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It had been two years since the company had attempted the group regression and returned with a lifeless—
(soulless)
—Kim Dokja. It had been two years and Han Sooyoung was fine.
She grumbled and complained when she ate out with Yoo Sangah, Lee Hyungsung, Jung Heewon, and the kids like she was supposed to. She ordered lemon-flavored desserts. She presented the absurd assignments her students had turned in to her before mocking Lee Jihye when the girl inevitably scored low on a test. She watched Uriel, Abyssal Black Flame Dragon, and Sun Wukong perform live from the television of the restaurant they all frequented. She watched Lee Hyungsung and Jung Heewon flinch from each other at each accidental touch, analyzing the way they looked at each other and how there used to be dedication in those eyes and now there was nothing. They asked her about her manuscripts and she would declare they were for her eyes only even though everyone at the table knew whose eyes they were for. Han Sooyoung commented on how Lee Gilyoung’s height had overtaken Shin Yoosung and waited for the two to begin squabbling before their only responses contained an indifferent shrug and she remembered they didn’t do that anymore. She picked the tomatoes out of her salad.
She had moved on, they all had, and they had all become fluent in lying.
(But while the lies came easy, they weren’t difficult to tear through. Lee Hyungsung was the first to break. He bore the weight of Kim Dokja on his shoulders, sagging under the memories of a man who was within their grasp but never really there. He stopped eating out. He told her he couldn’t do it anymore. Why were they trying so hard to move on when he was still here? The next to go were Shin Yoosung and Lee Gilyoung. They gave up on appearances quickly and they wore their despair like a second skin.)
Han Sooyoung watched the world move on from the enigma that was Kim Dokja. She became a college professor. She mocked her students, voice thick with affection, and told them stories of the Star Stream. They told her she was a hero. She felt like a fraud.
She visited the hospital every day. She hated Kim Dokja’s room but she always felt drawn to it. She hated him, too—for being so self-sacrificial, for putting everyone’s happiness over his, for being so selfish—
(She wanted to shake him until he woke up. Ask him why, why, why—why can’t he be happy, too? Why did he have to become the Oldest Dream? Was he still reading their story right now, staring longingly through the rusted glass of the subway? Why was it that he valued that stupid story over everything else—enough to give up his own life for it? But she had written it, hadn’t she? Maybe her own mind didn’t harbor the memory of a younger girl staying up late to type up a manuscript, but it had been her fingers that breathed life into a young boy’s lifeline. She wished she could go back in time and find another way.)
—but she always found herself talking to him whenever she got stuck halfway through the plot of a new story or if she wasn’t sure how one of her characters should act. She yearned for his analysis; Kim Dokja truly knew how to love a story. No other reader could compare to the man who had been consuming her words for over ten years. She missed his voice, as antagonizing as his words were. She missed his smile even though it always looked so unlucky—and five seconds after his signature one, the company would find his dead body, hoping that he’d come back to them soon, right?
(They didn’t talk about the years Kim Dokja had disappeared into the 1863rd round. They had no body to remember him by, only their memories and Han Sooyoung’s own dreams as she witnessed him on his knees, pale and shaking as he watched Yoo Joonghyuk—his immovable protagonist—die .
Kim Dokja knelt like a man who lost everything.
At least now they had a body. But for how long would they let him rot in the hospital bed, a man who never made any promises to come back?)
Sitting in a chair at the side of her reader’s hospital bed, Han Sooyoung felt overwhelmed with conflicting emotions. There was anger clogging her lungs in a desperate attempt to understand how and why, love twisting its way through her fingers—but the only person around to see it wouldn’t open his eyes.
She worked, graded her students’ papers while talking to Kim Dokja—
(only to and never with)
—and she’d cut an apple for him every visit, changing the shape each time she carved into it with a knife.
Kim Dokja had taken with him a fragment of their souls so that they would never feel whole again.
She wrote so he’d have something to read when he woke up. She worked to make enough for the hospital bill fees. She cut up apples so he’d have something to eat when he woke up. He’d wake up, right?
She was fine.
It was three in the morning and she had pulled up an assignment to grade on her laptop but found herself staring at Kim Dokja when she watched his hand flinch and a spike in his heart monitor. She frantically called Yoo Sangah and then began sobbing when he didn’t move to do anything else. Hope was a deadly thing and it was so easily renewed by a fluke.
The doctors called it a fluke. She yearned for it to be real. She was sick of watching a static monitor. Sick of questioning every movement she thought she saw in the corner of her eye.
“Maybe you should take a break,” Yoo Sangah said once while accompanying her to the hospital.
“What do you mean?” Han Sooyoung asked, clicking away on her laptop. She’d created a new story recently, the kind she knew Kim Dokja would love once he read it.
(She could see it now—Kim Dokja sitting up; breathing, blinking, and doing everything the living did. He’d scoff and say to her, Sooyoung-ah, this plot is so predictable. Are you relying on your favorite tropes again? in that light, airy voice of his before it would trickle into a laugh. Where’s the originality? And she’d stick her tongue out at him, ever the nuisance, before calling him a jerk, an asshole, a liar—and she’d say, Well, maybe you should’ve been here when I started and it would’ve turned out different. He’d wipe a tear from his eyes. I can’t believe I missed this. She’d stare at him then; searching and looking for the why. She’d speak simply. She’d tell him she keeps her promises.)
“Sooyoung-ah, I’m worried about you.”
Han Sooyoung barked out a laugh. “At me? Why? I’m a contributing member of society. I have a job and I like it. What’s there to be worried about?”
Yoo Sangah pursed her lips. “You visit him a lot.”
“You don’t visit him enough,” Han Sooyoung snapped. “None of you do. And Yoo Joonghyuk…” she scowled before closing the lid of her laptop with a flick of her wrist, frantically running her hands through her hair. “Yoo Joonghyuk avoids this place like the plague and it pisses me off. At least the kids are in school, but… Jung Heewon and Lee Hyungsung still visit even though it hurts them.” She clenched her fists. “But Yoo Joonghyuk… Yoo Joonghyuk, he—”
“He’s hurting, too,” Yoo Sangah said softly, reaching forward to place her hands on the other woman’s shoulders, acting as a grounding presence. She was an anchor and Han Sooyoung could feel the tension ebb out of her shoulders as she released a sigh, her anger simmering until it became a cold stone lodged in her chest.
Han Sooyoung leaned her head back to look at her before closing her eyes. “I know. It’s why I can’t stay mad at him. I just… wish he’d talk to us. You wanna know something?”
Yoo Sangah hummed, gently running her fingers through the other woman’s hair in a comforting gesture. “What?”
“Sometimes I almost miss the scenarios,” she said, voice hushed as she delivered her confession. “I hate how our misery was entertainment for the Constellations but it was almost easier to know everyone. Did you know Yoo Joonghyuk dragged his sword when he was happy? I didn’t, but Kim Dokja told me once. It made him happy, I think, understanding him so well. We were all… together… and we…”
“... and we had Kim Dokja?”
Han Sooyoung paused at Yoo Sangah’s comment. “I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder if we ever had him at all. He was so obsessed with that stupid story—”
“—it saved his life.” Yoo Sangah paused, looking at the author. “You did.”
“I wish I had never written that book.”
“Well, you technically didn’t,” Yoo Sangah answered, voice light as she smiled. Smartass.
“Ugh.” Han Sooyoung scowled.
“You know, that story meant a lot to him. I saw it in the library. It really was his lifeline and he was trying so hard to hold on. It might have caused this, but at the same time, who would we be without it?”
“Lee Jihye would probably be happier. Na Bori would still be alive.”
“And yet Lee Jihye chose to come back to a world without her. We all worked hard to create a perfect ending and yet we chose to turn our backs on it in the end.”
“... it wasn’t perfect.”
“You’re right.” Yoo Sangah’s eyes flickered to the hospital bed. “After all, it didn’t have Kim Dokja. Maybe this is the end result, but… this story made him happy. It gave him purpose and a reason to continue living. For all that, I think it was worth having.” She smiled before walking to Kim Dokja and placing her hand atop his cold, motionless one. “Besides, we haven’t reached our proper conclusion yet.”
“It’s been two years, Sangah. I’d say we have. In the final scenario, mine was—”
“I said our proper one, Sooyoung. We create our endings with our own hands from our own choices.”
“I don’t see how there’s much we can do,” Han Sooyoung stated sardonically. “He’s in the hospital. There are no more items. There’s no more magic. There are no more miracles.”
Yoo Sangah laughed, catching Han Sooyoung off-guard. “You think too much. Just do what you always do, Sooyoung. Live up to your conclusion—but make it your own. Never-ending story… then, don’t let his story end. But don’t let yours end, either.”
“Okay,” Han Sooyoung whispered. “I won’t.”
After Yoo Sangah left, Han Sooyoung opened a new document. She stared at a blank screen, the cursor blinking as hours passed and no words appeared. She stared at Kim Dokja, peacefully slumbering as everyone who knew him died. Her hands started typing, her fingers slowly pressing into the keys before her pace quickened as she made a decision.
There was no more magic. No more miracles. She’d deliver his story—and he’d be awake one day to read it, eliciting the exact reactions she had imagined in her daydreams.