Work Text:
The first time he meets Kim Dokja is on the subway.
Jaehwan is on his way home from work. He’s tired. He’s always tired. He’s starting to learn that that’s what it means, to live after the fall.
The subway isn’t too crowded. There’s a skinny man sitting next to him, hunched over his phone, scrolling almost alarmingly fast.
Jaehwan glances at his screen out of curiosity.
To his surprise—it’s one of the novels that he’s edited.
One of the bad ones, no less—the kind that he’d thought, and hoped, that no one would ever read.
But here is someone in his early twenties, definitely not the target audience of the webnovel, scrolling through it like it might contain the secrets of the universe.
“Do you like this?” he asks, despite himself.
He can call it work research. Customer interview. Whatever.
In truth it’s just incredulity.
The man looks up, startled. There’s a bandage under his eye that looks like it needs to be changed. “I’m sorry?”
Jaehwan nods towards his screen. “You like this novel? ”
The man swiftly turns his screen off.
“No.”
“Okay,” Jaehwan says.
He leans against the window, staring outside into the black tunnels, and pretends he doesn’t notice as the man turns his screen back on to keep reading.
/
The second time he meets Kim Dokja, it’s the other way around.
Jaehwan is at the station, a couple of minutes too early for his train. He pulls his phone out instantly. He’s spent too many years back in this world to make the mistake of not distracting himself for a single moment.
There’s a novel he’s been keeping up with recently that’s just been updated.
He clicks it, using his coins for the latest chapter.
And then he starts to read.
He scrolls, and scrolls, and pretends he doesn’t feel someone’s eyes on him.
Until the person quietly tries to shuffle closer.
Jaehwan’s eyes snap up, and meet with the same skinny man he’d sat with on the train a week ago. He looks caught, guilty, like he isn’t sure if he should bolt or pretend he wasn’t doing anything.
His eyes dart from Jaehwan’s phone, to the empty train tracks.
Over and over.
Jaehwan realizes.
“Were you trying to read?”
The man looks ashamed. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry?”
“I know it’s paid.”
Jaehwan stares at him.
The man keeps his gaze carefully averted.
He’s shorter than Jaehwan, not by too much, but enough that trying to read over his shoulder must have been difficult.
Jaehwan wonders if he hasn’t read any chapters of this novel after it went under the paywall.
He tilts his screen, so the man can see better.
The man looks startled.
Too startled, for the simple action.
“Thank you,” he mumbles.
“It's fine.”
They don't see each other again for another two weeks.
/
The third time that Jaehwan meets him, he finally learns his name.
The man’s name is Kim Dokja.
An odd name.
He's twenty four years old and he likes to read.
This is about as much as Jaehwan knows about him.
The only reason he learns any of this is that they’re in the same subway car again.
Jaehwan has a hand on the overhead rail, staring down at the man seated in front of him.
Kim Dokja doesn’t even notice him, too involved in whatever he’s reading—but there’s an ID card slung around his neck and it tells Jaehwan the basics of his identity.
Jaehwan can’t make out the title of what he’s reading this time, his own eyesight ruined by far too much screen time—but whatever it is is fascinating to Kim Dokja.
There’s a shine in his eyes that Jaehwan can’t remember seeing in the eyes of an adult.
Twenty four years old, coming home from some dead end job—probably quite broke, if the pitiful grocery bag by his foot and the fact that he wouldn’t pay for his own coins are to go by—and yet, he reads with the intensity of a child.
The sort that has learned to forget that there’s a world that exists when you look up from the words.
It fascinates him.
Jaehwan can’t say why.
Maybe it’s that he wishes he could learn to be like him.
“What are you reading?” he asks quietly.
Kim Dokja jumps, alarmed.
He looks up at Jaehwan, eyes blank for two seconds before recognition dawns.
Jaehwan can see him debate in his head on whether he should lie or not.
“Is it SSSSS-grade Infinite Regressor?” Jaehwan asks, because from the few words and names he can make out on the screen, it seems most likely.
Kim Dokja’s expression goes dark. “I would never read that shit.”
Jaehwan blinks.
There were some unexpected strong feelings here.
“I see.”
Kim Dokja looks both ways, as if he’s confessing to a crime. “This is Three Ways to Survive in a Ruined World.”
“I see.”
Jaehwan hasn’t heard of it.
“Also called Ways of Survival.”
“I see.”
Jaehwan hasn’t heard of that either.
“It’s an incredible story. You should read it.”
“I see.”
Jaehwan probably won’t.
/
At 3AM, he finishes the novel he was reading, looks up at his empty room, and feels the sense of emptiness that waits for him in every waking moment.
The emptiness he’s learned defines reality.
He clicks his screen back on, desperate for something else to distract himself with, and at a loss—searches up ways of survival.
The hit count for the first chapter is 12000.
By the 10th chapter, it's 120.
By the 50th chapter, it's 12.
By the 100th chapter, it's 1.
Jaehwan scrolls, confusion growing, but all the chapters after that have a 1 next to it. The chapter count is in the thousands, and yet, there’s only one reader.
Jaehwan clicks on one of the chapters at random.
1 comment —
kim dokja
thank you for the update author-nim, will joonghyukie meet anna croft here again?
There’s just one reader.
For real.
Jaehwan wonders what sort of miserable world this author is living in.
It makes him think of Runald, and the miserable world that Jaehwan had had him live in.
The thought leaves something ugly in his chest. Something that he’s learned to pretend is just his imagination.
There’s no time to think about a world that he destroyed.
But he stares at the series of 1s that span down the page, and his heart doesn’t settle.
/
They run into each other more often after that.
Jaehwan pretends it’s an accident.
In truth—he’s noticed that he only runs into Kim Dokja when he waits for his train at the far end, where the crowd is more thinned out.
So that’s where he waits, and without fail, he runs into Kim Dokja nearly every single day.
Kim Dokja doesn’t talk a lot.
He barely talks at all.
But it’s not like Jaehwan is a man of many words.
He sits next to Kim Dokja on the subway, and the other man shifts to give him space. He doesn’t say hello, and neither does Jaehwan.
Jaehwan peeks over his shoulder to see what he’s reading. It’s Ways of Survival again.
“What is it about?” he'd asked once.
It was an unnecessary question, because he'd looked it up himself. Ways of Survival seemed like a terrible novel, too long and too all over the place and a plot that looped so often that he'd probably die before the main character did anything productive.
But Kim Dokja doesn't say any of that.
He doesn't say this is a story about regression.
About the star stream.
About people who find entertainment in others suffering.
About people just trying to survive.
He says none of this. Instead what he says is—
“It's about the loneliest man in the world.”
/
Kim Dokja doesn’t talk a lot—but when he does, it’s always about Yoo Joonghyuk.
Maybe a part of him has decided that he and Jaehwan are in the same geeky boat, because while he usually sits with his head down, as if trying not to exist—a few weeks into knowing Jaehwan and he can’t shut up about Yoo Joonghyuk.
As if he’d waited his whole life for someone to listen.
“You won’t believe what he did today,” he says, clicking his phone screen off, an odd sort of energy around him that only appears when he’s read the latest chapter.
“He killed someone.”
“No.”
“He died.”
“No.”
Those were the only two things that that bastard ever did.
If it wasn’t that, then Jaehwan was lost.
“He turned into a Demon King,” Kim Dokja says, eyes shining.
Jaehwan stares at him, and then glances away.
“It’s a big deal, okay,” Kim Dokja mutters darkly to himself. “He’s never done it before. He literally massacred everyone just to get here.”
Jaehwan wonders how strange this life is. This emptiness. They’re taking the train to somewhere they don’t want to go, coming from somewhere they never wanted to be, speaking of a man who has never lived a day in this life, and who they envy just because of it.
“He’s a fool,” Jaehwan says.
“He is,” Kim Dokja agrees, “But you don’t get to say that.”
“Why?”
“Because you don’t know him.”
“And you do?”
“I know him better than anyone.”
Jaehwan wonders, not for the first time, about the tattered pages of The World After The Fall sitting on his desk.
He wonders, if he ever published it—would someone read it with the care that Kim Dokja reads with?
Would Kim Dokja read it?
Would anyone?
Jaehwan’s world has never been the sort that people want to see.
He’d been told off for it, over and over—
No one wants the truth.
Reality is hard enough without having to see it.
The corpses on the ground and the red eye in the sky—it had been frightening to anyone who looked. The only thing that Jaehwan can think of that’s worse is the reality he’s living in now.
/
Jaehwan doesn’t like Yoo Joonghyuk.
Any man who doesn’t immediately try to fucking get rid of the ability to regress, as if isn’t a curse—any man who can go through the same trials over and over, hundreds of times, and never once succeed—he’s no one that Jaehwan would look up to.
He will admire that he hasn’t lost his mind, even these many chapters in, but he can not admire his goals.
If Yoo Joonghyuk did a little more stabbing and a little less dying, he wouldn’t be in such a state.
But Kim Dokja loves him.
He loves him more than is probably sane.
He loves him so much, that Jaehwan is certain, at this point, that that love is enough for Yoo Joonghyuk’s world to truly exist somewhere.
It makes him lonely in a way he can’t understand.
The loneliest man in the world, was what Kim Dokja had called Yoo Joonghyuk.
Is he really that lonely, Jaehwan wonders, when he has someone so willing to read about him?
He stares at the pages of his manuscript spread over his desk.
His memories aren’t what they used to be. They’re tainted by the dulled edge of his current reality, of the longing for a world that he will never have. The story he now holds in his hands isn’t a tale of a protagonist who never gave up—it’s the story of a protagonist who should have.
But what then?
What should he have done, after giving up?
Jaehwan doesn’t know.
He doesn’t know what should happen when a story ends.
Or if it should ever end.
/
“It feels like death,” Kim Dokja tells him.
He isn’t even looking at Jaehwan, staring straight ahead. Kim Dokja, he’s realized, doesn’t often make eye contact. He comes and goes, as if invisible, as if he has never wanted to be where he is.
“What does?” Jaehwan asks.
“When you finish a book. It feels like death.”
“It does.”
Kim Dokja pauses, glancing in his direction. “I didn’t think you’d agree.”
“Why?”
“Most people don’t. Most people put a book down and then just keep living.”
Jaehwan wishes he could do that.
He wishes he knew what it meant, to just keep living.
“How?” he asks.
Kim Dokja smiles. There’s something morbid about it. He’s always seemed like a man who had taught himself to smile but had never learned that there was supposed to be happiness behind it.
“Isn’t that a question,” he says. “I’ve never asked someone that.”
“Maybe you should.”
“Maybe.”
/
1 comment —
kim dokja
author-nim, what do you do after you finish writing? after i read your chapters i spend the rest of the day thinking about them. i wonder what joonghyukie is up to and what he’ll do next. i try to see how much he’s grown, and how much he hasn’t, how much he’s still doing wrong and the things he’s learned to get right.
i spend so much time thinking about him that i’m not sure what else i should be doing.
what do you do when you finish writing, author-nim? do you feel sad?
/
They start meeting after work.
It starts as dallying at the station after they get off the train, with Kim Dokja trying to quickly fill him in on information about Yoo Joonghyuk before he leaves—information that Jaehwan could not care less about, but Kim Dokja is insistent that he learn anyway.
And then they dally too long that they end up getting dinner together—which, apparently, does not mean going to a restaurant like what Jaehwan assumed friends did—but instead finding expired food on sale at the convenience store and convincing themselves that it’s a great deal.
“This tastes terrible,” Jaehwan says bluntly, staring at his triangle kimbap with dismay.
“A lot of talk for someone who can’t cook,” Kim Dokja says flatly.
Which is true, so Jaehwan doesn’t argue.
He does, however, argue when Kim Dokja finishes his ramen and then decides to go fucking insane.
“It’s called Breaking the Sky Swordsmanship,” Kim Dokja says, stabbing his chopsticks in the direction that Jaehwan is in.
“It’s called your chopsticks,” Jaehwan deadpans.
Kim Dokja ignores him, as he tends to do. “I wish I could see it,” he says. “It must be beautiful. It slices the air itself, so precise, so incredible. It takes Yoo Joonghyuk years to perfect it.”
He stabs his chopsticks towards Jaehwan again.
Jaehwan just stares at him.
The billions of years he’s spent perfecting his stab, and this random loser thinks that he can test him.
“That’s not even how you stab.”
“Oh, and you’re an expert?”
“I am.”
Kim Dokja squints at him, like he can’t tell if he’s kidding or not.
Jaehwan takes his chopsticks from him.
And then he stabs Kim Dokja in the chest.
“Ow, what the fuck—you asshole, that’s going to stain!”
He scrubs at the front of his shirt furiously, trying to get the nonexistent stain off.
Jaehwan stabs him in the cheek instead.
“You—”
Again.
“Okay, you bastard, okay—”
And again.
There’s something deeply satisfying about it, that Jaehwan should probably think about and self reflect.
Instead he stabs his friend again.
/
“How do you do it?” Jaehwan asks.
“How do I do what?”
“Live.”
There’s a terrible silence.
The walk is too quiet.
Kim Dokja still doesn’t know that Jaehwan doesn’t live anywhere near him.
He doesn’t know, that every time that Jaehwan sees fresh bandages covering his arms, he sees numbers and equations on strangers’ faces for the rest of the day.
There’s a system here. One he doesn’t know the name of.
There is no Big Brother, but there is still an evil.
An evil that will never take a form that he can fight against.
Jaehwan doesn’t live anywhere near Kim Dokja, but when he walks him home—the next day Kim Dokja is remarkably unharmed.
Pretending his apartment is on this street is a small price to pay for it.
“How do I live,” Kim Dokja repeats lightly, as if he's thinking. “That's a rather rude question to ask, Jaehwan-ssi.”
Is it?
Jaehwan isn't sure.
He supposes it might be, but—Kim Dokja truly does not seem the sort of person who wants to be alive.
Jaehwan has held him back from walking into traffic three times just this week.
He calls it an accident, he says he was too busy reading, but Jaehwan isn't sure.
He doesn't think Kim Dokja wants to be alive.
But then—why is he?
How does he do it?
“Do you want to hear something stupid?”
“Sure.”
“I don't actually live.”
Jaehwan’s eyebrow furrows.
“Living is shit. You have to feel things. I'm not good with feeling things.”
“So you're dead?” Jaehwan asks dryly.
“Kim Dokja is dead,” he says, as if it's not a frankly disturbing thing to say. “When I'm Kim Dokja, I'm dead. But sometimes I pretend I'm Yoo Joonghyuk.”
“And that's when you live?”
“Yeah.”
Jaehwan’s eyebrows furrow further, but he says nothing.
It might be a mistake, because Kim Dokja wilts a little.
“Some of us have to pretend to be main characters,” he says. “Not all of us can just be.”
Jaehwan thinks of Karlton, all those years ago, calling him the protagonist.
He'd ignored it back then, but now, with the tattered pages of his manuscript, he can't lie that it had been the truth.
Jaehwan truly had been the protagonist.
But here, he is no one.
Here, he is barely there, and Kim Dokja might call himself dead—but he's more of a person than Jaehwan will ever be.
/
It takes almost a year before Jaehwan asks him.
There is a lot that he learns about him in a year.
He learns that Kim Dokja, for all that he talks shit about Jaehwan, can not cook either. He learns that he picks his tomatoes out of his food but looks guilty about it, as if he expects someone to jump out from behind a door and slap him for it. He learns that Kim Dokja has possibly never processed an emotion in his life, that he won’t tell Jaehwan when his birthday is, that his mother is in jail, his father is dead, that he prefers not to drink because his tolerance is low, and that if he was a little less broke, he would switch jobs to edit novels for a living.
He learns that Kim Dokja will never tell him what he’s feeling—but the more he talks about Yoo Joonghyuk, the more likely it is that something is wrong. He learns that one year into knowing each other, Kim Dokja still seems surprised by the fact that they can call each other friends.
And there’s a lot that Jaehwan learns about himself.
He learns that the more he thinks about Kim Dokja possibly reading his novel—the easier the words come to him.
He learns that for all the shit he gives Yoo Joonghyuk, all these months later he’s starting to grow on him a little.
He learns that when Kim Dokja comes over to his apartment, and curls up in Jaehwan’s couch until Jaehwan kicks him to make space for himself—when they sit there together and read endlessly, without a word spoken for hours—
Those are the only days that when the novel ends, and Jaehwan looks up, he doesn’t feel like he’s dying.
It’s on one of those days that Jaehwan asks him.
“If I read Ways of Survival,” Jaehwan says carefully, “Will you read something for me?”
“Sure,” Kim Dokja says. “What is it?”
Jaehwan reaches over the back of the couch, grabbing the papers he’s left on his desk.
He pushes it towards Kim Dokja.
The haphazard, messy pages—a desperate attempt to hold his life.
To remember the world that he burned down with his own hands to save.
He sometimes wonders if that’s what it means, to save a world. To destroy it and then create it anew.
He asked Kim Dokja this once, and the man said that’s exactly what Yoo Joonghyuk did in his 41st regression and Jaehwan considered that conversation derailed.
Kim Dokja stares at the papers in front of him for a moment.
Another moment.
Then his eyes go wide.
“You wrote a fucking novel?”
“Yeah.”
“You bastard, you never told me?”
“Yeah.”
“What the fuck. Are you like— talented?”
Jaehwan’s eyebrow twitches. “What.”
“I thought you were just another loser like me,” Kim Dokja mourns, flipping through the pages, but his eyes are shining the way they do when he’s excited. “I thought while I wasted my life you were wasting yours. But behind my back you were being productive?”
Jaehwan doesn’t know how to react to this accusation.
He’s always been productive, he literally has a job.
So does Kim Dokja.
He isn’t sure what counts as wasting their lives when they’ve both only ever wanted to get through it.
Kim Dokja starts to read, and then shuts the file abruptly.
“I shouldn’t read this in front of you,” he says.
“Why?”
“If I hate it you’ll know. If I like it you’ll know.”
“You’re a terrible liar. I’ll know even if you try to hide it.”
Kim Dokja frowns.
For some reason, he carries a certainty that he’s practically a con man. Jaehwan doesn’t know where he gets it from. Even passersby can tell when Kim Dokja is lying. The only person who falls for his lies is himself.
“You can’t fool me,” Kim Dokja says. “I’m going to read it alone.”
Jaehwan waves in the direction of the only other room in his house.
Kim Dokja gathers up the file and rushes away, shutting the door firmly behind him.
/
“There is no monster left to fight,” Kim Dokja says, his voice scarily steady.
It’s the first thing he says to Jaehwan after it.
Jaehwan hasn’t seen him for a couple of days, which he knows means that Kim Dokja has been going out of his way to avoid him. The fool was convinced that they shouldn’t make eye contact until he’d finished the whole novel.
“What,” Jaehwan asks.
“There’s nothing left to fight. In your novel. In this world. Anywhere.”
Jaehwan narrows his eyes at him. “Was there a monster here before?”
He doesn’t expect how hard his heart is beating.
Kim Dokja looks more tired than usual—he must have pulled too many all-nighters. It annoys him, but at the same time, he’s touched.
He knows that this is how Kim Dokja looks after he’s read something he loves.
Tired, and a little insane.
Like he might fall to the floor any moment but he’d talk about whatever stupid novel he’d read even half conscious.
“There was,” Kim Dokja says, sounding more insane than usual. “But I killed him with my own hands.”
For a moment—Jaehwan thinks he means a demon.
He thinks maybe, just maybe—Kim Dokja had seen the same world that he had.
That he had climbed up those towers.
That he’d hoped to fight Big Brother.
But at twenty four years old, Jaehwan knows better.
He knows that the only person Kim Dokja calls a monster is his father.
He glances at Jaehwan, as if waiting for him to judge him.
“What then?” Jaehwan asks instead.
“What?”
“What do you do, once the monster is dead?”
Kim Dokja just stares.
He looks lost, like this isn’t how he expected the conversation to go.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I just wait.”
“For?”
“For something.”
It’s a fair explanation.
It’s how all of Jaehwan’s time has felt here, back on Earth.
Just waiting. For something. Something good, or something bad—he doesn’t even care at this point.
Just something besides the dull emptiness that he’s learned is what it means to be human.
“There’s nothing left to fight now,” Kim Dokja says. “Now it’s just us. You and me and a whole lot of books to read.”
There’s a quiet, and it doesn’t feel as bad as it should.
There are no monsters to fight, no battles to win—but it doesn’t feel as bad as it should.
Because there’s a relief in his chest that he hasn’t felt, for as long as he can remember.
A relief, in knowing that he shared his story—and that it wasn’t just tolerated, but loved.
“I could live like that,” Jaehwan says.
Kim Dokja smiles.
It’s tentative, like he’s still learning how to do it.
But it’s real.
/
“What do you do, though?” Jaehwan asks. “Once the story is over.”
“I used to think I should kill myself,” Kim Dokja says, a smile in his voice because he’s always found humour in the strangest things. “But I’ve learned that you can read it again instead.”
“What?”
“The story only ends for as long as you look away from it.”
He flips back to the front of the manuscript, through all the heavily edited pages. Kim Dokja is even more brutal an editor than Jaehwan is—but it never feels critical.
The red ink he’s left all over Jaehwan’s words don’t feel like corrections.
They don’t feel like the words that Jaehwan is used to, of this isn’t how this should be. This isn’t how you should be. This isn’t okay to be.
The red ink, instead, feels like a kind of love.
The sort that curls over his words with care, and instead of this couldn’t happen, asks— is this the entire truth?
Are you still hiding, Jaehwan?
Are there parts that still scare you?
Kim Dokja turns to the very first page, and then pats it down to make his point. “Let’s read it from the beginning.”
“Aren’t you bored?”
“Why would I be bored?”
“You’ve read it thrice already.”
Kim Dokja shakes his head. “I could read it a hundred times. It makes sense to me,” he says. “The moment I start to read. Everything makes sense. It’s only when I look up that things go wrong.”
Jaehwan knows what he means.
He follows Kim Dokja’s gaze, to the start of the manuscript. To the description on the very first page.
This is the story of a man who did not return while everyone else returned to the past.
Jaehwan learns to read again.
/