Chapter Text
Yoo Joonghyuk was a very boring man who was bored with his boring life. Every day was always the same. He would wake up, spend the whole day wishing he was dead for picking a major that was, in fact, not as enjoyable as playing video games, contrary to his assumption, somehow make it alive to the evening, and repeat.
However, a new variable was added to his loop that first night of September when he finally decided to get rid of the Christmas tree that had been loitering around the corner of his room for ten months.
"Damn, I didn't know this was a popular burial site." Kim Dokja prods his shovel into the loose soil, his chin resting above the hands holding it.
Yoo Joonghyuk slightly flinches at the sound—and maybe at the unmoving finger peeking from the underground.
"First time?"
Cold beads of sweat forming on the surface of his hands made it harder to maintain his grip on the trunk of the Christmas tree wrapped around a garbage bag like a dead body, courtesy of his sister. Yoo Joonghyuk musters up a cool voice, trying to assert the illusion of dominance over some guy who may or may not have committed murder.
"Been here way before you."
The guy remains resting on the shovel's handle. From what little light the night sky provided to illuminate the scene, something close to a smirk seemed to form on his face. Yoo Joonghyuk wanted to strike him out with the Christmas tree, scurry back to his room, and come back with a knife.
"Ah, that person from some afternoon ago must have been you."
Yoo Joonghyuk felt as if a table corner had busted both of his elbows. Jesus Christ, there's another one?
"Probably," he replies, sliding his free hand inside his coat pocket to subtly wipe the evidence of fear building up on his palm.
They stared at each other in complete silence. It was hard to catch a clear sight of the other guy’s face under the pale moonlight. However, Yoo Joonghyuk was certain that the corners of his mouth were curled up ever so lightly in a way that was sickeningly welcoming and foreboding the entire time. From the stingy sight presented right before him, Yoo Joonghyuk randomly surmises that the guy isn’t that bad in the eye—other than the fact that he’s smiling and posing right above some person he just buried a few meters underground.
Quite unlike his usual behavior, Yoo Joonghyuk was the one to break eye contact. He heard the other one let out a mocking huff. What a smug bastard, he thought.
Yoo Joonghyuk swings the dead body over to his left shoulder, prompting his heels to spin him back away from this madness. “I’ll find another spot.”
“Oi, where are you going?” The other calls out, sounds of soil getting scrambled could be heard again. “There’s enough space for a hundred more bodies.”
Yoo Joonghyuk doesn’t stop in his tracks. He needed to get out of there, grab the sharpest knife he could find in his kitchen, and probably hold it for the rest of his life.
“I don’t like sharing,” he replies without looking back.
The guy didn’t seem to be going after him. Still, Yoo Joonghyuk picks up his pace.
“Really? That’s a shame…” The tone seemed rather ominously enthusiastic which made the determination of Yoo Joonghyuk’s legs to escape fade off. Yoo Joonghyuk already knows what’s about to happen. “Wouldn’t it be hard to carry that Christmas tree again all the way back?”
He froze in his spot for a couple of seconds. He slowly spun around like a horror protagonist despite already knowing what kind of sight was situated behind him. The guy he couldn’t identify just yet, leaning on the shovel now anchored beside him. He was grinning, eyes formed faint crescents.
Yoo Joonghyuk knew exactly what had to be done by then.
"Oh, what the…" Kim Dokja groans, holding his head upon waking up to an excruciating headache and a sore upper body. He prompts himself into a sitting position as he alternately massages both of his presumably bruised shoulders. He murmurs to himself, "Damned bastard hit me with a Christmas tree."
Tonight surely was an unusual one.
For the first time in so many nights that Kim Dokja had slipped in and out of the forest area, he saw another person. And to Kim Dokja’s delight, the said guy still didn’t seem so bad after all this time—except for the moment when he knocked him out with a whole decaying Christmas tree from last year’s holidays. He was even committed to the "Christmas tree dead body" gag, how cute.
Kim Dokja gets off his ass and crouches up on his feet. He fiddles with the seemingly still-warm finger peeking from the ground as if the shrouded body was pointing an accusatory finger at him. Tonight’s prior work was knottier than usual—how in the hell did this guy end up being more athletic than the other squeamish ones? They’re usually knocked out with one jab to the neck, but this one was a little different. The son of a bitch somehow managed to sneak an uppercut and a tragic knee to the groin. Only whoever’s up there in the sky knows how stupid Kim Dokja looked, limping toward the forest with one hand dragging a dead body’s foot and one hand on his pained lower area. He's gotta give it to the guy, though—he was different from the rest.
It’s a shame he had to be killed. Well, that’s the price for knowing too little.
He fidgets with the finger once more before getting up on his feet with the use of the shovel as leverage. The last silt he gathered veiled the last indication that someone looked at the same things he will have to look at from now on.
Kim Dokja felt a strange breeze brush past him as his legs carried him away from the scenario where his grim territory and what lay beyond it that was illuminated by the pale moonlight were clearly separated by the rough edges of the umbrella of leaves above him. Nevertheless, he moves along with light steps as though he were entering a newly unlocked level in the light.
Quite the opposite of his burden-free—or so he likes to believe it is—shoulders, a gust of doubt seems to push him back. It’s telling him he already managed to fuck up the sequence of events by starting off shaky on the wrong foot. To be fair, he did get caught burying a corpse.
"Ah, that guy… what was he even doing here?" He mumbles, running a frustrated hand along his hair. "He should’ve taken that tree out one week after New Year’s. That dumb bastard must’ve not told him about it…"
Kim Dokja kept wandering around aimlessly on the university grounds. Still grumbling about the miscalculated encounter, he finally lets his hair rest easy and pours his irritation on the tiny rocks at the end of his shoe instead. He just went on like that for a few more minutes in hopes of coming up with a band-aid solution for his blunder until the vibration of his phone inside his pocket prompted him to stop moving in circles.
A bright expression fairly looms on his face on the assumption that something he loves still exists even in this place.
"I didn’t know— oh ." His face immediately sunk into a deep frown upon seeing that the email was only a notification from some shady forum where he'd signed up to inform him that someone had downvoted his post.
However, his disappointment didn’t last too long. An idea just rained over him—how he can patch things up with a guy whose face is practically kissing up a screen for a living.
Kim Dokja sneers to himself, his balled fist covering his mouth as he giddily types away on his phone. "I wonder if his handle is still the same," he murmurs just a second before a familiar sequence of letters and numbers shows up. The corners of his mouth curl up even further.
He remains standing in the middle of the faintly lit plaza, his phone screen brightly radiating on his face. Trickles of night’s breath dancing with the wisps of hair eased on his forehead to the sounds of crackling dead leaves. It was a scene that was rather dramatic for such a mundane progression.
"Yoo Joonghyuk," he sounds out almost at the same time his fingers say the same thing. "I know… you were freaked out… by what you saw earlier… but it’s not what you think it is… I was just joking about the burial site stuff and all…"
Kim Dokja distances his phone from him and re-reads his message as if he was trying to look at it from another point of view. He stares at it for a minute before shaking his head and erasing everything. No, that sounds even more criminal.
He begins another message.
"Yoo Joonghyuk, you are wrong about everything," he says, dragging out every syllable. He frustratedly presses his finger on the delete button again. "Ah, forget it."
Sliding his phone back inside his pocket, Kim Dokja recalls Yoo Joonghyuk’s expression back in the forest upon seeing him in an unsightly incident. Apart from the second, when he saw the tiny proof of Kim Dokja’s miscalculation, Yoo Joonghyuk already seemed confused about his presence.
Kim Dokja breathes through his folded palms before cooping them up inside his coat pockets. He starts finding his way back home on the cobblestone ground, gone was the playful expression on his face.
He had expected this, anyway.