Work Text:
To the person in the bell jar,
blank and stopped as a dead baby,
the world itself is the bad dream.
— Plath, from “The Bell Jar”
[This story is for just that one reader.]
It echoes in Sooyoung’s mind, the memory of that. Somehow, the weight of it presses her down even when she makes her way to chase the hope of Dokja’s existence returning. Countless different ideas pass her by, soft as the cold breeze in her face, telling her that this is what it means to be a writer. Even though she is right here, beside Joonghyuk, beside each one of her companions, her mind transcribes every single detail like an observer from the sidelines. Yoo Sangah’s laugh, like the light. Yoo Joonghyuk, nodding very quietly. Sooyoung’s own heart flutters in the middle of her chest, hurting like a wounded bird, staring at the door of the hospital room unsure of what she’s going to find at the other end of it. If that existence will be recognisable, or something even worse, if that existence will recognise her.
Sooyoung has never regretted anything in her life. Every single decision she has taken, she has taken aware of the responsibility that comes with it. She isn’t a coward, it is not her nature to be one. She might be selfish, she might be delusional and she might be confusing and disconcerting, especially not the kind of person who fits in here with all the thematic sacrifices but she deserves to be here, now with an intermittent knowledge; a certain idea she cannot yet comprehend without actively loosening the vast number of threads that hold her mind together.
The soft, weak light from the white screen of her living room veranda. The gaping absence of her parents, their backs a figure silhouetted into the door. The white door. The ink grinder. Her first lighter, translucent blue shining in the dark of her father’s office that reeked of smoke, her unmade bed and the yellow iris plants secured in pots by the sunlit windowsill of her childhood bedroom. How, so many times, as a child she had stared numbly at that same windowsill, at the naked branch of the tree outside that looked like it was creeping closer towards her the more she looked. How, her life seemed something unlike her own. And then there were those dreams. Those dreams, the beginning of this world.
She remembers the curb. Dust swirling around the staircase preceding her into the shops that lined it, and her, quietly sitting with her knees to her chest as she peered into a novel. Another novel. Over and over again, consuming all of those words with delight and wondering if she’d write like that someday. She did not have high standards of excellence, to her writing was writing. Anything written down was something to be admired. But in her own case, she wanted better. She would read and imagine how her life would sound, written down. She would read and imagine herself as a character, the oak table in her bedroom filtering in the mellow afternoon with countless sunglasses littering its surface, her mother’s hands gently caressing the side of her face when Sooyoung first returned with an award. Rain, right outside the veranda. The world turning grey, green and brown. Back to the very start.
She has always wondered how she’d fit her current self into a story. How she’d describe the touch of a table against the pads of her fingertips. How she’d look into the mirror and observe the dips in her face, the mole under her eye.
How… how she’d be kinder, if she was allowed. If she could be.
How she would be—
In the end, the story about her life isn’t all that great. It is rushed, unedited and boring. And it is very, very long with nothing at all to make it interesting. It plays on a great stage, governed by forces unquestionable and unchangeable and in the end, it leads them to this very moment. To this room, clinical and white and so sanitised the smell makes her want to fall to her knees.
The rest of them filter inside after her.
Sooyoung’s heart is roaring. She feels the grin on her face, some kind of astronomically ancient joy stirring in her person at the idea of how small her hands are in the face of this abnormality of her own design.
Kim Dokja is sitting upright on the bed, heaving, hand grasping his own chest, taking huge gulps of air in and out over and over again as if he’s breathing in this world for the very first time. Startled, almost, at the knowledge that it doesn’t hurt him.
Her entire life. Thirteen years. Until eternity.
She remains there, stuck on the threshold. Even Yoo Joonghyuk takes a few steps closer to the feet of the bed, near the stabilising life support by his side screaming of Dokja’s functioning heart in irregular and irritating beeps, that by all means tell them that Kim Dokja is back and functioning as any regular human being would. All of her companions rush towards him, the kids gather around him and sob. Dokja doesn’t seem to be able to comprehend the existence he is, right now. His hand is pressed over his heart like he can hear it thumping in his ears. Yoo Joonghyuk says something, quietly.
Sunlight spills in through the open windows like a new beginning. The final new beginning. A carefully crafted epilogue.
Every single decision Sooyoung has ever made haunts her now but then, Yoo Sangah turns and Sooyoung can’t even feel the tears on her cheeks when she stalks forward, narrowing her eyes. She doesn’t even know what she’s going to say, what she even wants to say, but the moment Dokja sees her, the moment their eyes meet, the world turns quiet.
Time against time. Him, on the white bed, in the white room, clutching his chest. Sooyoung, standing by the foot of it, unsure what to do with her own hands. Monstrosity against monstrosity.
Recognition filters in his eyes the moment he sees her. Against all odds, that is the thing that finally breaks her. That is the thing that, ultimately, forges past her ironclad resolve and finally dissolves into cold, unflattering tears. Dokja, still struggling for his breath, now almost laughing. Ugly laughing. Laughing in the only way he can. Dokja, right there, by their side, along with them.
Dokja. Kim Dokja.
What could a person who has followed one single story for over thirteen years even be like, what could a person haunted with that amount of devotion even be called?
“You fucking bastard,” Sooyoung snorts, and it comes out warped and twisted. Comes out wet with grief.
“Sooyoung-ssi,” Sangah admonishes. “The kids—”
“Sooyoung-ah,” Dokja wonders, aloud. His voice is rough, disused, barely even a voice. But it’s him. And he sees her, standing there, and he’s smiling and it’s the most brilliant smile she’s ever seen. Befitting of a God. “Han Sooyoung.”
Her story is complete.
This version of the epilogue remains unwritten. Sooyoung stares at the open word document on her system for a very long time, at the thousands of emotions welling inside her begging to be let out on paper. She feels so much like a little kid again, burnt out after writing and writing for so long without stopping that on some days she cannot even lift a finger.
A face pops in, right then, crawling through her memories and taking a seat beside her coffee cup on the table. She tries to push it away but it remains persistent. She tries to avoid thinking about it as much as she can, but it remains persistent. Still, Sooyoung emerges victorious when she decides to simply knock the screen of her laptop down and get up, stretching her fingers and her back.
It doesn’t bother her much that she cannot write anymore. She has always been writing, for as long as she remembers. Now, she thinks, is the time to do other things. Go on to explore different fields. Pick up badminton like Yoo Sangah’s always bugging her to. Or Basketball, Jung Heewon’s forte of secret stress relief. She could try singing but she’d be kicked out and disowned by all of Kim Dokja’s Company for the humiliation she’d bring upon them. Dancing isn’t something she’s good at either, she thinks. She’s never been a particularly physical person. She skipped all gym classes, she befriended the librarian who let her sleep during those. Her physical constitution, as embarrassing as it is, isn’t as strong as some of the others.
Sports… dancing or music, those are a little far-fetched concepts still. Besides, what would Dokja think? He’d probably laugh himself to hell.
She pauses, in the middle of the room. She’s standing with her bare feet on the faux fur carpet. Her windows are wide open, curtains fluttering in the afternoon wind. Outside, the branch of the willow tree that leans into her bedroom like an outreaching hand has bloomed into pretty violet flowers. Inside, she is cold. She is slight. And she is suddenly as weak as the day she ran to find Dokja at the subway station, reached out for him— out before she was consumed and then.
Nothing.
These bouts of fatigue have been occurring more often, recently. She thinks it’s what she deserves. A lie became the truth because she spoke it into existence. A lie became the truth carved by her own hands. A lie became the truth. The one singular truth.
Sooyoung looks to one side of her apartment, the one where her bed lays on an elevated counter. She’s renting a simple but expensive studio. It’s enough for her, just one person. Everything she has ever wanted is within reach. Including her reflection, reaffirming her existence, on the side of her bed. A slender rectangular mirror held up against the mint green cabinets, letting her see herself clearly.
She looks smaller than she did yesterday.
She looks down again, at her hands. Scarred and broken, countless times. The bandage and gauze she still ties around her wrist, like a precaution. The wounds there haven’t healed yet. She doesn’t know why they haven’t healed yet but she doesn’t want to take the risk.
But now, Sooyoung holds that hand against the light. Up, up and over. For some reason, her feet carry her forward until she’s spinning. Once, twice. Over and over through the empty space of her living room, trying to make a shape out of that absence, trying to give it a name.
She’s laughing. She doesn’t remember, anymore, what she stood up to do, having gotten caught in committing all of this to her memory. Her hair falls a little beneath her shoulders now. The mole under her eye is still the same. Her features are still sharp, her face still looks like it’s going to break into a grin any moment now. She doesn’t know why it all seems a little distant, still. Is that a consequence of the regression turn Joonghyuk took them on?
A consequence of writing Ways of Survival, crafting it into the world. Becoming a god. Is this her condemnation? The lie she protected with her own two hands until it became the truth; it could be the cost of defending such a lie. She does not particularly have any idea, even after so long, how to deal with the knowledge that she wrote the very words that set the foundation of the end of the world, how she is the orchestrator of all that suffering and terror.
But perhaps, an even scarier conclusion for her is this: she doesn’t regret it. If she could go back again, she’d do it all over again because it led her to that guy.
To Dokja, the man lying on the bed next to her on the photoframe she keeps on her bedside table. Yoo Joonghyuk, her and Kim Dokja. Taken a day after he returned to that same sickening hospital ward.
She still cannot quite look at Yoo Joonghyuk’s face. She tries not to make it obvious but now that she has nothing else to occupy her time with, she keeps thinking about him. About him and Ways of Survival.
She tried really hard to do him justice. She tried really, really hard. She still remembers his rage at finding out he was just a character— his belief, undefeatable belief, that all of the things he had done, all of his monumental suffering was something written down on a page.
The page that she wrote.
But she wrote him a happy ending, too. One that he sat back down to edit, solidifying hence the lack of his own origin and yet, he did it. Yet, to him, this is a happy ending.
Why does it not feel as such to her? She wonders if it is the lie, again, eating through her soul. The terror of what she’d done, the burden that no one else but herself could carry. What even could be the truth about all of this really?
Sooyoung is a writer. Every single story she had ever written before Ways of Survival, ever dreamed of, she had made up of some root cause. Ways of Survival was written out of one too, but if someone asks her about what the whole truth of its origin was she would never be able to answer that. She would never want to.
Why would they want the truth, anyway? The star-stream, back then and the entire world now, were always broadcasting and reporting their story from everywhere; they didn’t need the truth. They were content with a lie. They were comforted by it. And Sooyoung would never change that perception, Sooyoung didn’t care enough about them.
Didn’t care enough about them but what about Dokja?
When he inevitably would ask her, why she chose him, what the truth was, what would she tell him? She doesn’t know the answer to it and the lack of one scares her. Sooyoung is a decisive, calculative individual. She never takes risks. Nothing has ever mattered to her like this before, nothing has ever mattered to her enough before.
Why would it matter to him what the truth was, anyway? She gave him a story. That story saved his life. Wasn’t it enough to have a story like that?
Her phone vibrates and falls off the counter of her desk. She flinches, allowing the curling alarm to break her out of her reverie as she curses and rushes to retrieve it.
14:25, she reads on the screen. Yoo Mia. She has to go fetch Yoo Mia from school.
Somehow, no matter how incredibly unbelievable it is, Yoo Sangah becomes synonymous to comfort. She draws Sooyoung out of her apartment, a place she only leaves when she has to fetch Yoo Mia and remains holed up in otherwise, and talks to her. Tells her things about her day and waits patiently until Sooyoung is comfortable enough to start talking about hers. Sooyoung has an inkling of the conversation she wants to have today, as well, but the afternoon sun is scorching and she is sleepy and this is exhausting.
“Sooyoung-ssi,” Sangah says, walking out of the glass doors of the curbside convenience store and towards the big blue umbrella under which Sooyoung’s currently taking refuge. She has popsicles in one hand and two cans of soda in another.
Sooyoung’s sprawled over on the white table and she doesn’t sit up straighter even when Sangah comes around. Instead, she just lazes around more. Hands outstretched on the tabletop, head pillowed over her bicep. She makes grabby hands for the can of soda and it is only when she feels its cold, dewy skin in her palm that she raises her head, leaning back on the chair and raising one leg to settle it on the spare seat. She curls her hand around it, tipping the can of soda in her mouth and relishing the burning sensation.
“You know,” she says, quietly. She doesn’t know if she has the right to say it. If she should. But she says it anyway, because she needs to. “You don’t need to refer to me like that.”
Sangah’s expression breaks into a smile. Her brown hair is glowing bright in what little sunlight reflects on her figure, bouncing off the glass storefront. “What would you call me then, Sooyoung-ah? Unnie?”
Mortification reels her in but it isn’t like Sooyoung hadn’t expected it when she’d said those words out loud. “Sure,” she says, knowing how awfully pink her cheeks probably are. “If you want.”
“I would like that,” Sangah says, warmly. She’s so unbearably stable. Sooyoung can still remember her anger back during the initial days of the scenarios, her furious expression at Sooyoung’s absolute lack of sensitivity. Sooyoung knows she hated her at some point, she isn’t sure what changed since then. Or if it was some weird principle she earned after becoming Sakyamuni’s successor, something insane like tolerance. Or if it is because they saw the end of the world together and everything else seems pointless, in comparison. But she is always seeking her out first like she knows Sooyoung won’t.
Always coming to fetch her, in the end.
Sooyoung knows that no matter what they’ve been through, the other companions do not understand her. She doesn’t think Sangah does, either, but she doesn’t seem to care.
“If you’re done assessing my intentions again,” Sangah says, “can I ask you something?”
Sooyoung blinks rapidly. “I wasn’t assessing your intentions. I was just—”
“It’s really okay,” Sangah says. “I do not mind whatever it is that you are doing so as long as you trust me, right now.”
One of the things Sooyoung had always disliked about her, her ability to forgive almost anybody. No matter what. Yoo Sangah is still too hard to understand.
Such benevolence was beyond Sooyoung’s realm of understanding after all. She had no such bone in her body. She’d already forsaken the world, fucked it over for her own selfish sake, because she couldn’t bear to leave one single life behind.
“I know what you want to ask me,” Sooyoung says, fetching the clear packet lying on the table in between both of them. “I don’t know if I have a proper response for you.”
Sangah sighs softly. “He can tell you’re ignoring him, you know?”
Sooyoung looks away. “I’m not ignoring him.”
One week up and Sooyoung hasn’t been able to pay him a single visit. To a person who can read her like an open book, in more ways than one, he obviously knows what’s going on. But it is true. She hasn’t been ignoring him. It isn’t on purpose. It’s just that now that they’ve reached the conclusion, now that everything has finally fallen into place― everything, all of it, has fallen into place and the final epilogue has been constructed― she doesn’t see where she falls into the machination of it. Somewhere, deep inside, she loves the story too. A crazy, maniacal part of her isn’t afraid of the ghost of the apocalypse still lingering over the heart of the city. She is not shaken by the sight of the building beside them, once a proper home, now crumbled under what could have only been a giant feet.
She made this. She made it all.
She does not particularly know what kind of price she has to pay for it, yet. She cannot, of course, have it so easy. There has to be retribution somewhere, right around the corner.
“What I’m saying is,” Sangah says, insisting enough that Sooyoung turns back around to look at her, “he’s been waiting for you ever since he woke up. It’d be nice if you guys could actually talk to each other, that’s all.”
“You make it sound like we don’t talk at all,” Sooyoung mutters.
“Well, before— you were always together, in a corner, whispering to each other.”
Sooyoung’s resolve falters. It hits her straight on the head, the memory of that time.
“You are important to him,” Sangah continues. “He is important to you too. So talk.”
Sooyoung stares straight ahead at her can of soda for a very long time. Then, she slides her gaze off to focus it on the pavement instead. “I really want to dye my goddamn hair.”
Maybe she’s taken aback, because Sangah laughs.
She laughs and Sooyoung looks back at her right when her eyes crease shut for a second. She laughs and Sangah thinks: yeah, Dokja is right. She is incomparably beautiful.
The next day, Sooyoung goes to a fucking florist. It’s just a stop on the way but she trembles by the door still. The windchime flickers above her when she finally gathers the courage, as if in encouragement, and she raises an eyebrow in mocking appreciation.
It’s cloudy. Fitting enough for a day like today. She doesn’t know if Dokja likes flowers but even if he doesn’t, he better treasure these. The girl at the counter had asked her what she was looking for when she’d stalked inside and yes, for all the flower symbolism Sooyoung has looked up on the internet, she doesn’t remember a single bit of it. She had told the attendant she’d like to give something to an idiot in a hospital ward who was prone to considering death over and over again but was not suicidal in the traditional sense of the word. It had been a very accurate description and seemed to have struck a chord in the girl’s faith too because her eyes glittered for a second before she went on inside to fetch a decorative bouquet of purple flowers.
Sooyoung stands before the door to Dokja’s ward now, taking in a deep breath. She doesn’t know why she’s nervous to see this idiot. It’s her idiot. It’s Kim Dokja.
They saved the world together.
She slides the door open and steps inside, resolutely not looking at the person on the bed until she has drawn the door to a close behind her.
The smell of antiseptic fills her nose. She makes a face, scowling. “I truly hate the sight of all this.”
She’d been here every single day when Dokja was still sleeping. Writing the story, hoping that he’d remember them and come back and wanting to be the first person he’d see if that happened.
The sight Dokja made on that bed still kicked the wind out of her.
He looked weak, so weak. He was still built the same way he had been during the apocalypse but now his cuts and bruises looked even more ghastly, less likely to heal into things that wouldn’t become scars.
“These are fucking heliotropes,” she says, casting her gaze to the side to avoid saying something else that would make her sound miserable. “They were so expensive—”
Ah. There are a lot of bouquets there. A lot of them, the entire couch is covered with them, some litter the floor too.
She looks back at a grinning Dokja, disbelief etched on her face. “Turns out people have made me into a hero, as well.”
His avatar never smiled like that. He was never amused, always somewhat confused. He was still curt and direct but he didn’t seem to have any energy like before. Always sleeping. Either that or sitting in a daze.
“You,” she begins but can’t find the words in herself. There’s so much she wants to blame him for. How dare he do it again, sacrifice himself, without telling them anything— telling her anything. Sooyoung had been so mad when it turned out that she was right, that the better half of Dokja was probably still sailing on that subway lost in space.
But none of that anger is within reach anymore. All there is, is despair. Sooyoung has tried figuring out the root of this horrible emotion. She has tried pushing it down, pulling it out. She has tried everything but it doesn’t leave. It remains the same way it always has, sour on the tip of her tongue. Angry and malevolent. A being entirely her own, probably the remnant of the Black Flame Dragon still inside her.
The reason those cuts don’t heal. The reason for how many hours a day she spends simply staring at the ceiling. Misery with nowhere to go.
At one point, Dokja could catch that emotion on her perfectly. Understand, accept and present a way out. At one point, this didn’t feel temporal. Like to fix this, she’d have to go back in the past.
But she made her decision and now she must live with it. A god never gets to choose, after all. They are dealt a hand and they must bear it.
“Me.” He is calm, sitting upright now. Sooyoung ignores the garbage tower of bouquets on the other side and stalks straight for the bedside table. She keeps it there.
“These are special,” she says, under her breath. “They cost a lot.”
It’s Dokja, it is Dokja alright. A physical, tangible presence. No longer a dream. Before she even knows it, she’s raising her hand and reaching for him. She presses her cold palm to the side of his warm face. His jawline is hard but his skin there is soft and pale.
She’s never learned how to ask if he’s okay the normal way.
Dokja smiles. “Are you okay, Sooyoung-ah?”
She retracts her hand, as if burned. Dokja continues to eye her in abject amusement. She drags a chair over and shakes her head, putting on a scowl again.
“What do you even do here the entire day?” she asks, trying not to displace his current self with the boy he was at fourteen, swaddled in similar blankets in an identical ward. “If I were you, the monotony would drive me mad.”
“It’s not that bad,” Dokja says. “The others come along sometimes, to keep me company. Joonghyuk-ah is always here but I think today, there was an event at Mia’s school. Plus, I’m free tomorrow. They’re done with keeping me under a microscope.”
Sooyoung nods. She knows. That’s why she’s here now. Yoo Joonghyuk never left Dokja’s side, it made it impossible for her to gather the courage to step inside the room even if she’d ever made it past the threshold of her house. But now that he’s getting discharged, she couldn’t postpone the visit any longer.
“Yes, sure,” she says.
For a second, neither of them say anything. An uncomfortable silence stretches in between both of them.
“Sooyoung-ah,” he begins, after a moment. She knows what he’s going to say even before he utters those words and she cannot let it happen. “About—”
“Please,” she interrupts, surprising even herself. “I.”
She stops there, unaware of what she wants to say. She just cannot bear it, to hear the words from Dokja’s own mouth. She thought she could, she really did think she could. It shouldn’t even be this hard, really. It shouldn’t be hard at all but it is. The idea of this man here and the little boy he once was, all of that she knows intimately. She is so afraid of Dokja’s own fragility. She is so afraid that all of those words, they were not enough.
She hates being responsible for things. She is not a leader. Every waking moment of the life she lived back then, writing the story again and again for thirteen years. Afraid that one wrong word, one wrong recollection and she’d jeopardise Dokja’s entire existence. Afraid that the person he was there, in front of her, wouldn’t exist.
She looks at him in silence. Dokja’s hair is dark. His lips are cracked. He looks dull and unimpressive but he looks so alive. She doesn’t know how many times she’s lost him before. She doesn’t think she can lose him again. And she’s so, so afraid she will.
Nothing has ever mattered to her like this before. It is strange, it is so strange. The first time she remembers having encountered Dokja, even when she had not remembered him and the story she wrote for him, she had read his comments on Ways of Survival with something akin to greed. Something like want, something like surprised desire that couldn’t understand how he could stick with an unworthy story for so long.
A reader so dedicated, isn’t that what every writer wants?
She knows now she loves him. In every single way or form of the world, they are tied to each other.
Dokja’s gaze softens, like he knows this too. “Sooyoung.”
tls123-nim.
It is unbearable. He does not even ask for the truth. He does not even ask her why she chose to sacrifice the world instead of him, like he knows that question will bring her more pain than any of his sacrifices yet. “Who would’ve known,” Dokja mused quietly, like he wanted to lighten the atmosphere, “my friend would turn out to be a god.”
Sooyoung stares at her hands. These hands that did everything. That made everything. The beginning and the end and the epilogue.
She is rendered dizzy, momentarily. Her wrist throbs under her bandages. She winces but keeps her mouth shut.
“I am not a god.”
What she is, is a monster.
“You are one to me.” Dokja says nothing else to defend his statement but: “You saved my life.”
It is then that Sooyoung feels her stomach giving out on her. The entire topic of writing Ways of Survival has seemed so unapproachable, so daunting, that now having it lie bare in between her and Dokja is suffocating her. In so many ways, this is exactly how their relationship works. It’s a wonder she hadn’t guessed, before, where their system of being the only ones in this goddamn world who truly understood each other would end. What it would end with.
Dokja had seemed to know, when stepping out of that subway, who he would find on the other end. Who would become the Oldest Dream.
Sooyoung had never… had never expected the author of Ways of Survival to be her. She had never even considered it, not until she’d seen the younger Kim Dokja withering away on the hospital bed knowing that if she didn’t write the story now, if she didn’t save him then she would not be able to survive herself.
“I don’t blame you, Han Sooyoung.”
Sooyoung looks at Dokja. Why did she choose him over everything else in the world? The truth was, she was a god helpless to her own existence. She had given something undefinable a name. She had ascribed a title to a lie, and in doing so, given it power. The truth is that this is all history.
The truth is that she loved him very much.
“I could never, ever blame you.” Dokja’s eyes are glassy as he says this. “I loved your story. I loved your story to an unimaginable degree.”
“I mean,” Sooyoung snorts and it just sounds a little thick. “It’s a little imaginable. What, with the dream and all.”
“Oh fuck you,” Dokja says, but his gaze is bright.
The truth is that Dokja’s name has never harmed her mouth. Not even once.
It is because Dokja is the evidence of the crime Sooyoung has committed.
She sits down on the floor in the dark, sliding against her kitchen cabinets. She has a glass of water in her hands but she cannot bring herself to take a sip. Suffer, something inside her tells. Endure it and suffer. Keep it in your mind and suffer. You made a decision and now you learn to live with it.
She knows this, of course she does. She wants to scream at all of those accusations, wants to point her finger and ridicule them. Tell every single version of the avatar in her head that she did not survive so long on pure luck alone and she can show them the metal she’s made of.
But it’s all her. Her, in this dark kitchen, against cream coloured cabinets that look white in this lack of light. Her, against herself in her brain.
Her, again and again. The start of everything.
The doorbell rings, a shrieking and unflattering sound. She flinches, heartbeat climbing up to her throat before she realises that no, it isn’t a monster. It’s the doorbell. It’s just the doorbell.
It’s just the doorbell, she tells herself as she scrambles to her feet, discarding the glass on the island and making her way out of the kitchen towards her doorway. The motion-sensitive lights outlining the door frame flicker open, washing her in their blue gaze the moment she drops her feet heavily on the wooden floorboards of the landing.
She opens the door, unsure of who she is going to find on the other end. Most of the time it’s either Yoo Mia, crying about how insufferable her older brother is, or Yoo Joonghyuk himself, here to fetch his sister. Sometimes, it’s Lee Sookyung who comes over for tea. She says she’s concerned about Sooyoung’s stature, that she shouldn’t be this weak in a time as incorrigible as this one. Lee Sookyung knows, too, that Sooyoung is the culprit here. That if these changing times should claim one life, she wouldn’t mind if it was hers.
The person on the other end of the door is not who she expects at all.
It is Yoo Sangah, smiling, holding a clear packet up for Sooyoung to see.
“I got hair dye,” she says. “Are we going to stand here the entire night?”
Sooyoung is thrown off to such degrees that even surprise has left her body. She’d just— she’d just said whatever came to her mind in the heat of the moment, she hadn’t really meant it. She wasn’t being serious and yet here Sangah is.
Sooyoung narrows her eyes. “Did Dokja put you up to this?”
Sangah rolls her eyes. “No, he didn’t. Just let me in.”
Sooyoung nods, right. She completely forgot they were still at the doorway. She steps aside, allowing her to shuffle inside. Sangah carries the smell of monsoon with her, of wet soil and rain. Sooyoung wonders if it’s raining outside.
“It will,” Sangah says, shuffling out of her shoes. “It’s cloudy outside right now, I could barely see anything but grey above and it’s nine.”
Sooyoung’s gaze travels lower, to the really vast variety of box hair dyes Sangah has seemingly brought for both of them.
“I took the liberty of choosing colours that I thought would flatter you, now you can choose what you want yourself but—”
“How did you know?” Sooyoung asks her.
Sangah blinks. “About the hair dye?”
“No, I mean.” The fight drains out of her body visibly as she gives up, smacking her lips and bringing her hand to the back of her head, aimlessly sorting through the soft hair there. “What I was thinking. About the rain.”
Thunder rumbles outside, strong enough to shake their walls.
Sangah simply remains patient. “I figured you’d wonder. There was no trick to it.”
Sooyoung’s first and base instinct calls on her to be more wary. But.
She sighs. “Do you even know how box hair dyes work?”
Fifteen minutes, and after burning through a few sachets of developers, Sangah is finally gloved and ready, standing behind her in front of her dresser as she experimentally clips her hair around Sooyoung’s scalp. The colour they’ve chosen is a deep, deep blue. She’s just going to let Sangah go haywire with it, not really caring enough if she ends up looking like a clown. Sooyoung’s very blessed to have the ‘can look good in anything’ gene in her system.
She watches Sangah work in the mirror, her eyebrows furrowed in concentration. She hesitates, for a second, before asking: “How was work?”
Sangah works now as a superhero of sorts. She runs around the city chasing all kinds of criminals who retain their stigmatas night and day. Sooyoung isn’t even sure how she gets off days. Or dresses casually like how she wants to, wide dress pants and a soft beige toned shirt.
“Bearable,” Sangah says, not taking her eyes off the strand of Sooyoung’s hair she’s currently twisting into a clip. She tugs too hard, accidentally, and Sooyoung’s wince almost turns into a weird mix between that and a snort when she sees Sangah make the funniest face she’s ever made in panic. “Sorry! Sorry, oh my God.”
“You’re good,” Sooyoung says, cracking a smile instead. “Don’t worry. Anyway, so the poster girl of the new regime— I saw an article about your win against Svetlana. That incarnation of—”
“It was flat. She was very fast but that’s about it.”
Rasputin’s incarnation or not, she was battling against Yoo Sangah. And by all means and forms of the world, Yoo Sangah’s strengths are pure magic.
Still, Sooyoung gets the feeling that Sangah doesn’t much like her job. She does it because she must, because someone has to.
“It’s not that bad,” Sangah says. When Sooyoung makes a face, Sangah just shakes her head. “What? Your face gives you away.”
Sooyoung doesn’t say anything. Truthfully, she doesn’t care. Even if Sangah could read her mind. All that remains inside is junk anyway.
“I heard you paid Dokja-ssi a visit, finally.”
Sooyoung frowns. “You call him that too?”
“Force of habit. We were colleagues first, you know.”
“I do know.” She wrote this story. She wrote every line of it. Their brave, brave hope that doing so would bring Dokja back. And then it did.
“Anyway, how did it go?”
“It was,” Sooyoung bites her bottom lip. “Relieving,” she decides, finally, nodding. “It was relieving.”
Sangah smiles. She watches it in her reflection. How did they get here? Sooyoung doesn’t know. She doesn’t remember.
She only knows that they are here now.
Sangah shakes her head, going back to sorting through her hair. “I’m glad. I’m really, really glad.”
Pain flares up on the left side of her head. Sooyoung does not react.
In the end, their hair dyeing venture is an epic failure. Sooyoung washes the colouring round off and blow-dries her hair to find that what remains is a blue so deep it may as well be black, only visible in, perhaps, the light of the day.
But it doesn’t matter to her. She laughs, saying something stupid and uncharacteristically forgiving like maybe next time and it wipes the trace of disheartiness on Sangah’s face.
That night, Sangah sleeps in her flat, on the sofa, curled under Sooyoung’s favourite blanket. In the morning, before Sooyoung wakes up, she prepares a plate of gyeran-mari for her and slips out into the sunlight without warning.
Han Sooyoung still doesn’t particularly understand how Joonghyuk trusts her so easily when it comes to his sister. She knows how protective he is, has seen him in effect every single time there’s been even the slightest threat to her. But here she is now, sitting in the park by their neighbourhood and waiting for Yoo Mia to be content with whatever the fuck she’s collecting, scourging those sands, she realises that somehow— in all the years of the epilogue she lived while Joonghyuk was lost in space, he had left Mia in her care and it seemed to mean something to him.
She still remembers him, changed in the aftermath. Because of your story, I was able to survive until now.
She couldn’t hear it then and she can’t hear it now. But she can do this, watch over Mia until Joonghyuk can come back to fetch her.
Mia looks over from across the park, an entire sea of light in between separates them but she is laughing. She looks identical to her brother, this way.
Sooyoung smiles back.
It seems to give her some kind of incentive to come rushing over, for some reason, because then she’s making her way to the green bench where Sooyoung is sitting across all the solid-shapes of the park equipment. “Unnie!” she yells, and it’s really fucking stellar that the park is empty because Sooyoung still doesn’t understand how Mia has come to recognise her as an authority figure in her life. Any onlooker passing by now would probably think her to be this kid’s mother.
“Yes, yes. What is it?” she asks, when Mia is finally close enough.
Mia opens the little sling-bag pouch resting on her side and lets Sooyoung take a look at all the weird sparkling gemstones inside. Sooyoung has observed this pattern of fascination among the younger generation these days for such things. Specifically, beads made of cut-glass or gemstones that they seemed to consider good luck. It makes no sense to her.
Sooyoung frowns. “Where are you even getting all of this?”
“Habitation in this area was of the alien Mierta gem quality, it’s now mostly slipped by but it’s left these little trinkets in its stead.” Mia opens her hands to show Sooyoung the blue stones she’d been collecting, hued a little green. “Oppa said these, in their own world, stood for peace. I’m going to string these together in bracelets.”
Peace? Sooyoung does not particularly remember if they’d ever encountered gemstones like these but then, one memory nags at her conscience. The Kaizenix Archipelago, Schweichen Von Kaizenix’s jewellery. The necklace around his throat, under his collar.
Mierta. A symbol of peace.
“Yoo Joonghyuk said that?”
Mia opens her mouth, once again like she wants to say something but then her eyes catch something behind Sooyoung and she stops, face breaking into a grin instead. “Oppa!”
Somewhere behind her, a voice calls out. “Mia-yah,” and then, quieter, “Han Sooyoung.”
Sooyoung turns. Joonghyuk has started wearing more normal clothes. Sweatshirts that aren’t black all the time, sometimes mint green, sometimes violet. Loose pants. Sliders. His hair is still artfully tousled but more unkempt, more normal. His face, all of the scars. All of his person. Him.
She tries to say something, anything. Her memories of the Kaizenix Archipelago are distorted, like every single memory that belongs to her is now. But she still remembers his face as Schweichen. His rage, fury and then his ultimate resolution to commit to a true ending. How violent they were capable of being towards each other.
He looks freer now. He looks at ease.
Sooyoung can feel the headache at the back of her skull brim over to her forehead, to the back of her eyelids.
His face as the regressor, distrustful and handsome and hard and hard and hard. His face as the Secretive Plotter, one single scar so huge it covered a half of his face. His face now, his own happy ending. Where everything in this world was right and his companions had all survived and once in a while, when he cooked, all of his companions and all those constellations that had once aided them would walk in the room and leave traces of laughter behind.
He looked like he was finally at peace.
“Oppa, Sooyoung-unnie said she’d buy us ice creams so let us quickly leave for the shop.”
Mia’s voice breaks through Sooyoung’s stupefaction and she gawks. “I did?”
“Yes,” Mia says, giving her a meaningful look. “Did you not?”
“I mean,” Sooyoung concedes. “Yah, you’re so liberal with my money like you’ve earned it yourself.”
“I will, one day. And then I will buy you ice cream.”
Joonghyuk cracks a small, half smile. It is so transient that it is only there for a second before it is replaced by his normal, expressionless demeanour again. “Study harder for that.”
Sooyoung is reminded of his fleeting smile, back when he’d finally come back to them.
All she can do is stare.
“Study harder?” she mocks, force of habit. “What for? To buy me an ice cream?”
“Yes,” he says, taking his eyes off Yoo Mia’s big, pleading figure. “You have done a lot for her. The most she can do is buy you an ice cream.”
Sooyoung falters. “Eh, but then she should buy me something better, don’t you think?”
“You both should also take the earner’s opinion into account, which is: I do not want to buy either of you anything more than an ice cream.”
Sooyoung laughs. “Yah— after, all I’ve done for you! The amount of times I unclogged the toilet after—”
Mia kicks her on the shin to shut her up and stop her from bringing up such events from the past. In Joonghyuk’s absence, with no one else to support Mia, she’d made her move into her own flat and those days had been nothing short of chaotic from start to finish. It is the memory of that, then, Sooyoung can’t do anything but laugh harder. And it is so contagious that Joonghyuk snorts too, turning his head back for a second like looking at something else will make him want to stop laughing.
And Sooyoung notices it, the mole under his jaw.
The understanding that she did not give him those things, that she never wrote about them in the novel, strikes her like a hard blow to her head. She never dreamed of such qualities. To her, the regressor was the finest man to ever be born on Earth. A mind far nobler than anyone else in comparison, a face so perfect it was unparalleled in human definitions. But then she notices the mole under his jaw and then can’t help but let her eyes trail around to drink in all of his features hungrily. The freckles on the side of his neck, on the high of his cheeks. The little scar on his eyebrow that this regression turn didn’t give him, that had followed him as an injury from his days as a kid. A kid who could’ve been.
Those parts of him. Very human parts of him.
Sooyoung wants to throw up. She made this world up from her flesh and blood and threw her life away for it to survive but Joonghyuk gave it meaning. He made it his own, personal stage.
Sooyoung wants to throw up a little. Nausea hits her square in the face and it is the first time, she thinks, in the history of her ailment that she can actually acknowledge that it has gotten a little, tiny bit, worse.
“Are you okay?” Joonghyuk asks, like he can tell something is up. But she is fine. She is completely fine.
“I’m good,” she says, firing up a grin. “So, ice cream?”
Her wrist throbs. The impending sensation of something horrible finally commencing makes stagger to her feet, dizziness hitting out of nowhere.
Both the siblings look dubious now. Sooyoung doesn’t trust herself either. But she must. That is how she survives, time and time again.
She doesn’t know how long she’s been sitting with her back against the door to Sangah’s apartment but it’s long enough for the corridor— once lit up by sunlight— to extinguish like a dying flame. When Sangah finally comes back home from work, she finds her like this. On the floor with trembling hands and a high fever.
“Sooyoung?” she asks, uncertainly. And when Sooyoung looks up, the smudged blood on the side of her face is an obvious sign of alarm, Sangah grows more insistent. “Han Sooyoung?”
“Hey,” she says. “Long time no see.”
The thing is, when she went back home from seeing Joonghyuk, she could not get that mole out of her mind. And then she threw a couple of things at the wall. And then she sank to the floor. And then she watched her reflection in the mirror and she screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed. Five times, trochaic. Like a broken heart.
Next thing she knew, the fresh bandages tied safely around her arm were turning red. It bloomed, really. And she knew, instantly, that she could not ignore it anymore.
Sangah falls to her knees before her. It’s so odd to see two grown women conversing like this in the middle of a hallway but Sooyoung cannot feel her legs and Sangah… Sangah is obviously doing anything but thinking right now.
Sangah’s hands grab her chin, forcing her face to the side. The grip hurts but Sooyoung says nothing. She lets Sangah observe the blood.
“What,” Sangah begins, voice tempered. “What in the world is all this?”
“I’m not sure.” It is then that Sooyoung lifts her hand. The blood soaked bandages are in full view for Sangah now. The realisation daunts on her face with horror.
She stands back up, her own hands beneath Sooyoung’s shoulders, tugging her back up.
“Come, let’s get you inside first.”
It is a few minutes of struggling and erasing the black spots in her vision later that Sangah finally manages to pull her through her doorway and take another few steps inside before dumping her on the couch. “I’ll be a minute,” she says, gripping her phone in her hand. “Remove those bandages for me.”
She leaves Sooyoung in complete silence. Sooyoung can’t particularly look at her wound so she stares at the living room around her. There are paintings on the wall and everything is soft toned. The wall of the kitchen that separates it from the living room is made of a counter and a glass shell, on which plenty of little colourful post-its rest alongside a haphazard map drawn between them.
She sinks back into the sofa. Her heart is beating too fast, unnaturally fast, but she cannot feel an ounce of energy in her body. Only her heart. She can only feel her heart.
“Sooyoung-ah, I told you to remove the bandage,” Sangah’s nagging voice flitters into her vision again, dragging the coffee table closer and sitting on it in order to get on eye level with Sangah. She dumps a box, a first aid box, beside her and her phone clatters down to the carpet like it is of no value. She picks Sooyoung’s arm up. “How long has it been like this?”
Sooyoung tries to remember. Her memory stalls. She hums, instead.
“Sooyoung-ah,” Sangah says. “You have to talk. You have to keep talking. Seolhwa-unnie will be here any second but until she is, keep your own self running.”
Lee Seolhwa it is. Sooyoung smiles like she’s drunk. “I don’t know. A bit after the headaches did.”
“Headaches?”
“Yes,” she says. “Headaches. Body ache. Memory loss.”
She had been a forgetful person by nature. It only got concerning when she began forgetting sizable chunks of her memory.
“And why didn’t you tell us about this?”
Sooyoung can’t remember her reasons anymore. She did have one, though. At the start. She did.
“Sooyoung.”
Maybe she should’ve been honest. From the start. About everything. Maybe she should’ve said something.
“Han Sooyoung!”
Her voice is like a soft lull. By the time Sooyoung reaches for it, it’s already too far away to reach.
Her eyes open to a white ceiling. Sooyoung isn’t particularly used to the feeling of waking up dazed but she— she has been here before. She has done this, woken up on the wrong side of the bed and wondered and wondered and wondered for a long time why her heart was beating that way, why it felt like her hands were reaching out towards empty space even if they were beside her, on the bed, quietly keeping to themselves. She has been here, in this moment, letting the oppressive silence fester as she searched for something, anything, to make sense of it.
Her childhood bedroom.
The soft, weak light from the white screen of her living room veranda. The gaping absence of her parents, their backs a figure silhouetted into the door. The white door. The ink grinder. Her first lighter, translucent blue shining in the dark of her father’s office that reeked of smoke, her unmade bed and the yellow iris plants secured in pots by the sunlit windowsill of her childhood bedroom. How, so many times, as a child she had stared numbly at that same windowsill, at the naked branch of the tree outside that looked like it was creeping closer towards her the more she looked. How, her life seemed something unlike her own. And then there were those dreams. Those dreams, the beginning of this world.
The yellow iris plants. Back then, she had dismissed it even if she didn’t ever remember planting them, or watering them, or anything. She didn’t know how they’d gotten there. Only that they were pretty and she wanted to keep them safe.
She never questioned those lapses in her memory or why she always felt so, so fucking tired no matter how long she slept. She never questioned those made-up memories, all that inspired her. The novel she wrote when she slept. The novel she wrote when she woke up. Her entire life, she dreamed of this.
She remembers the curb. Dust swirling around the staircase preceding her into the shops that lined it, and her, quietly sitting with her knees to her chest as she peered into a novel. Another novel. Over and over again, consuming all of those words with delight and wondering if she’d write like that someday. She did not have high standards of excellence, to her writing was writing. Anything written down was something to be admired. But in her own case, she wanted better. She would read and imagine how her life would sound, written down. She would read and imagine herself as a character, the oak table in her bedroom filtering in the mellow afternoon with countless sunglasses littering its surface, her mother’s hands gently caressing the side of her face when Sooyoung first returned with an award. Rain, right outside the veranda. The world turning grey, green and brown. Back to the very start when she wrote down the end of the world.
She’d never realised. She had never, ever realised.
Sooyoung sleeps. For a very long time, she sleeps there unseeing. Her eyes are open but her mind is very quiet. Nothing hurts anymore. It’s just a white room. The curtains are yellow.
Her eyes close.
What makes a god a god?
Sometimes, it is an existence that occurs only because they are believed in. An existence born out of a necessity, a need. An existence born because someone wished for them to be. Out of want, a deep, incessant want.
A god is a wish.
And yet, by creation they are inherently merciless. They have no purpose other than to exist as a channel, and hence they do not owe anyone anything. They do not owe a helpless person saving. They do not owe an unhappy person happiness. They do not owe humanity some final kind of salvation and they do not need to give it. No amount of begging would change their nature.
You can get down on your knees. You can tip your head at the altar of their existence. It would not change a thing. Sooyoung has personally stood witness to every single atrocity a god can commit without regret. She has loved them, time and time again. And she has been loved, in like.
And to be loved by such a god— it is to be doomed. You are not allowed to, you will never be human again if you do. But they choose you. They take a lie and make it into the truth. They take a lie and change boundaries between what can exist and what cannot so it means something to you. To be loved by such an existence is to weigh every single step you take in exchange for the world. To make sure you breathe, the ground will crack open. To make sure you live, the skies will pave way for rain. It does not matter how well-intentioned or kind you may be, your touch will always bring unprecedented harm.
It is unfair to put that much responsibility on a single person. And Sooyoung is sorry, she is so, so sorry.
She saved Dokja and it gave him what could’ve been an entire eternity of doom. A fate he had resolved himself to.
She feels drained like she has never been before. A tear slips by the side of her face and she lets it be.
All that follows her is silence. Everything, all of it, is finally catching up to her. She is a powerless existence, an entirely too wretched god.
Oh, now she’s crying. Crying and crying and crying. For a second, she thinks she sees a yellow iris plant in a neat, acrylic blue pot. And then she’s crying harder.
What do those flowers mean? Why does it matter? Why does it matter what the truth is— why would it matter what the truth is? She dealt a hand armed with a lie and it took hers in return. Is that not enough? Is it not enough if a lie managed to save just one person when the truth never would.
Maybe this is her retribution. The weight of her decision.
She hopes she rots like this, swamped under these blankets and a curse eating her away from inside out.
Sooyoung does not rot away, unfortunately.
She wakes up again to a white room. This time though, the curtains are right and there is no yellow iris and she’s not alone.
Yoo Mia is sitting at her side, on a little bench. She doesn’t notice, at first, but when the heart rate monitor beside Sooyoung flares, her eyes fly open and she’s screaming for a doctor.
They’re rimmed red. Sooyoung has half a mind to be surprised by how much this little girl, who has done nothing but be insufferable towards anyone not her brother before, cares. About her, apparently. But she does.
“Unnie!” Mia cries. “Someone— she’s awake, she’s awake!”
A flood of people come rushing in next. Each one to the next to Sooyoung’s surprise. Jung Heewon, Yoo Sangah, Lee Hyunsuk, even Yoo Joonghyuk and the kids.
Kim Dokja.
It’s Lee Seolhwa who enters finally, dressed in a doctor’s coat.
“Sooyoung-ssi?”
All the voices outside die again. She hates this, she didn’t want it to be such a big deal. She didn’t want to see everyone like this again. She tries closing her eyes, unable to deal with it and like Seolhwa catches on to her discomfort, Sooyoung hears her ask everyone to step out for a few minutes.
“That includes you.”
Sooyoung opens her eyes to see Seolhwa pointing at Dokja.
Dokja shrugs. “I’m not leaving.”
“Dokja-ssi—”
“I’m not leaving.” His voice is sharper now. He is resolutely looking everywhere else but at Sooyoung.
He looks better now too. He is dressed in a casual shirt and a dark pair of pants. His hair is freshly tousled, like he’s been in the wind. He looks good. Not healthier, yet. But good.
He looks like how he did when he was a constellation. Confident, self-assured and yet some weird form of tortured.
“Let him be,” she says and her head hurts.
Seolhwa gives her a look but decides to let it slide. “How long have you had a headache for?” She begins working some kind of protocol procedure on her. Checks the monitor, checks the drips, checks her reflexes and takes a few notes.
Sooyoung glances at Dokja. He still isn’t looking at her. He’s just watching Seolhwa work.
“A bit.”
Truthfully speaking, she has always been in pain. She doesn’t even remember how it started. Maybe from her lower back, then to her upper spine and then to the entirety of her skull. She has never not been in pain, to the best of her memory. It has always hurt.
Now, of course, she knows why.
“How long?” Seolhwa repeats.
“I don’t really remember,” Sooyoung sighs. “It’s been a while since I haven’t felt it.”
“And your arm?”
Now that is something she can answer. “The wounds didn’t close from when we stepped off that subway, the first time round. There’s nothing I could’ve done.”
“You should have come to me.”
“Yes,” Sooyoung concedes, “but I didn’t know it’d last for so long.”
“You did,” Dokja says, out of nowhere, and finally he looks at her. And he looks mad.
She didn’t, this was unintentional. It was completely unintentional. She doesn’t want anyone to suffer on her behalf, doesn’t want anyone to be upset because of her.
Normally, Sooyoung wouldn’t even care. But when you doom a society of millions, when you walk past memorial statues and funerals, you start caring. She did this.
She can’t keep doing it.
“I didn’t,” she says sharply. She wishes it would kill her, already. The consequences of her actions.
Seolhwa interjects before Dokja can say something worse. “Your skill— Avatar, did you say it involved you splitting your memories?”
Sooyoung looks down. “Yes.”
“What you are going through, right now, is a memory loss syndrome triggered as a side effect of overusing your stigma.”
An understatement. She spent thirteen years as an ego which later became sentient and took all of her memories with her. She thinks she can tell where all these problems are coming from.
“Your body’s neural responses aren’t faring well to your fabled injuries. You are crumbling.”
Sooyoung doesn’t know how to respond to that. A part of her feels something a little like relief.
“So?” she asks, finally.
“So nothing,” Seolhwa says. “You’ll survive, you’ll just have to take supplements.”
“Okay,” Sooyoung doesn’t know what else to say.
Seolhwa gives her a moment, waiting. When Sooyoung says nothing, she steps back.
“In a moment, I’ll cart you all for a few more tests. Precautionary measures.”
With that, she leaves, leaving the two of them alone.
“Sooyoung,” Dokja begins accusatively, not wasting a second. “You should’ve said something.”
“I didn’t know what it was before.” She’s being honest. She really didn’t know. “When I found out, I just thought it was something I have to live with.”
“You―” but then he stops, like he knows he’s being hypocritical.
“It’s okay.” Sooyoung slides her gaze to the other side, at the window. “I’ll manage.”
I’m not dying, she wants to say.
In the grand finale of everything, her existence is just one among many. What made her different? That she was a writer. That she loved someone. That she would do it all again in a heartbeat, everything, if it meant she would see him here again. Standing in front of her.
But a sense of normalcy? That is beyond what she deserves. She knows Joonghyuk thinks she can’t see him eavesdropping but she can, he’s leaning with his back against the door and he is the prime witness of everything that she has ever done. The most important victim of them all. Even if Sooyoung could ignore every other victim in the world, she could not ignore this man.
Thousands of lifetimes of unimaginable pain and now he’s standing in front of her. Do not think of useless things.
Sooyoung cannot bear it. It is so unbearable it has turned into a physical ache. Dokja she can understand. Dokja she knows like the back of her hand.
Joonghyuk, she didn’t write him into existence. He already existed, all she did was make a shape of him from her memories. But now, she cannot look at him without wondering if those shapes are what define him as a person. He has lived every single turn that she has skipped, boiled down to a few words, a few good-for-nothings while she mercilessly inflicted astronomical pain on him and watched him come out of it on the other end. What she does is write, anyone can write. But not many can survive.
Dokja did. Joonghyuk did. Sooyoung doesn’t think she is strong enough to.
“This is not— this is not normal.” Dokja sounds frustrated, but she refuses to look at him. “This is guilt. Isn’t it? For some reason, you’re feeling guilty.”
Sooyoung’s lower lip trembles. She’s so fucking tired. All she wants to do is sleep.
But her lack of response doesn’t stop him. He keeps going. “You saved me, twice over. I don’t know if I can say anything else with the kind of surety I can say this with but you saved me twice over. I would not have survived without your story, I would not have lived past fifteen.”
She closes her eyes.
“I’m not guilty,” she says. “Not in traditional terms, anyway. I would do it all over again, in a heartbeat. That scares me.”
“What?”
“Yoo Joonghyuk.” In autumn, when she was thirteen, void of all the memories of what she did last night, she designed her first solid protagonist. She remembers scribbling random characteristics down on her notebook, sitting under a yellowing tree, its leaves a scattered red around her reminiscent of spilled blood. Handsome, she had noted, foolishly. Stubborn. Irritable. Elusive.
She named him Yoo Joonhyun.
Leaves pressed between pages. Hands stained red with juice. She smiled, like she had done something great. And when she had gone to sleep, she had woken up again. When she slept, she wrote of him. When she woke up, she wrote of him.
And now he stood there, back against the door like he was worried. And how he trusted her with Yoo Mia, how when he didn’t know if he would ever return again— he had asked Sooyoung, of all people, to take care of her.
How without Sooyoung, he would not exist.
“He is living proof,” Sooyoung’s voice breaks. “He is living proof of what I did.”
Sooyoung is a forgotten god, Dokja is a half remembered dream and Joonghyuk is the oldest pain in the world.
Dokja wants her to talk to Joonghyuk. She doesn’t know if she can do that yet, so she goes on a field trip instead. She wakes up early and sees Dokja knocked out by her side and decides, it’ll be okay. Rips the drips off, changes into her own clothes, ties her shoelaces. Stares one last time at Dokja’s sleeping figure and slips out of the door, very quietly, like a ghost.
Outside, the world is a dim blue. She finds herself a lake in the breeze, sits at the banks of the lake and observes the picture of the sky painted on its clear surface.
Why does it hurt her so much? She had considered it an unmarketable story, way too long to be worth anything. Narrated in the only way that it can be. It has no origin but she tried really hard to give it one. She likes beginnings too, innocent beginnings like softly observing the passage of time in the middle of a forest and coming across a boy too occupied by crying to notice you. She likes endings as well, two figures on the opposite ends of a hospital ward. One on the bed, still crying. Another standing a few feet away, staring at him in abject disbelief.
Her story saved a life. It undid everything else but that life. History is written and rewritten and rewritten throughout time, begging for a beginning and then ignoring it for a kinder one. It takes what it loves and discards what is left, forgets it even if it is the truth.
The truth is that there is no god. There is no wish. There is no prison and there is no wall. Why do the chains that shackle her ankles sound like crying every time she moves? She cried a lot after everything ended. Why does the name she gave her one and only creation sound so much like silence? Maybe because she dreamt of it for an eternity before bearing it into existence and never said it aloud. Or maybe, it’s because she lied and someone believed it enough to turn it into the truth.
She digs a pebble from the soil beside her and tosses it into the lake.
She hates being miserable. She hates being responsible. She wishes there was something she could do to alleviate it but there is nothing, she thinks, that could ever make it better. That is the price she must pay.
“Han Sooyoung,” a voice comes from somewhere behind her, startling her.
Sooyoung yells, disgruntled, only to find Joonghyuk emerging from the shadows of the thick canopies behind.
Her heart falls and then soars, skyrocketing. “Why did you run away?”
“I didn’t,” Sooyoung lies. “I was going to come back after thinking for a bit.”
It’s not completely a lie. She did come here to think but mostly just to get away, for a bit. She wanted to organise her thoughts and think more orderly and then go back and lock herself inside her house until she needed to come crawling out. Until she could finally understand what to do with her hands or the open document on her laptop. Until looking at Yoo Joonghyuk did not feel a little like taking a shovel to his grave. To his 1863 graves.
“What are you thinking about?”
He comes to sit next to her and Sooyoung does not reject it. All she does is shudder. She watches him from the side, for a second and then peels her gaze away to throw it back at the pink lake. Now pink in the morning sky.
“You,” she says, finally being honest. “I’m thinking about you.”
She can feel Joonghyuk glance at her but she does not budge. Instead, she keeps her gaze pinned to the lake, noting its resemblance to a very large mirror. The writer in her gazes at it with adjunct curiosity. The sky is hurt, she thinks. It’s bleeding and bleeding and bleeding. The lake, however, is nothing but a cold reflection.
“Why?” Joonghyuk asks, like it really is a mystery to him.
Sooyoung smiles. What do you tell someone that you wrote into existence? Why am I thinking about you? — Because I will always think about you. I can never do anything without thinking about you. Joonghyuk has a habit of drumming his fingers on any plane surface he can find. Sooyoung had not known that about him when she wrote the novel but when she came back, she found it to be true.
He did have that habit. He did drum his fingers on any plane surface he could find. It bore her a timeless question. Where did she begin and where did Joonghyuk end? Or where did Joonghyuk end, and where did she begin?
He was undoubtedly real. A solid, physical shape in front of her. So why did it hurt so much, their lack of origin? Why did it matter if she wrote something that gave him a face or name? Why did it matter if she didn’t make him at all, only wrote what she knew of him.
“That first second I realised I had to become tls123,” she begins, honest enough that it chars her. “I didn’t think there was an out. The moment I realised is the second I realised I loved him too much and there was no other way.”
“And there wasn’t,” Joonghyuk says. “You could not have chosen anything else.”
Sooyoung knows he would not disagree. Perhaps the only person in the world who could understand her desperation to save Dokja, to hope her words could bring him home to them, was Yoo Joonghyuk.
“The first time I wrote your name on the page, however.” That had been excruciating. She had stared at the blinking cursor for a very long time until the Dokkaebi King’s exasperation finally reached his limit and he asked if it’d be easier if he did it. But it had to be Sooyoung. No one else knew the two of them, knew Yoo Joonghyuk, like she did.
“The second time,” she adds, quietly. “The third.”
“I told you. I do not care about the novel.”
“How can you not?” she demands, upset on his behalf. “If I had just been a little kinder to you. If it had not been half as painful as it was—”
Yoo Joonghyuk does something unexpected then. He reaches out, slapping the back of her shoulder lightly. “You could not have done that because you already knew my story. How would you have changed it, without changing what helped that guy’s end?”
The lack of origin when it comes to the three of them frustrates her beyond belief. Dokja grew up reading a novel. That novel came to life and by that logic, its protagonist did too. Dokja did not survive it. All of them threw themselves back to help him take an inch and then she wrote that fucking novel, that Dokja grew up reading and it was all true. Everything in it was true. And then that novel came to life, again. And it would keep coming to life, again and again.
“You could not have done anything,” Joonghyuk says, kind like no one has ever learned to be. To forgive a monster in the face of the harm it has caused you. It is unbearable. “You could not have done anything.”
Sooyoung tries to exhale but it comes out strangled. “Do you not want to punch me, sometimes?” she asks, stupidly.
Joonghyuk smiles. It’s a real smile. “I do,” he concedes. “But only when you’re being stupid. Like now.”
A tear slips and she doesn’t even want it to, it’s goddamn embarrassing but his forgiveness is so gentle. She doomed the world. She did it all with a bunch of sentences, across thirteen years, for three thousand chapters. She condemned him to an entire eternity of suffering before managing to find salvation in just one of his goddamn lives and he is sitting here now, trying to alleviate her guilt.
He is a beating heart, pulsing red with blood at the centre of this unforgiving universe. The space between an uttered lie and an assumed truth. The oldest pain in the world; the origin of all deathly devotion. He is the most human he has ever been, more human than any of them can ever be and perhaps that is what is choking her.
“What’s happened has happened,” he pipes in, quietly, thankfully not mentioning the tears. “You cannot change it, so let it go now.”
She tips her head back, sniffing. Her face is wet. Horrible. Her nose is all clogged.
“You are my origin, you know.” Joonghyuk sounds distant now. “You are the only one I have.”
All those lifetimes lived for one single purpose: to find a meaning. To understand why you exist, who did this to you. Joonghyuk who came into being out of thin air, who was given all that he was and then a sister who he cared for with all his heart. The closest thing he had to family.
The reason why he tried so hard to break through the fourth wall. To find the existence who dreamt of him time and time again and didn’t even let him die.
“I don’t blame you for it,” he adds quietly. “You did what you had to, I did what I had to and that guy did what he had to. Blame doesn’t figure anywhere in there.”
Sooyoung snorts despite herself. How Joonghyuk can call Dokja by name but chooses instead to refer to him by these other monikers. Kinder monikers than the ones he had. That guy, as opposed to a fucking demon king. That fool, as opposed to the Oldest Dream.
Perhaps the origin is born here. Out of this love. Out of this forgiveness.
“I don’t know what to do,” Sooyoung says.
She stares at the hurt sky.
Joonghyuk says nothing for a very long time. Then, he begins, voice decisive and resolute. “When you write something again, I would like to be your editor once more. If you will have me.”
And so, the epilogue looks like this.
The Black Flame Dragon, who does not know how to express his concern in any normal way or form of the world, bothers her time and time again as she sits down in front of her empty document in the middle of her room and stares at her screen. “Surely, you cannot be this useless,” he says, his eyes tracking the blinking cursor on the empty screen. “Tell me, was it a mistake to be your sponsor?”
Sooyoung tells him to go fuck himself. She doesn’t mean it, and he knows that too. He touches her wound, the bandages on his arm sometimes, when he thinks she doesn’t. And she knows what that’s all about too. Kim Dokja’s stupid ass salvation reached him too, made him better than he ever was― in any of Joonghyuk’s regressions.
And then, of course, there’s Dokja. He arrives at Sooyoung’s apartments at unprecedented times and drags her ass to tent bars, ordering bottles of soju enough to shame anyone in their vicinity while telling her, “Drink this, you idiot. Inspiration is in the bottle of alcohol.”
Yoo Joonghyuk is somewhere at his heels then, scandalised. “Inspiration is not in the bottle of alcohol―”
But by the end of the night, all three of them are drunk and stumbling into each other. Sooyoung’s grabbing Joonghyuk by his collar, calling him a fucking bastard for telling her that her lack of inspiration is because she’s really just weak. And Dokja is sitting there, laughing, like he’s having the time of his life. Sangah is the one who comes to save the day, then, having gotten reports of three national heroes picking fights with every single person in their vicinity. She takes them all home, calling Mia to aid her with the stupid regressor. And then, at last, when they’re both in Sooyoung’s living room, she holds Sooyoung as she cries.
“I really, really want to write,” she says, drunk out of her mind. One single thought acting as a plague. “‘m not weak.”
“No, you aren’t,” Sangah says, softly patting her back. Sooyoung thinks Jung Heewon is on call with her then, along with Lee Hyunsung. Last she checked they were in Australia.
Sangah’s telling them something like: no, no. No, she’ll be alright.
And Sooyoung, at once, knows she will be.
And so, the epilogue looks like this. Sooyoung finally goes to Yoo Joonghyuk’s fortnightly held barbeque party and gawks at Lee Jihye introducing some goddamn nuisance as her boyfriend and schools that kid when no one else is looking. She tells Joonghyuk he should try for the Masterchef, or something and then gets drunk with Dokja again who’d only just sent her a mildly questionable text of this sort last night.
KIM DOKJA [03:44]
One shot, Sooyoung-ah. Bottoms up and bam, the words are all going to be there.
HAN SOOYOUNG [08:15]
what the fuck is wrong with you
And so, the epilogue looks like this. On the side of her bed, on the table, the photoframe with the three of them: Joonghyuk, her and Dokja, taken a day after he returned to that same sickening hospital ward. In that picture, Joonghyuk is smiling and Dokja’s doing something weird with his face and Sooyoung’s grinning.
And so, the epilogue looks like this. Tightly held, tightly wound. Healing.