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He woke up searching.
For the rush of air to his lungs, to claim the breaths that were of his own volition for the first time in a while. He woke ripping off the wires that were attached to him, unstringing himself from the room that had been his resting place for years too long, before the sounds caught the attention of others outside. The entire affair was violent, like an animal desperate to be uncaged.
“Where is she?!” Kim Dokja wailed when they all stumbled in successively, each taking their own step to placate him. It was like watching a baby deer lurch around, finding its footing. He crashed into the IV poles, knocked into the frame of the bed, as Joonghyuk held him back from the door. “Where- I need to- I need—”
“Kim Dokja.” His eyes were on Joonghyuk’s in a flash, mouth parted and face open. “Stop.” That was all it took. Kim Dokja had forgotten, perhaps, of the years that had taken shape while he was not with them. The imploring in Joonghyuk’s voice seemed to have struck him, reminded him where he was, how long it must’ve taken for him to come home.
His legs gave away beneath him when the adrenaline retreated, and Joonghyuk’s grip became the only thing holding him up. His chest was still heaving when they settled him back into his bed, to let Lee Seolhwa and the others check his condition.
But the little extension they created did not act as the respite they wanted to. With every person that filed in and out, Joonghyuk knew he could not delay the truth any longer, not when the weight of it was already crushing them into the dirt.
Seolhwa put together reminders disguised as a rehabilitation plan. A couple of weeks of physiotherapy and a nourishing diet to make up for muscle loss, among other things. He was ordered minimal movement on his own and simple activities until his body remembered how to function. He wasn’t to be excessively excited or stressed, given his still fragile mental state.
Yoo Joonghyuk stood rooted in place in the small hospital room as the orders were given. He could follow it all but the last—that one was unavoidable, wasn’t it? It also, somehow, became entirely his burden to bear. Lee Seolhwa’s look of pity was the last thing he saw before everyone left.
He walked up to the bedside. Dokja was staring at his lap, at the applesauce on his tray and the spoon next to it. Joonghyuk could feel the air pulsing around them, tension swelling with every moment of silence.
“She’s dead, isn’t she?” he asked, looking up at Joonghyuk’s face for the answer he already seemed to know.
Joonghyuk said nothing. Couldn’t say anything, when his lungs had seized control of his throat and made sure nothing would pass.
That was enough.
Kim Dokja’s eyes wavered, grew glossy almost instantly. “Alright,” he said, chin trembling. Dokja reached out for Joonghyuk and he fell into place naturally. Curled around his shirt and rested his forehead against Joonghyuk’s chest. His hands were so gentle, so weak; they were nothing like hers. “I see.”
Then he let tears fall to try and ease a grief that would never fade.
It was a slow, painstaking process.
Breaking the details of the incident was its own concern. Joonghyuk tried letting the pieces fall into place, allowing the truth of what had happened to ease naturally. But Kim Dokja wanted to know everything all at once. He wanted the weight of words he was not stable enough to withstand.
As a compromise, Joonghyuk took him to her grave.
He was fully prepared to deal with the harrowing aftermath, but Kim Dokja found the stone and stared at it for a long, long time. Then he placed the yellow tulips in front and sank to his knees, hands digging into his thighs. The tears never came, as if he’d exhausted them. He likely had, the way Joonghyuk did when it happened.
“Hey.” It came out timid, trembling. “Sorry I’m late.”
A wave of something heavy, nausea, swept through him like it had been waiting for a reason. He felt like throwing up, felt his intestines were going to be twisted and wrung dry. Maybe Joonghyuk hadn’t exhausted all his tears just yet.
“I know you don’t want to hear that,” Dokja continued softly and Joonghyuk was so, so grateful that he couldn’t see his face. He felt his nails burrow into his palms, felt blood in his throat. “I know you hate sorries more than anything in the world, yet you’d definitely be telling me I should be fucking sorry for everything I’ve done. Sorry for that, I guess.” He laughed, and it was not a laugh at all.
Kim Dokja reached out, fingers running over the loose soil. Put his palm flat against the earth and sighed. “What I should really be saying is, thank you.”
What did it mean to create life with nothing but your hands? To pull together words from uncertain memories and create a narrative from scratch? To spend late nights talking and taking those conversations to fill up an empty screen? To form someone’s identity, and save someone else’s with it?
She’d done it once to ruin Yoo Joonghyuk’s life, and once again with his help. Still, Joonghyuk wouldn’t know. All he did was live the narrative and live beyond it, then more, in what he’d seen behind it. His hands had always been to destroy, not to create. He didn’t know. Would never know.
“I saw you,” said Dokja. “When you decided you were going to write Ways of Survival. And then when you did.” His voice felt tight, as if he were going to squeeze the words out even if it killed him. “Thirteen years carved out of yourself for someone like… me.”
He took a shaky breath, entire body trembling. “I couldn’t understand why.” Then, more quietly: “I still don’t understand why.”
It was not quite meant for Joonghyuk’s ears. He could barely restrain his anger. “Kim Dokja—”
“But you wrote that novel for me anyway, even with what it meant for me and you and this guy.” When he turned to glance at Joonghyuk, he was smiling. “I am thankful for that.”
He has to learn for himself. Those had been her last words. Joonghyuk had hated them. He would prefer to knock them into Dokja’s head, if he could. A couple of beatings would get the point across, surely, instead of this waiting.
And yet, Joonghyuk was beginning to understand why she’d insisted on it. Because the Kim Dokja that had come home, he would not ever be capable of it. He’d come close and repeat the words, wear the idea they have of him effortlessly. But erasing that sort of guilt entirely was near impossible. Kim Dokja had already gone and carved his sins into his stories; to absolve those sentences would be to pull apart the threads of the Kim Dokja they’d barely woven together.
They could not do that, not again.
It became a little easier, after that. The idea that she was within his reach in some form made things manageable. Or maybe the reality of it all simply looked him in the eye.
Kim Dokja liked to visit often, and even more by himself. He had a lot to say to her, it seemed. He would return home fine but there were moments when Joonghyuk caught him dazed, a little lost. Searching.
Even this big house that he so senselessly desired didn’t have everything he wanted. He could not ignore that; none of them could.
Empty spaces were only a reminder that something had been there, once.
“Tomatoes?”
Dokja looked at him strangely. “I don’t like tomatoes.”
Yoo Joonghyuk was certain of it, but it was nice to have confirmation. He thought she would have been happy to hear it aloud. He quietly thanked the readers of Kim Dokja’s story for ensuring this.
“Zucchini?” Joonghyuk continued.
“I have no idea how to cook zucchini.”
Joonghyuk frowned. “I am the one who does the cooking.”
It was easy to distract Kim Dokja—and himself—with mundane activities. Joonghyuk would call it filling space, if he were brave enough to say it. Grocery shopping and exercise and chauffeuring people around. Lee Seolhwa let him shadow in the hospital, and Jung Heewon would take him to the bar, so he could sit around and talk—no drinking, she promised. Yoo Sangah brought him to her lectures, seating him in the back so he could listen in on linguistic theories he could barely understand.
Yoo Joonghyuk realized that Dokja didn’t even know that she’d been a philosophy professor.
“It suits her,” he mumbled after Sangah had mentioned it in passing.
“Philosophy?”
“Teaching.” Dokja laughed at his own thoughts. He chopped vegetables slowly, steadily, after insisting on helping out. He’d gotten tired of just watching Joonghyuk do all the work. But his hand-eye coordination had gotten better and Joonghyuk saw no reason not to let him try. “I bet she swore at all her students.”
“She graded with disdain too.” The words tumbled out on their own. Joonghyuk thought of her, hunched over a desk in the depths of night, pouring over assignments. “She particularly disliked papers.” She still ended up grading all of them in time anyway, each with detailed, thorough feedback.
“That son of a bitch.”
Joonghyuk added vegetables to the pot. Stirred and stirred, waiting for Kim Dokja to say something. After a length of silence too long, he looked over to see red on the cutting board.
“Kim Dokja, you—”
“Her hands were scarred, I remember.” Dokja held his own hand out, as if admiring it. Crimson trailed down the side of his pointer, in the crevices and down his palm lines. “With those hands, she still…”
He shook his head, as if in disbelief. The smile on Kim Dokja’s face was crooked like it’d been drawn and plastered on. Yoo Joonghyuk’s stomach churned.
“She’s saved my life twice in the ways that matter, you know.” He pushed aside the ruined vegetables and brought his hand to his mouth. “The same person, two avatars, two stories.” When Dokja pulled his finger away, the blood was gone. “I didn’t get to thank her for either.”
Joonghyuk did not speak. Instead, he walked over and picked up the cutting board before dumping its contents into the trash can. Then he grabbed Dokja’s hand and ran it under the sink faucet.
“Do not do that again.”
Dokja stared at the flowing water. He was not going to meet Joonghyuk’s eyes. “I didn’t mean to.”
Joonghyuk felt an old anger crackle beneath his skin. “I don’t care.” He held a vice grip around Dokja’s wrist. His chest ached, like something was smothering it until it was impossible to breathe.
Kim Dokja stared at him for a moment, then sharply pulled his hand away. He turned the sink off, wet fingers wrapping around Joonghyuk’s forearm. “Sorry,” he mumbled, teeth gritted. “Okay? I’m sorry.”
Dokja wasn’t, really. He’d do it again. This was a man who didn’t think he deserved happiness no matter how much others besieged him. This was a man who didn’t know how to repent for his sins without hurting.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated, a little more desperately, and his free hand came up to swipe Joonghyuk’s eyes. A bit more genuine, at least for Yoo Joonghyuk’s sake. “I didn’t mean to. Really.”
He voiced his thoughts. “I don’t believe you.”
Residual puerility stuck to Joonghyuk’s indignation. Kim Dokja produced a smile a bit expired, but more genuine than the one from earlier. “Sorry,” he repeated in that way of his, like he carried more than he was willing to share. “I know that you too…”
He left the utterance incomplete. Yoo Joonghyuk pulled away and quietly finished making the rest of their meal. Kim Dokja’s meager apology hung over the air, and Joonghyuk tried not to think about what had been unsaid.
Her room had been left untouched. They could barely muster the courage to walk in, let alone move anything.
When Joonghyuk first told Dokja of it, the first thing he did was march inside.
The air was cool, not at all musty as Joonghyuk had been anticipating when Dokja eased the door open. Her notebook was on her desk for the few of them that dared to skim through it, multicolored pens scattered to the side. Empty candy wrappers were littered in the waste bin. The bed was haphazardly put together, with the blankets folded in on itself in an attempt to pass as neat. There were crumbs on the sheets. Three pillows were resting against the bed frame, an evident position of somebody who’d spend their nights sitting up with a laptop in bed.
Strangely, the room still felt alive.
Yoo Joonghyuk lingered near the doorway, watching as Kim Dokja browsed through it all. Something felt uncomfortably private—the perusal or the mere act of witnessing it. Joonghyuk couldn’t tell which.
Abruptly, Dokja turned. “When was the last time you came in here?”
Joonghyuk didn’t know. He said that, and then tacked on: “Why does that matter?”
Dokja frowned at him in lieu of a response. The gaze was scrutinizing and judgmental and pitying all at once. Joonghyuk glared back. “What?”
“You miss her so much,” Dokja muttered and the words were knives pressing against Joonghyuk’s throat. He grew still all over, wondering how an observation could feel so accusatory. The hush between them swelled. Yoo Joonghyuk stared, and Dokja stared back.
Kim Dokja was right, after all. It was so easy to admit in hindsight.
“What else am I supposed to do?” Joonghyuk replied quietly and broke the impasse. Then he took several steps back and left the room, left Kim Dokja alone.
None of it had been easy. She had not been easy. She was infuriating and grief-stricken and volatile, and then too many things all at once, more than her small body could hold. Even then he’d missed her so, when he knew she was alive and well, when she wrung words out and wrote and wrote. He’d missed her when she stood right in front of him. Missed her even when he could reach out and hold the hands that built him from nothing.
Yoo Joonghyuk stood in his bedroom. Inhaled once, then twice. The breath that followed was still trembling.
The door opened several minutes later. Joonghyuk would have been surprised if he hadn’t been followed. He waited for whatever other blow Kim Dokja would send his way.
Instead, Kim Dokja took a seat on the mattress. He ran his fingers over the comforter, smoothing out wrinkles. It made Joonghyuk feel like a stranger in his own room. His nails dug into his palms. “What is it?”
“I see her in my dreams.” Yoo Joonghyuk startled, the hostility creeping over his shoulders retreating immediately. Suddenly what—
“She curses at me,” continued Dokja. He picked at the sheets, then pressed a palm against them. “She tells me she doesn’t regret it.”
Joonghyuk frowned tightly. As if such confirmation was ever needed. “Kim Dokja, you…” Words failed him unexpectedly. What was he trying to say? Why couldn’t he get them out?
“Joonghyuk-ah,” Kim Dokja finally turned, a smile so minuscule and blinding. “She’s just as I remember.”
It was odd, the first time Joonghyuk noticed the dreams. He’d expected the nights to be worse, to make up for the comparatively manageable days, but they weren’t. Terrors never haunted Kim Dokja the way they had Joonghyuk, and he knew because the nights were steady and sure, disturbingly sound. And the truth of that matter came as no consolation.
It took him a second for all the words to parse. Joonghyuk said nothing and instead joined Dokja on the bed, watching as he stared out the window, at a silver smear of a moon. How unpleasant. His eyes burned. How pathetic.
To Kim Dokja, who spent every moment aching for someone he would never again have in his reach, of course the dreams of her came as solace.
For the nightmare would be to wake up and remember that she was gone.