he doesn’t like reading novels then what am I supposed to do? Maybe he’s handsome, or interesting in some other ways. Maybe. But,” he purses his lips, pauses dramatically before continuing, “Yoo Joonhyun.”
Sooyoung wants to smash her head into a wall.
“Don’t give me that look,” Dokja says. “You know what I’m trying to say; you can’t tell me the guy I’m going to meet is going to be as handsome or good as Yoo Joonhyun.”
“Yoo Joonhyun is a scumbag,” Sooyoung replies flatly. “And he isn’t even real. You’re just delusional.”
“How dare you—”
Someone taps his shoulder and he almost jumps out of his own skin in surprise. In front of him Sooyoung puts on a disgustingly bright smile and in an evenly disgustingly bright tone, exclaims, “Sangah!”
“Sooyoung-ah,” greets Sangah, kissing her shortly, before turning to a now composed Dokja and hugging him in greeting. “Dokja-ssi.”
“Sangah-ssi,” Dokja musters a polite smile. “It’s been a while.”
Sangah laughs. “It really has. I’m glad we can meet again, even if it’s because Sooyoung wanted to set you up with my cousin.” Dokja can’t help but genuinely smile at this, amused. “Anyway, why don’t I introduce you both? I’ll call him over; he’s been admiring some old artifacts while waiting for me.”
“Oh, no. It’s fine. Sooyoung and I weren’t serious about this whole blind-double-date thing, and I wouldn’t want to be a bother—”
“Oh, but I insist, Dokja-ssi!” Sangah interrupts him. “My cousin is handsome but his personality is, how do I put it…”
“Absolute shit,” Sooyoung gleefully offers.
Sangah nods in resignation, sighing, before smiling in kind. “It took me days to get him to agree to this. Just once—how about you meet him just this once? You’ll be doing me a huge favour and if, after this is over, you don’t like him, then that’s that.”
Dokja squints at Sangah’s deceptively kind smile.
“I’ll delete Sooyoung’s Kim Dokja Blackmail folder,” she adds.
“Deal,” Dokja immediately answers.
(“Hey—!” Sooyoung starts, but before she can spark an argument in the middle of a museum, Sangah slaps a hand over her mouth.)
“Where is he?” he asks.
Sangah turns around, briefly searches the crowd of museumgoers. “If I’m not mistaken, he was right over… Ah, there he is!” She raises her hand, waving and smiling, and yells, “Joonghyuk-ssi! Over here!”
Past scattered groups of people, a tall man turns his head to the side, and Dokja’s breath catches in his throat.
They lock eyes, and the stranger’s eyes instantly go wide. His sharp eyebrows raise in shock, and something seems to dawn on him. Time seems to slow in this moment and the world fizzles out all around them. Dokja doesn’t know what face he’s making, but the stranger breaks into a sprint and starts running towards him with a look of wonder.
When the stranger reaches him, now right in front of Dokja, Sooyoung snickers. “You didn’t have to run like that,” she says. “What, don’t tell me there was a cockroach or something, and you booked it because you got scared? At your big age—”
Yet again, Sangah slaps a hand over her mouth.
“Sorry. Just ignore her,” she tells the stranger, before clearing her throat. “Dokja-ssi, this is—” she turns to Dokja, ready for introductions, but freezes.
A good few minutes pass with her body tensing and her eyebrows knitting in worry before she can speak.
“Dokja-ssi, you…” she begins carefully. Dokja snaps out of it, finally, fumbling and embarrassed, whipping his gaze away from the stranger to Sangah. “You’re crying.”
“Huh?” Dokja blinks once, twice. He brings his hands up to his eyes and fuck, Sangah’s right; he sniffles involuntarily, tries to wipe away his tears, ends up laughing awkwardly.
“Shit, sorry—I don’t—I don’t know why I’m crying, but”—he glances over at the stranger again—whose lips have parted and his eyes somehow indescribably soft—and feels his chest swell, his eyes crinkling at the ends, and his smile wobbly but wide, so wide—“I’m fine, I think. I’m alright. I’m just—” his voice cracks, “I’m just really happy.”
Before Sooyoung or Sangah can say or ask anything else, the stranger—he has sharp, strong, and furrowed brows, Dokja distantly notes, and a firm and sharp and tense jaw; familiar; all of these things, so achingly familiar—reaches out to touch him.
Handsome bastard, Dokja thinks. And said Handsome Bastard wipes his thumbs right under Dokja’s eyes in an attempt to stop Dokja’s tears, but it’s not working. So he gives up on that and runs a thumb over the soft line of Dokja’s jaw instead. Dokja melts into his touch instinctively. Devastatingly.
“You,” Handsome Bastard exhales, breathless, “I know you.”
“I know,” Dokja exhales softly, then laughs and places his hand over the stranger’s. “And I know you too,” he says. And finally: “Joonghyuk.”
Everything clicks into place.
Joonghyuk pulls him by the jaw and waist, and his hands are so, so irrevocably warm—tightening around Dokja’s waist and pressing around his jaw—like he’s been dying to do this his whole life. And it’s like a lifetime ago. And it’s like they’ve never had to lose each other.
A lifetime too late, Dokja reciprocates, finally, hugging him tightly, and kissing him back as slow and long and soft.
There are tears streaming down his face. Everyone’s looking at them, at two supposed strangers kissing as if they’ve been starved, and it should be embarrassing but it isn’t, and Dokja finds that he doesn’t give a damn because Joonghyuk’s here now. Because he’s here with Joonghyuk now.
Beside them, the long-forgotten couple’s eyes widen, and it’s only after his and Joonghyuk’s kiss finish does the silence get broken.
Unsurprisingly, it’s Sooyoung who breaks it. “Since when did the two of you know each other?” she asks, and Dokja bursts into loud, genuine laughter.
“I can’t believe you wrote 1864 letters to me.”
“It’s your fault,” Joonghyuk scowls, though he holds Dokja closer to his chest. How could he ever move on from him, after all? He thinks, anyone who’d fallen for Dokja would know this: there was no way out. “You ruin me,” he murmurs, means to say: I couldn’t love anyone else after you. And I wouldn’t. There was only you. It’s always just been you.
Though he spoke the words in good faith, Dokja freezes. “…I’m sorry, Joonghyuk.”
Joonghyuk looks down at him with a frown. Raises an eyebrow. “For?”
“For leaving,” Dokja answers meekly. “For running away and abandoning you.”
“It hurt when you left,” Joonghyuk admits. “It hurt even after years, and it never stopped hurting.”
He remembers the days of crushed, balled-up letters. He lingers on the memory, and the many memories after. In all of them, Dokja isn’t there.
“You frustrate me to no end, Dokja,” Joonghyuk says simply. He strips himself bare like this; he circles a hand around Dokja’s wrist, pulls him closer, doesn’t look away from his eyes.
(They look the same, he notes. They’re as he remembers them, and a sense of relief and closure washes over him at the realization. They’re as he remembers them.)
He thinks back to his last letter, and the last line he’d written, and closes his eyes, breathing in slowly. He feels Dokja’s pulse and it’s steady, and his skin is warm, and he’s alive and here. He’s here.
“Spend a lifetime making it up to me,” Joonghyuk grunts. “You can’t refuse.”
It’s then that Dokja’s expression softens. Joonghyuk can’t see it but he guesses that there’s a small smile on his face.
“How did I get so lucky with you?” Dokja whispers, rising from underneath the duvet and kissing Joonghyuk’s face all over. “I won’t leave you ever again, Joonghyuk. Never.”
“On second thought,” Joonghyuk murmurs, opening his eyes and reaching for the back of Dokja’s neck and pulling him closer. “You’ll need to do a little more than that.”
“Mn.” Dokja gasps when Joonghyuk hungrily kisses him, and when Joonghyuk trails a hand down the small of his back. “Yes—I—ah—” Dokja swats Joonghyuk’s wandering hand away when it trails too much lower, red-faced. “Calm down, you horny bastard! At least let me speak”—Joonghyuk is too distracted by the flush on his face, his wetted lips, his skin pressing against his—“We just did it; I’m not young anymore, you’ll break me.”
“Dokja.”
Somehow Dokja sees flower petals surrounding Joonghyuk’s face. Gah. Puppy dog eyes?
“…Alright, alright, fine!” A long silence passes with Dokja just glaring at Joonghyuk, a war without words, as Joonghyuk’s hand comes back to settle around his waist, before Dokja concedes with a huff and drops his head to Joonghyuk’s shoulder. He rolls out of Joonghyuk’s arms, to his side, then finally has his back against the sheets.
“Just…” He turns away, covers his face with his hands shyly, growing even redder. “Stop looking at me like that, and don’t…” he lowers his voice to something barely audible, “Don’t be too rough…”
Something in Joonghyuk snaps.
“Morning, Sooyoung-ah.” Sangah kisses Sooyoung’s cheek and hands her her morning coffee while tidying her bedhead. Sooyoung mumbles out a lazy g’morning back, which makes Sangah smile. “What’s got you troubled so early in the morning?”
“It’s nothing. Just—” Sooyoung takes a sip of her coffee, squints. “Those guys’ memories.”
“Ah.”
“I didn’t expect them to remember instantly.”
“Well,” Sangah laughs, “it was a little embarrassing when they started crying and kissing each other in the middle of the museum. Everyone was looking.”
“It’ll make good blackmail,” Sooyoung snickers, reaching past Sangah to place her coffee down on the counter. Then, she wraps her hands around Sangah’s waist, leans in and sighs into her hair, and relishes in how Sangah’s fingers comb through her hair. “A pair of idiots,” Sooyoung murmurs. “That’s what they were in the last life, and what they are in this one, too. They deserve each other.”
Sangah smiles softly. “You’re happy for them.”
“Eugh.” Sooyoung’s face contorts as a shiver runs down her spine. “Never say that again.”