Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I have a playlist for this fic because apparently I can't write anything emotional without Spotify bleeding music into me. So put it on shuffle and give it a listen if you want ig?

(Critique not my taste in music I've been told it's bad enough times 😭)

Also this and this, these three playlists are making up everything in my head. Feel free to suggest more songs! (Or help me change the playlist cover 😭)

(EDIT 20/08/2025: I changed the name of the fic.)

Here's the summary again in case the formatting was fucked before:

Death doesn’t come as a surprise to Kim Dokja. He’s been waiting for the call since he was fifteen, convinced that dying would be the only meaningful thing he’d ever do.
Yoo Joonghyuk, on the other hand, has spent his life fighting to stay afloat—only to be told, mid-livestream, that today is his last.
In twenty-four hours, they’ll argue, laugh, fall a little in love just in time to break hearts—and of course, learn what it means to be alive, just before the end.
It's a love story. Or a tragedy.
Depends on who’s still breathing by the end.
Or perhaps they both will. Who knows?

Chapter Text

14th February, 20xx

12:15 AM

Kim Dokja was going to die today.

And no, this was not one of the stupid jokes he told Han Sooyoung and got hit for, nor was this his usual suicidal conjecture he had believed in since he was fifteen.

Kim Dokja was going to die today.

The unchangeable ringtone of Death-Cast—the solemn, deafening toll of church bells—rang through the darkness of his apartment, echoing off peeling wallpaper and a leaky ceiling. In the silence, it sounded ceremonial. Final.

How suitable, Dokja thought.

Death-Cast always called between midnight and three. The sooner they told you, the more time you had left. Twelve-fifteen was early. Lucky him. At least he knew the premium subscription lived up to its name.

The screen of his phone glowed a loud gray, the name DEATH-CAST printed in flat, bold letters that didn’t feel real. The longer he stared at it, the more it felt like an impossible dare.

Kim Dokja didn’t flinch. He simply got up—mechanically, like sleepwalking—leaned back against the headboard of his bed, and pressed the green button. For a second that felt like a hundred hours, there was absolute silence on both sides.

“...Hello?”

His voice cracked from disuse. He cleared his throat, tried again.

“Hello?”

The voice that answered was soft and friendly. Practiced. The strange kind of careful people used with children to comfort them, or in his case, a soon to die adult.

“Mr. Kim? Is this Kim Dokja?”

He tilted his head towards the ceiling. Stared through it.

“Yes.”

There was another brief pause.

“Dokja-ssi, this is Youngki calling from Death-Cast. It is my regret to inform you that sometime in the next twenty-four hours, you will die. We at Death-Cast express our deepest condolences, and encourage you to live this day to the fullest.”

There was a pause, maybe to let the words sink in.
They didn’t. He’d already heard them, even before she said them.

Dokja didn’t know what he was supposed to say.

Thank you? I figured? Finally?

For a brief moment he even considered asking them how, even though he knew no one, not even Death-Cast themselves knew how a person would die. Only that they would. And they had never been wrong before, he remembered this particularly funny incident when some foreign President had tried to wait out the day in his bunker only to end up being shot by his own secret service agent. That had cemented Death-Cast’s hold on the world and the American business had spread worldwide within a year.

Kim Dokja had been one of their first subscribers when it had finally come to Korea.

The woman was still saying something. “...any requirements or funeral arrangements, please do log onto deathcast.com and—”

“Right.”

“Would you like to be connected to our Grief Counseling team? Do you have any friends or family that are currently unavailable, if so we shall try to reach them as well.”

“No thank you, that’s unnecessary.”

The woman’s tone softened further, “And sir if you—”

“Thanks for the heads-up, I’ll be sure to leave a five star review before I get turned into fucking roadkill or whatever it is that awaits me.”

“Sir—!”

He hung up.

The screen switched back from the cold gray to the dim white of the webnovel he’d been reading before he was interrupted. He watched as it dimmed further and the screen shut off, casting the room in complete darkness. The silence in his apartment was deafening. The fridge hummed. The wind rattled something loose on the balcony. He could hear the upstairs neighbor’s dog barking faintly through the ceiling.

Outside, the city was still awake. Distant traffic, glowing windows, someone yelling too far away to understand.

Kim Dokja blinked up at the ceiling again.
So this is it, he thought. The day I die.

He waited for something—fear, sadness, some kind of revelation.
But all he felt was the same thing he’d felt every morning for years:

Nothing.

And the funny part was—he almost found that comforting.

I should call Han Sooyoung

She’d probably be pissed at him if he went off and died without telling her and most probably end up digging out his grave so that he could never rest in peace. He shivered at the thought, and picked up his phone, the screen once again lighting up as he scrolled through his contacts.

Although…

He wasn’t sure whether Han Sooyoung would be able to pick up, considering she was on an international trip, signing books or whatever it was that internationally best-selling authors did in their free time. He wasn’t even sure of her current time zone, and he did not want to wake her up mid-nap and get obliterated via voice-call by whatever cranky old hag possessed her during those hours.

He cursed internally after looking at the international charges and hit dial anyway.

He let his head fall back against the headboard again as he waited. The glow from the phone cast a ghostly light across the empty room.

The phone rang once.
Twice.
Three times.

She’s not going to pick up.

He didn’t realize how fast his heart was beating until the fourth ring.

On the fifth ring, the line clicked.

A groggy, venomous voice answered:

“You better be dying, Kim Dokja.”

He almost laughed at that.

“I am.”

There was a pause. A long one.

“...Fuck,” she whispered.

6,272 miles away from the city of Seoul, Han Sooyoung sat up on her bed, now wide awake.

Kim Dokja picked the far wall to stare at now, he could hear the soft rustle of sheets over the line, the thump of hurried footsteps, a click of a light switch. She was moving already.

“You’re joking,” she said next, the words sharp, brittle. “You absolute cockroach , if this is another one of your weird existential jokes, I swear on every god and devil that has ever breathed—”

“I’m not.” Dokja said quietly.

She went still on the other end of the call.

Then: “You sure it was actually Death-Cast and not one of those new scams?”

A simple nod, forgotten until he remembered she couldn’t see it. “Yeah.”

“And long has it been since they called?”

Kim Dokja glanced at the digital clock at his bedside table, “Only a few min—” he froze.

The clock cheerfully read 1:12 AM.

Huh.

Did I really dissociate and stare at a wall for an hour?

“Scratch that, it’s almost been an hour.”

A sharp breath.

Then the storm came.

“You fucking idiot ! You should’ve called me immediately! What kind of absolute dumbass gets the call and just  sits there like—what—like some discount tragic hero waiting for his final curtain call? Kim Dokja, you, you goddamn—FUCK YOU, YOU BASTARD!”

She didn’t stop. Not for air. Not for mercy.

“You’re not supposed to be alone, dumbass. You should’ve— You should’ve—! Didn’t I tell you to delete that sick ‘I’m okay with dying alone’ crap off your phone notes years ago?! And don’t tell me you were going to just rot in that moldy little excuse for an apartment without saying anything, because—”

She continued ranting.

Dokja didn’t interrupt. He let her go. It was always like this.

Anger first. Then panic. Then—

“Do you even have a plan? No, of course you don’t. You never do. Did you eat dinner yesterday? Of course not! You’re sitting there in yesterday’s laundry, aren’t you? For god’s sake, Dokja, you’ve got like—what—twenty, twenty-three hours left at best and you’re just gonna lie there like you’re waiting for fate to pick you off!?”

He almost laughed. Almost.

“Han Sooyoung.”

She didn’t hear him.

“—and you’re not even going to try to message someone, are you, because you think it’s better to disappear without bothering anyone, because that’s what you do, Kim Dokja, that’s what you always —”

“Han Sooyoung.” There was a soft but pained edge to his voice this time.

She froze mid-rant, mid-word, maybe mid-breath.

He swallowed.

“You know there’s nothing that can be done.”

The silence that followed felt almost crushing. A silence made of too many unsaid things pressing in from both ends of the line.

When she finally spoke again, her voice had changed.

It had that crack in it—the kind she always hid behind loudness, behind sarcasm, behind the sound of someone who couldn’t afford to be fragile.

“That doesn’t matter you suicidal bastard,” she whispered. “You can’t die while...”

She didn’t finish the sentence. But Kim Dokja understood it anyway.

While I’m not there.

While you’re alone.

While…

Kim Dokja let his eyes fall shut.

“It’s alright.”

“ No it’s not, ” she hissed, voice unsteady and shaking harder now. “Don’t you fucking dare tell me it’s alright, like this is just some inevitable bullshit we’re all supposed to accept. You know I’ve never accepted this bullshit—”

“Death-Cast has had a hundred percent accuracy rate Sooyoung.”

“DOESN’T MATTER!” she shrieked. “You’re not allowed to be calm about this. You’re not allowed to just fade out like you’ve been rehearsing for this your whole life. I’m not— I’m not letting you go out like this.”

She was breathing hard now. And when she next spoke, it was no longer a whisper.

“I’m going to the goddamn airport.”

He sat up straighter, blinking. “What?”

“You heard me.”

“You just left. You can’t possibly—”

“Not another word.” Her voice snapped like a whip, the fury in it barely covering the tremble underneath. “Not another single fucking word, you bastard.”

Dokja shut his mouth. Let her fill the silence.

“I’m serious,” she continued, biting the words out like they hurt. “Don’t do anything even remotely dangerous. Don’t go near a crosswalk. Don’t cook. Don’t eat fish with bones. Don’t even open your window without a helmet on. Just—I don’t know. Don’t breathe too hard.”

He exhaled softly, a tired breath that left him hollow.

“And don’t stay alone,” she added, quieter now. “Go to someone. Jung Heewon, maybe. Or—you know. Anyone.”

Kim Dokja smiled, thin and dry.

“You know I can’t interrupt her and Hyunsung-ssi’s engagement party. They've been planning it for months.”

“What!?”

“I’m not gonna dive-bomb their party and make it about myself, it’s their day.”

Another pause. Sharper. More brittle.

“Do you even hear yourself Dokja?” she snapped, her voice transitioned into a horrified whisper. “You’re dying, Kim Dokja. You’re dying. And you’re worried about being a goddamn inconvenience?”

He closed his eyes again. Didn’t answer.

“Jung Heewon is the closest thing you’ll ever have to an older sister. Lee Hyunsung’s also your friend, you’re their goddamn guest of honour , how can you possibly think—”

“Which is why I’ll politely decline and blame my boss instead,” Dokja cut in, tone even. “They’ll believe it. It’s not that far-fetched.”

“—that they’ll be hung up over you of all people coming to them?” she finished, incredulously.

Another heavy silence fell.

Then Sooyoung breathed out—sharp and fast. “Fine. I’m calling Sangah. She’ll know what to do. She can come over—”

“No.” The reply was instantaneous, albeit a lot sharper than he had intended it to be.

“Excuse me?” she said slowly, and he could practically hear the punch she would’ve landed on his jaw if she were here in person. “You little—”

But her voice. Her voice had that same snarl again. That liveliness. That heat.

At least that was nice.

“If you don’t tell Sangah by this afternoon,” she said, low and deadly, “and I will find out by calling her, then she will. And I won’t be responsible for your murder when she finds out from me that you didn’t tell her and decided to kick the bucket.”

“How terrifying.” he deadpanned.

“And you’re an idiot, so it evens out.”

Another pause, it felt like entire worlds were breathing between them.

“If you’re not gonna listen to me…” she hesitated. “At least use ‘Last Friend’ for heaven’s sake.”

“Absolutely not.” His brow creased. “You know that thing is busted.”

“It’s not busted,” she sighed like she was aging five years in real time. “You keep pretending it glitches so people would stop bothering you.”

“Maybe.”

“Reinstall it. Log in again. I don’t care if you go find someone to cry to or just grab coffee with a stranger—you’re not spending your last day alone. Please.”

“Alright.”

Her voice came sharper, “Promise me that Kim Dokja, promise me that you won't spend the day alone.”

Kim Dokja leaned his head against the wall and looked up at the ceiling again. He let the moment settle over him, soft and weary, like the static hum of grief waiting just outside the room.

“…Okay,” he said, finally. “I promise. I swear it on my honor.”

Not that my honor will be worth much in twenty-four hours.

.

.

.

1:45 AM

Kim Dokja sighed for what felt like the hundredth time that night.

His fingers drummed absently against the cold side of his phone. It had been half an hour since Han Sooyoung had yelled herself into silence. Half an hour since he’d promised to do what she asked. Shower. Brush. Eat.

He had kept those promises—more or less.

The water from the shower had been lukewarm at best, but it had washed the static from his limbs. His toothbrush felt brittle from disuse. And the leftover rice and microwaved egg from his fridge had gone down like sawdust, but he forced himself to chew. Because Sooyoung would know. She always knew.

Now he sat at his desk, hair still damp, the faint scent of soap clinging to him like a reminder that he was supposed to be alive for a few more hours.

His laptop sat open beside him. The fluorescent white and blue interface of his email inbox cast a soft glow into the otherwise dim room. 26 unread messages. A good chunk of them from his boss, each with a subject line more impatient than the last. As if deadlines mattered today.

Kim Dokja didn’t bother opening a single one.

Instead, his eyes stayed locked on his phone, which had been cycling through the login screen of the Last Friend app for the past five minutes.

“I told her it was busted,” he muttered under his breath, staring flatly at the loading wheel.

Then again, when has Han Sooyoung ever listened to you?

Eventually, the animation flickered into life. Two silhouettes crossed each other’s paths and high-fived beneath some cheerful and supposedly uplifting slogan that he didn’t bother reading. The reviews underneath the app had changed a lot, but the top most viewed review was still a five-star by some dude name Paz who wrote, “ You don’t have to die alone!” With a bunch of emojis.

Dokja rolled his eyes. Tell that to the app that never loads.

He typed in the password. Muscle memory guided his fingers, but he still cringed when the username lit up across the screen:

DKOS_3

He groaned. “Of course.”

He should’ve changed it. He meant to change it. But the account had been set up by Sooyoung and Sangah the day he turned twenty-two—after his third work-induced anxiety collapse, after another brush with death he’d called “a funny coincidence.”

To him DKOS stood for ‘Demon King Of Salvation’ which might have been cringe, but nobody was going to tell that to nineteen year old Kim Dokja when he flunked some important exams and took up a pretty famous character from this web novel he’d been reading as his username as a means of comfort.

However, DKOS , Sooyoung had said, eyes glinting with sarcasm. Dokja’s Kill-Count of Suicidal Attempts: Season Three.  It didn't make sense, but nothing ever did when Han Sooyoung was concerned.

He had almost deleted the app that day. He should’ve.

But now he was here.

The login chime played—soft, artificial, almost apologetic—and the welcome screen appeared.

We’re sorry to lose you, Kim Dokja.

A soft piano note followed. Minor key. As if the app itself was mourning him. The corners of his mouth twitched upward in a dry, humorless scoff.

“What, no coupon for a final meal?” he said to no one.

Two options blinked in front of him.

• Dying Today?
• Not Dying Today?

He hit ‘dying today’ and swiped forward into the homepage. Nothing had changed.

Same curated list of random profiles. Same bright, falsely comforting design choices. Same error message blinking over the little green dot at the top that was supposed to indicate the number of Deckers online in real time.

Error: Connection Lost.

Tens—maybe hundreds—of people were dying today. All across Seoul. People with names, faces, last meals, bucket lists. And yet the app showed him the same recycled list it always did.

Dokja tapped the refresh icon.

Nothing.

He swiped down again. And again. He even jabbed the screen a little harder than necessary, thumb aching against the glass.

Still nothing.

He tried to open the feedback section to log a bug. Maybe it was the developer part of his brain, still hardwired to flag crashes and glitches like he was back at his job. But the Contact Us screen refused to load, cycling endlessly.

He leaned back, staring blankly at the cracked corner of his ceiling. His phone lay on his chest now, screen glowing like a second sun. A part of him—deep, buried, childish—wanted to chuck it straight out the window. Watch it spiral down six stories and shatter into unfixable pieces. Something about that felt poetic.

But he didn’t move.

Just lay there.

Let the light warm his collarbone. Let the seconds tick by.

A soft ding from his phone pulled him back.

Your bio is outdated. Update now?

He stared at it for a long moment. The words glared back like an accusation.

With a sigh, Dokja hit yes.

It had been years since he’d last touched this thing. The bio still said he was twenty-seven, still listed “development and testing” as his job (not that it had changed), and still carried the faint, mocking tone Sooyoung had added when she’d filled in half the fields for him.

He updated the age. Adjusted the city. Filled in the likes and dislikes with the same ease.

Then, the last section blinked into view:

“What do you want to do on your last day?”

His fingers hovered over the keyboard.

What do I want to do?

Stay at home, probably. Binge through the hundreds of web novels he’d bookmarked and never gotten around to reading. Maybe write sarcastic comments. Sleep in a little longer. Watch the rain through his window, if it rained. Listen to that playlist Sangah once made for him. Nothing loud.

A part of him almost typed that.

But then—

He thought of Sooyoung’s voice, still rough from sleep, fury laced with desperation. Of Sangah’s steady calm, the way she always texted him in full sentences with little hearts she pretended were ironic. Of Heewon’s stubborn loyalty, the kind that would scold him straight into the afterlife. Of Lee Hyunsung’s quiet presence, the way he made everything seem a little less unbearable just by being in the room. He thought of the kids and their—

Shit

The kids.

He hadn’t even thought of them until now. His gut twisted.

In all the supposed chaos—the Death-Cast call, Sooyoung’s rage, the broken app—he hadn’t once thought about what he was supposed to tell Lee Gilyoung and Shin Yoosung. What words could you possibly say to children who already understood too much about death? Children who had already lost everything? They wouldn’t grieve over him, that he was sure of. They were far, far stronger than him when he had been fifteen.

The panic came fast, sharp. It curled up his throat like bile.

He forced it down.

Inhaled. Exhaled. Stared at the blinking cursor in front of him.

The question was still there.

“What do you want to do on your last day?”

After a long moment, he typed.

‘Everything I couldn’t do.’

That was it.

He hit save before he could second-guess it.

The page updated.

And the home screen refreshed.

A new profile appeared.

It popped into existence at the top of the list, framed with a faint golden shimmer and a sticker at the bottom that read: New Decker.

Kim Dokja blinked.

The profile read: “Yoo Joonghyuk”

The profile picture was a grainy photo taken in a dimly lit room. Just a half-shadowed figure seated in front of a desk. Blurred edges, poor lighting, no filters—nothing polished or posed.

And yet, despite that…

God, Kim Dokja thought, this guy’s hot.

Undeniably, unfairly, devastatingly handsome.

It was irritating.

He scrolled down, half-annoyed at the injustice of the universe.

The bio was… sparse. Painfully so.

“Streamer. 29. Seoul.”

No interests. No flair. Not even a shitty emoji or misplaced hashtag.

Boring.

Boring, boring, boring.

Kim Dokja exhaled through his nose, unimpressed. He could practically feel the despair crawling back into his spine. “This app is so busted,” he muttered aloud.

There was absolutely nothing in common between them. Nothing to suggest any reason why the god-awful algorithm would push this guy at him like some divine revelation. For a second he debated writing an angry email to the devs.

There was no way this guy (if he even was a guy) was real, it could have been a bot or some dog behind a screen for all he knew, there was no way to tell on the internet. More likely, this profile was one of those .

The whole thing screamed of I catfish dying people and scam them into losing their money! Or even worse: I’m actually an axe murdering psychopath. Let’s meet up :^)

It wouldn’t be the first time something like that happened. Last Friend had a long list of horror stories under its belt. With people desperate for companionship, it was bound to attract predators.

Dokja had half a mind to report the profile and close the app. Already, his thumb was hovering over the little flag icon.

Then he scrolled just a little further—

And stopped.

His eyes caught on the final line of the profile.

“What do you want to do on your last day?”

And beneath it:

“Everything I couldn’t do.”

The same words he’d typed out not five minutes ago.

Dokja blinked. Once.

His thumb, hovering above the report flag, lowered slowly.

It didn’t feel like fate. There was something—quiet and off-kilter—in the way those words looked back at him. Like the faint echo of a thought he hadn’t meant for anyone else to hear.

The room felt smaller somehow. Still.

Kim Dokja sat there, silent, the glow of the screen reflected faintly in his eyes.

The whole thing screamed of SERIAL KILLER DON’T MAKE CONTACT to him.

Still…

He didn’t know why. Maybe it was the suddenness of it. Or the odd familiarity of the name. Or maybe—maybe it was just that this person, unlike the others, was here. Not that he could describe what ‘here’ meant. Only that he was here.

Right now.

Online.

Also dying.

Just like him.

His heart thudded once. A heavy, solitary beat.

He tapped on the name. Then on the chat option.

Hey.
You awake?

Chapter Text

1:15 AM

Yoo Joonghyuk did not wish to die today. There were no do-overs in a hardcore world.

His character landed cleanly on the water he’d placed down at the last moment as the Ender Dragon exploded into smoke and light. Purple shards burst into the air like falling stars, and EXP bloomed outward in quiet fireworks. In the center of the screen, the dragon’s death spiraled across the Void, its pixelated body dissolving in ash.

Joonghyuk didn’t say a word.

He never did.

There was no celebratory screeching or exaggerated cheer. No donation thank-yous, no mic-peaking laughter. Just the soft clack of his keyboard as he guided his avatar across the off-white endstone to collect the green orbs and then went off towards the outer islands.

The stream had been live for three hours and forty-seven minutes.

Yoo Joonghyuk wasn’t a Minecraft player in any way but his fans had been begging for ages and when that was combined with the incessant pleading from his manager/editor (Uriel could be headache when she wanted to) to agree with them for a greater outreach, Joonghyuk had finally relented.

Tonight however, his webcam wasn’t on. His lights were broken, flickering crazily every time he switched them on and he hadn’t gotten around to calling an electrician to fix.

On the second monitor that Yoo Joonghyuk never bothered watching, the chat moved like floodwater:

bro said NOTHING and soloed the dragon on his first try ok
🐉💀💀💀 yj moment
how is he hot AND so good???
oh my god i’m in love with this man
marry me. i’m serious.
notice me pls
i love you yjh, your voice is hot
NO COMMENTARY GANG WE WIN
real talk this bgm is fire who made this
not a bgm bro that’s his phone ig

The music in the background, however, had shifted.

Faint and distant—barely distinguishable beneath the Minecraft ambiance—was a sound that didn’t belong. A kind of slow, reverberating chime. Steady. Distant. Mournful. Yoo Joonghyuk didn’t remember C418—the composer of some great music, according to Uriel—making any new tracks for the game but whatever, he was new to the game anyway and he would never play it again so it didn't really matter. What would he know anyway?

He killed a lone enderman he’d accidentally made eye contact with and picked up the elytra from the chest. Six shulkers hit him at the same time but currently with the buckets of milk in his inventory, it wasn’t that big of a concern.

guys. guys that’s not the bgm
HIS PHONE’S RINGING
WHY IS IT RINGING
I HAVE CHILLS WTF
why does it sound like bells???
PLEASE DON'T TELL ME THST'S WHAT I THINK IT IS????
you’re kidding
YOONGHYUK PICK UP THE PHONE

Yoo Joonghyuk used a rocket and his newly equipped elytra to fly towards the main island. 

is that—wait
wait wait wait
HOLD THE FUCK ON
IS THAT HIS PHONE RINGING???
PHONE
CHAT DO U HEAR THAT
isn’t it 1:15 in seoul i’m scared
HELLO????
DEATH-CAST???
no way. no no no.
IS THAT DEATH-CAST???

Still oblivious, Joonghyuk turned back toward the main island. He threw one last pearl and watched it arc into the sky. As he landed near the portal, the bedrock rim shimmered faintly in the glow of the torches he’d placed. He let his avatar stand there for a moment, unmoving, before stepping forward and letting it drop.

The screen darkened.

Text scrolled into view.

I see the player you mean.
SupremeKing_?
Yes. Take care. It has reached a higher level now. It can read our thoughts.
That doesn't matter. It thinks we are part of the game.

Joonghyuk reached for his keyboard to hit a key for "Skip"—no need for a block game to wax existential poetry at him—when he caught the edge of a different sound entirely. Between the split-second break between one OST and the other he heard a weird tolling sound.

Call?

No, that didn’t make any sense.

Who would be calling him of all people?

It was coming from his desk.

His phone, lying facedown next to his mousepad, was vibrating with such intensity that it almost tipped itself off the edge. And the sound—the chime echoing faintly through the headset now—wasn’t his ringtone. It wasn’t a sound he had set. Not one he recognized.

He frowned.

His phone was always on silent during streams.

Always.

Faintly, behind the headset, he could hear it now. The tolling of bells. Church bells. Slow and sonorous.

Church bells

He pulled off his headphones and his ears were immediately assaulted by the near-deafening noise of the ominous ringtone.

The phone, face-down, vibrated violently once—twice—three times. It spun slightly, the tremor from the call jarring against the wood grain. He stared at it for a moment too long. There was a growing pressure in the back of his throat, a tightness he hadn’t felt in years. Something animal, something instinctual. The kind of fear that settled not in the heart, but the marrow. His heart was beating too fast, his lungs were moving in and out rapidly and he felt an unexplainable itch in his legs to get up and run. The world seemed to be zooming out like some shitty movie.

BRO IT’S THE CALL
PLEASE DON’T PICK UP
someone say something
ANYONE
PLEASE
YJ
YOO JOONGHYUK
STOP STREAMING MAN
HOLY SHIT

Scientists said that unexplained flight or fight responses came from years of survival based fear carving a space into the human brain over a process of thousands of years. Fascinatingly, they hadn't been able to explain how this simple tone had—in the short span of twenty years—hammered itself into the fear cortex of every single human being on the planet.

He didn’t want to pick it up.

The ringing continued.

Loud and ceremonial, like a requiem with no choir.

He reached for the phone with stiff fingers.

The screen lit up, harsh and white in the dark.

Incoming call: DEATH-CAST

His mind went blank for a second.

He had known this moment would come eventually, of course. Everyone knew. It was just a matter of when. The call always came between midnight and three, just like they said. He should’ve expected it.

But somehow, in all the years he had thought about it—brushed past headlines, watched people cry in subway stations, scrolled past tribute posts on CountDowners with thousands of likes—he never imagined it would feel like this.

Like someone pulling the earth out from under his feet.

More than that he was angry.

I like this player. It played well. It did not give up.
It is reading our thoughts as though they were words on a screen.
That is how it chooses to imagine many things, when it is deep in the dream of a game.
Words make a wonderful interface. Very flexible. And less terrifying than staring at the reality behind the screen.

He stared at the words on the screen as the ringing got even louder.

DEATH-CAST

The name looked too casual there, too sterile. Like it belonged to a contact saved in haste. Like it wasn’t the single most terrifying number a person could receive.

His hand trembled.

Was it the cold? No it couldn’t be that, the thermostat was working fine.

He was something else entirely.

Yoo Joonghyuk, who had survived twenty-seven years of an unjust life with nothing but quiet rage and iron discipline, stood completely still in the middle of his silent apartment, and for the first time in a long, long while, he was afraid.

Because Yoo Joonghyuk did not wish to die today.

And yet, here was Death calling him anyway.

It cannot read that thought.

No. It has not yet achieved the highest level. That, it must achieve in the long dream of life, not the short dream of a game.

The phone kept ringing.

It didn’t care that he was frozen. Didn’t care that he hadn’t picked it up the first time. It simply rang again. He’d always considered Death-Cast similar to an insurance company. A complete scam, despite their 100% prediction accuracy rate. Never in his short life had he considered that he’d ever actually get the call.

A quiet, impossible thing: inevitability wrapped in ceremony.

He pressed accept.

“Mr. Yoo? Yoo Joonghyuk?” came a male voice—polite, level, too practiced to be anything but real.

His jaw clenched. “Who the hell is this?”

A pause.

“This is Bihyung from Death-Cast. I’m really sorry to inform you that some time in the next twenty-four hours, you will—”

“No.” His voice was sharp. “No, you’ve got the wrong number.”

“My sincere apologies then, is this not Joonghyuk Yoo?”

“No—yes, this is Yoo Joonghyuk. No, I’m not going to die today.”

Another pause. The voice stayed steady.

“I’m sorry. I know this isn’t easy. We’ve verified your ID based on the subscription. You are Yoo Joonghyuk, age twenty-seven, Seoul resident—”

“I said no,” he snapped, louder this time. “You’ve made a mistake. Check again.”

“I understand this is difficult. But I assure you, Mr. Yoo, this is not a mistake.”

Joonghyuk pulled the phone away from his ear for a second, staring at the glowing screen. He could hang up. That’s all he had to do. Just… end the call. Go back to the game. Go back to—

But he didn’t move.

He laughed.

It sounded like cracking porcelain. Hollow. Too sharp around the edges.

“You’re joking.”

“I’m very sorry,” the man continued, unfazed. He was good at this. Trained, probably. “As part of Death-Cast’s promise to notify all Deckers before their passing, we’re reaching out to inform you—”

“No.” Joonghyuk’s voice snapped out, cold and final.

Another pause. Not from his script this time. He could hear him take a breath, quiet and careful.

“I understand this is difficult—”

“I didn’t ask if you understood.”

“…I can stay on the line with you if you need—”

“I don’t need anything,” he bit out, knuckles white where he clutched the phone. “Whatever algorithm you’re using, it’s wrong.”

“It’s not an algorithm,” the man said gently. “I’m sorry. I truly am. But I have other callers to attend to and you’ve been flagged by the system. I’d like to attend to them as well so if you could please.”

The man’s voice wasn’t cruel in any way. Nor was it angry. Just… tired. Like he’d had this exact conversation hundreds of times before. And maybe he had.

Does it know that we love it? That the universe is kind?

Sometimes, through the noise of its thoughts, it hears the universe, yes.

But there are times it is sad, in the long dream. It creates worlds that have no summer, and it shivers under a black sun, and it takes its sad creation for reality.

What kind of sick, cosmic joke was being played on him?

To cure it of sorrow would destroy it. The sorrow is part of its own private task. We cannot interfere.

Yoo Joonghyuk felt something crawl up the back of his throat. Like ash. Like bile.

“But I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said, quieter this time. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I’ve never even been—”

“I know.”

“I just beat the game.”

A whisper of breath from the other side.

His voice became lowered and hollow as he repeated, “ I just beat the game. ”

There was no response to that.

The caller—a man by the name Bihyung—informed him of his privileges and read out from his fixed script of information that was needed to be told to all Deckers, not that he was one. He refused to be.

He leaned back against the headrest of his chair and stared at the infinitely slow words crawling up the screen.

Give it a body, again.

Yes. Player…

Use its name.

SupremeKing_. Player of games.

Good.

Take a breath, now. Take another. Feel air in your lungs. Let your limbs return. Yes, move your fingers. Have a body again, under gravity, in air. Respawn in the long dream. There you are. Your body touching the universe again at every point, as though you were separate things. As though we were separate things.

“I hope you get to do more than just beat the game,” the caller said.

We are the universe. We are everything you think isn't you. You are looking at us now, through your skin and your eyes. And why does the universe touch your skin, and throw light on you? To see you, player. To know you. And to be known. I shall tell you a story.
Once upon a time, there was a player.

There was nothing left to say after that. 

The line stayed quiet.

And then—click.

The call ended.

Yoo Joonghyuk sat there, phone still pressed to his ear, like the silence might reverse time if he waited long enough.

But it didn’t.

And so he sat, in the cold blue light of the computer screen, heart thundering in his chest.

For the first time in years, he felt powerless.

Because no matter how fast he clicked, how well he'd fought, how long he'd survived—

There was no respawn. Not in real life.

Not this time.

He swallowed thickly, the sound loud in the silence that followed. The call had ended, but something still rang in his ears—a hollow echo, the kind that didn’t fade.

His eyes flicked over to the side monitor.

The stream was still running.

Fuck

He’d forgotten to mute his microphone.

A wall of text flew upward faster than he could parse. A cascade of disbelief, crying emojis, frantic capital letters, repeated strings of his name. People were already making obituaries.

His viewer count had surged during the call. 9.4 million . Higher than any stream he’d ever hosted. Higher than any stream anyone had probably hosted. And worst of all, he was sure they weren’t just fans, half of these would be edit makers or stream-clippers who'd make up fake sob stories about how they heard him and cried, all to gain a little bit of extra clout that would come with the 'SupremeKing_' tag.

It was as if he was already dead.

You. You. You are alive.

And sometimes the player believed the universe had spoken to it through the sunlight that came through the shuffling leaves of the summer trees

A living exhibit. A death to be consumed in real time.

He stared at the numbers, at the river of grief and panic rushing past. It made his skin crawl.

He didn’t even speak. Didn’t say a word to the audience that had come to witness his end.

Yoo Joonghyuk reached under the desk and yanked.

The tangle of wires behind his setup groaned and snapped, power cords and HDMI cables wrenching free in a violent jerk. A flicker. Then the screens cut to black.

Everything went dark.

Only silence remained.

He sat there in it, for a long moment, like something might follow.

But nothing did.

Joonghyuk dragged his hands over his face, pressing hard into his eyes, as if pressure could make it all disappear. But the ringing in his head stayed. The chill in his chest stayed.

It was anger that finally bloomed—hot, senseless.

The kind that came when fear had nowhere left to go.

His phone beeped. A sharp ping , as if the world still had the audacity to continue.

Without thinking, he snapped.

His arm lashed out blindly, but he missed the phone by an inch. His palm slammed into the base of the vertical monitor instead—the expensive one, the one he’d waited months to afford—and it pitched backward, off its stand, off the desk.

The sickening crack of glass against the wall rang out.

He didn’t even flinch.

The phone still sat there. Buzzing.

He stared at it with something like contempt. Then leaned back into the silence, jaw clenched so tightly it ached.

There would be more messages. None from any friends or family though, he didn’t have those. There would be panic. Headlines. Notifications. A dozen people trying to reach him, some for comfort, others for content.

But none of it mattered.

Because Yoo Joonghyuk was not going to die today.

He refused to.

That’s what gamers do, don’t they? He thought to himself. Defy the odds?

Yoo Joonghyuk was not going to die today. He wasn’t going to stay holed up in his apartment waiting for death to come and mark its claim on him, he was going to go out, live a completely normal day and sue Death-Cast once they were proved wrong by the end of these twenty-four hours.

This scenario was entirely very funny.

Because Yoo Joonghyuk was going to die today.

And nothing—not even a perfect run or millions of people watching—could stop it.

Yoo Joonghyuk picked up his phone and saw the whole host of messages.

Or three anyway, all from Uriel. 

YJH I just saw the stream
I’m so sorry. I—fuck. I’m so sorry.
Don’t be alone. Whatever you do today, just don’t be alone.

There was a link under her last message.

“Last Friend – find someone to spend your last day with.”

Yoo Joonghyuk stared at it.

It was absurd.

A neat little app, packaged and branded and marketed to the dying. Swipe right to die with company. Swipe left to rot alone. Somehow, the world had made dying not only acceptable—but palatable. He would blame capitalism but he knew the app was free of charge so he couldn’t even complain about that.

He frowned.

He’d never actually met Uriel in person. She lived somewhere in Europe—Spain, maybe? Or was it Italy? She always had too much sun in her pictures, and too many cats. They had stumbled across each other on a game forum years ago. Somehow, despite his terrible social skills and constant refusal to join voice calls, she had kept messaging him. Checking in. Sharing screenshots. Sending him memes and links and half a dozen emotional essays about how he should “touch grass” and “learn joy like a human being.”

And he hadn’t replied to half of them.

And yet here she was, sending him this. Thinking about him.

The world never ceased with its absurdities.

He didn’t know what to say to that. Didn’t know how to respond to someone who still cared after all the walls he’d built up.

Instead, he tapped the link.

It opened to a muted download page, all pastel colors and gentle language. A smiling logo. Something friendly.

Something that didn’t belong on the phone of a man who’d just been told he was going to die.

He installed it anyway.

And as it loaded, Yoo Joonghyuk sat back, watching the progress bar crawl miraculously fast across the screen as if the program itself knew that its sole purpose of existence was for people whose time was running out.

What was he doing?

There was no point in meeting someone now. He wasn’t the type who wanted closure. Or company. He didn’t need anyone. That had been his entire life—keep moving, keep working, don’t ask for help, don’t trust anyone to stay. Routines. Checkpoints. Lists. That was how he’d survived for so long.

Now there wasn’t anything left to survive.

He glanced around his apartment. The broken monitor. The shredded wires. The mess of a man who had lived like he’d never have to stop.

What did people even do on their supposed last day? Say goodbyes? Hug their friends? Write confessions? Post cryptic tweets?

He didn’t know.

He didn’t have anyone close enough for that. Not really. No one who knew what he looked like in the morning, or how he took his coffee. No one who would be at his door the moment the call came.

Just Uriel. On the other side of the world. Sending him cat pictures and a download link.

He’d given up friends long ago and he had no family except—

He didn’t want to think about her.

The app pinged softly as it finished installing.

Yoo Joonghyuk stared at it.

Last Friend.

He didn’t believe in friends.

Nor am I going to die, he thought. This is all just to prove a point.

But perhaps just for a day, he could pretend.

He tapped the icon.

.

.

.

.

.

1:30 AM

The screen blinked to life.

A warm, too-cheerful shade of sky blue filled the interface. An animation played in the center — two grey silhouettes drifting toward each other against the ticking of a stylized clock. When they met, they raised their arms in a high five that shimmered with pale confetti.

Yoo Joonghyuk stared at it, unmoving.

It was disturbingly upbeat.

Last Friend , the words spelled themselves out in bold sans serif, bouncing into the center like an eager puppy and expanding. A soft chime followed. Then a menu descended, with oversized buttons like something built for children or the elderly.

He stared at the options.

• Dying Today?
• Not Dying Today?

His thumb hovered, almost absently, over the second option.

Not dying today.

Because he wasn’t . This had to be a mistake. A miscalculation, a statistical error, something. Death-Cast couldn’t possibly know what it was talking about. He was fine. He felt fine.

But even as the thought bloomed, he remembered the call. The silence on the other end. The undeniable finality in the voice that had said his name like it was already carved into stone.

And the chat. All nine million of them watching his face, or rather his voice—his webcam hadn’t been on—collapse in real time.

Yoo Joonghyuk exhaled sharply through his nose. He selected Dying Today.

A box floated into place.

We here at Last Friend Inc. are collectively sorry for this loss of you.
Our deepest sympathies extend to those who love you, and those who will never meet you.
We hope you find a new friend of value to spend your final hours with today.
Please fill out the profile for best results.

Deeply sorry to lose you,
Last Friend Inc.

He scoffed quietly, but it came out too bitter to be amused.

What a strange way to say it. This loss of you . Like he was an item misplaced, or a late delivery that would never arrive.

The profile form opened beneath the message. The screen blinked.

He began to type.

Name: Joonghyuk Yoo
Age: 27
Date of Birth: 3rd August
Height: 184 cm
Weight: [—]
Orientation: [—]
Job: Streamer
Interests: [—]
Dislikes: People who talk too much, bad food
Favorite Movies/TV Shows/Books: [—]

He filled out only what he had to. No point giving them more than the minimum. If he was going to be dead by the end of the day, he didn’t need a legacy built into some cheery little app. It wasn’t like anyone cared anyway.

As he hit enter, the last prompt slid into view.

“What do you want to do on your last day?”

The cursor blinked.

He stared at it.

This wasn’t like the other questions. This wasn’t factual, measurable, sterile. This was an invitation. A gentle nudge toward something that felt far too real.

What did he want?

He should type something easy. Nothing. Or I don’t know. Or something angry, defiant. It’s not my last day. Proving Death-Cast wrong.

His fingers hovered over the keyboard.

But…

That would be an insult to the people who were dying for real, wouldn’t it? The people who had accepted it. Who had faced it with grace, who had loved others, said goodbye, held their families, tried to make meaning out of the void.

Yoo Joonghyuk hadn’t done any of that.

He had sat alone in a dark room, letting strangers tell him he was brilliant without ever knowing a thing about him. He had let silence speak for him. Let time trickle away behind a glowing screen.

And now time was running out.

He pressed his palm to his mouth, rubbed it once like he could erase the ache forming in his chest.

What did he want?

So many things.

Things he’d never let himself have. Things he didn’t think he was allowed to want.

There was a list inside him, longer than he could put into words. He couldn’t even name half of it.

Maybe—

His hands moved slowly now. There was no audience here, just him and this empty, blinking field waiting for him to be honest.

He typed:

“Everything I couldn’t do.”

He stared at the sentence.

Just four words. But it felt like an entire lifetime. Every missed chance. Every unopened door. Every person he’d rejected and every friend he hadn’t allowed himself to make. Every late night he said no to company because he thought he’d have tomorrow.

The screen glowed quietly. Waiting.

Yoo Joonghyuk pressed Submit .

The page loaded.

The home screen updated.

He leaned back further in his chair and let the quiet settle over him like a question he didn’t know how to answer.

He hadn’t realized how tired he was until now. His limbs felt heavy, like he’d been carrying something for a very long time and had only just set it down.

The app pinged. A cheerful little ding!

A new profile had loaded onto the screen.

It looked just like the others: a rounded tile with a small display picture, name, age, and some information. There was nothing immediately remarkable about it. The photo was average, albeit high resolution, probably cropped from something else. The kind of image you used when you didn’t think anyone would really look at you anyway. Not that Yoo Joonghyuk could say anything about that, he himself had taken a picture right now in the semi-darkness of his room.

Yoo Joonghyuk frowned at the name.

Kim Dokja

The profile didn’t shout anything. No bright emojis or joke bios or curated aesthetics. Just lines of data, each one somehow… ordinary . He wasn’t even sure why he tapped on it. Maybe it was the timing. Maybe it was boredom. Or perhaps it was something he did not want to name. It certainly wasn’t fate.

Name: Dokja Kim
Age: 27
Date of Birth: 15th February
Height: 176 cm
Weight: [—]
Orientation: Don’t particularly care about it
Job: Salaryman
Interests: Web novels, Reading, Omurice, Going home after work
Dislikes: Tomatoes, Plagiarism, My boss
Favorite Movies/TV Shows/Books: TWSA, TWATF LOTM

Yoo Joonghyuk’s eyes scanned the details.

There was something plain about this man. Not dull, he wouldn’t say stupid — just plain in a way that felt intentional. Like he was the kind of person your eyes would skip over on a crowded train, only to realize minutes later that you’d been sitting next to him the whole time. A presence so subtle it edged on absence. A face whose features would delete themselves from your memory the second you looked away.

Not forgettable, exactly. More like… someone who didn’t want to be remembered in the first place.

Yoo Joonghyuk almost swiped back.

And then he saw the lines in stylized Unicode, snuck in right at the bottom.

and the universe said you are not separate from every other thing

and the universe said you are the universe tasting itself, talking to itself, reading its own code

and the universe said I love you because you are love.

The whole thing was cheesy—so cheesy it almost hurt to read. It looked like an old profile, something the guy had probably set up years ago and never bothered to update. At least, Yoo Joonghyuk hoped it was forgetfulness. Anything else would require divine intervention to excuse this level of secondhand embarrassment.

What he didn’t know was why it unsettled him.

It wasn't because of the cringe. Perhaps it was the fact that he’d just read those same exact words less than an hour ago. Or maybe it was because they didn’t feel like a quote or something that's usually attached onto descriptions to make a person more 'aesthetically pleasing' in Uriel-speak. For some reason, they read more like a confession.

His eyes dropped to the final line beneath it. In the section reserved for the activities of the dying for their last day.

“Everything I couldn’t do.”

Yoo Joonghyuk’s breath caught in his throat.

His thumb hovered.

That was his line. His sentence.

He stared at it again, as if maybe he’d imagined it. As if the screen would refresh and it would disappear, replaced by something else, something less uncanny. But it stayed.

‘Everything I couldn’t do.’

The same words he had typed out moments ago in the dim hush of his room, thinking he was alone in that thought. Thinking it was a private admission meant for no one. A vague but vast thought.

And here it was again.

In some stranger’s profile.

Something clenched in his chest. It was small, tight, fleeting — barely enough to name. Surprise, maybe. Or recognition. A faint echo of himself in someone else. He hated that it made him hesitate.

Yoo Joonghyuk swiped right.

The screen shifted. The profile blinked away.

He leaned back in his chair, the silence thick again.

How strange , he thought.

Not because they had written the same thing. Not because it had appeared at the exact moment he was convincing himself to delete the app.

But because it made him feel something. Something like—

No, he thought, too quickly. Don’t do that. Don’t get sentimental over some stranger.

He stood up, rubbed his face, paced once across the room to clear his head.

It meant nothing. Just a coincidence. Just an algorithm doing its job.

Still the words clung to him.

Everything I couldn’t do.

They sat there, tucked behind his ribs like something he’d swallowed by mistake.

The line was probably pretty common, of course there would probably be hundreds of people with that exact same line, but the thing was Yoo Joonghyuk hadn’t seen the profiles of any of those hundreds of strangers, just some weird man named Kim Dokja’s.

He turned away.

There were shards of his monitor still scattered on the floor. I should clean them up , he thought. There was blood on his palm from where he’d accidentally scraped it during the outburst, but he didn’t bother looking for a bandage.

Instead, he sat down again and stared blankly at the monitor that still worked. This one, the main, was connected to a different outlet so was still running. Only HDMI cables had been removed so it washed his face with the dark gray of its power saving mode.

This is stupid . I shouldn’t have downloaded that app.

His phone buzzed.

A message.

From: Kim Dokja

The preview lit up across his lockscreen:

Hey.
You awake?

Yoo Joonghyuk stared.

What kind of idiot started a conversation like that?

He clicked on the notification, and the app opened to the chat window. The little green dot beside his username flickered faintly, pulsing in quiet confirmation that yes, he was online. Very obviously.

He scoffed under his breath.

Of course I’m awake, you dumbass. Who the hell gets a call about their own death and then just turns over and takes a nap?

He didn't realize his fingers had started moving until the cursor blinked against the screen.

YJH:
Yeah. I’m awake.

He hit send before he could overthink it.

A pause. Then:

KDJ:
Cool. Just wanted to make sure.

Yoo Joonghyuk stared at the screen again. That was it? That’s how the guy wanted to start? No awkward “sorry you’re dying” or “are you okay” or “nice to meet you on this cursed day”?

Just Cool. Just wanted to make sure.

He couldn’t decide if that made him want to log off or stay.

The seconds ticked by. The app gave no typing indicator—of course it didn’t—so he had no idea if Kim Dokja was going to say anything else. The silence between their messages felt almost intentional, like a test. Like a dare.

Yoo Joonghyuk sighed, leaned his elbows against the desk, and typed again.

YJH:
This how you normally start conversations with people who are dying?

KDJ:
I didn’t say I was good at conversations.

A small, involuntary huff of breath left him. Not quite a laugh. Not quite not.

The cursor blinked. Yoo Joonghyuk frowned down at the screen again.

KDJ:
You seemed like someone who might still be in shock.

YJH:
I’m not.

KDJ:
I’m Kim Dokja, by the way.

Yoo Joonghyuk hesitated. Then, before he could stop himself:

YJH:
I know.

KDJ:
Alright.

Silence again.

Not awkward. Not tense. Just quiet.

Yoo Joonghyuk stared at the chat window, fingers hovering over the keyboard. He wasn’t sure what kind of conversation he’d been expecting. Something pitiful? Dramatic? Stupid? Whatever this was—this plain, blunt rhythm—it felt more real than he liked.

KDJ:
So you are an axe-wielding and murdery psychopath!

YJH:
It says your name right there on your profile.

KDJ:
tch. and here i thought you were the interesting kind of weirdo.

YJH:
Sorry to disappoint.

KDJ:
eh, I've been disappointed by better.

YJH:
…

YJH:
Are you always this dramatic?

KDJ:
no. sometimes i’m asleep.

YJH:
Unfortunate that I caught you awake, then.

KDJ:
lmao you say that like you weren’t the one who swiped right

There was a pause, a beat of dry amusement curled through Yoo Joonghyuk’s chest before he could stop it.

YJH:
…It was a mistake.

KDJ:
most things are. don’t worry about it. Although I have to say. Oof man, that hurts.

KDJ:
so. what’s your plan, then? gonna check off your entire bucket list by lunchtime or what

YJH:
No. I’m going to prove Death-Cast wrong.

KDJ:
lmaooooo denial is a river in egypt yk

Yoo Joonghyuk scowled at his screen, irritation pricking behind his eyes.

KDJ:
but seriously, that’s fine. optimism’s not a bad thing.
who knows? maybe they did get it wrong.

The cursor blinked for a second, then:

KDJ:
and even if they didn’t—
aren’t you a game streamer or something?

His eyes widened.

KDJ:
Isn't your literal job defying the odds?

Yoo Joonghyuk stared at that line longer than he probably should’ve. His hands hovered above the keyboard, and he had no idea what to say.

That was what he’d been thinking. Almost exactly.

What the hell?

How the hell had this stranger—this forgettable-faced salaryman with a horrible typing style—figured that out so fast?

He didn’t respond to the message directly.

YJH:
Your bio. The poem. What’s it from?

Of course he knew where it was from, he’d been playing the game a while ago but he just wanted to check whether his hunch was wrong and this man had simply put it in because it 'looked nice'.

A pause. This time, longer.

So long that Yoo Joonghyuk started to frown.

The little green dot beside Kim Dokja’s name stayed lit, but no reply came. He waited another minute, two.

Had he been too forward? Too cold? He hadn’t meant for it to sound accusatory.

He grimaced, suddenly remembering how quickly people could vanish.

That was fast. I ruined it already.

The thought landed harder than he expected.

He clenched his jaw and set the phone down. Tried to tell himself it didn’t matter. It was one conversation. One stranger. It didn’t mean anything, there’s always more. He could hit refresh and find someone else.

His phone buzzed.

KDJ:
fuck. I forgot to delete that.

The breath he let out was longer than it should have been.

He stared at the screen, then narrowed his eyes and scrolled back up the chat, rereading the sentence he’d just read.

Fuck. I forgot to delete that.

That was it?

Yoo Joonghyuk closed his eyes briefly and exhaled.

He was being ridiculous. He knew that.

But still—just for a second—he pressed his hand to his face and told himself to get a grip. Scolded himself for getting too comfortable. For caring too quickly.

You haven’t even met him. Stop.

The phone buzzed again.

KDJ:
it’s from a game actually, you should know. not even that deep lol. Ever heard of Minecraft?
Might be cringe looking on a bio, though it hits kinda different when it’s you in the end credits huh

Yoo Joonghyuk didn’t reply immediately.

But his eyes lingered on that message. And, for the first time in hours, he didn’t feel entirely alone.

KDJ:
btw, if you haven’t already, you should probably get your affairs in order.

Yoo Joonghyuk frowned at the message.

YJH:
I told you, I’m not going to die.

KDJ:
i know.

KDJ:
just in case.

KDJ:
humor me.

Joonghyuk stared at those two words: humor me . It left a strange taste in his mouth. He wasn't used to anyone asking things from him that weren’t demands, or expectations to be fulfilled.

Just a request. Just a stranger on a screen.

His fingers hovered over the keyboard before typing—

YJH:
...Fine.

The next few messages were a mixture of sarcasm and surprising practicality.

KDJ:
passwords. digital assets. bank info. If you've got anyone in your life, tell them how to access it. write a letter. or don’t. Most importantly DELETE YOUR SEARCH HISTORY I’m willing to bet you’ve got some weird stuff in there considering you don’t touch grass.

KDJ:
or record a dumb voice note if you’re too emotionally constipated to write things out. just don’t leave a mess. dying’s already annoying. don’t make it worse for the people left behind.

Yoo Joonghyuk frowned harder.

He didn’t like that. The assumption of it. The idea of being someone left behind, or someone leaving. But he didn’t argue. Somehow, it felt wrong to.

YJH:
Are you always like this?

KDJ:
like what

YJH:
Annoying.

KDJ:
lucky for you it’s my last day. I'm trying my best to be tolerable.

KDJ:
so… we meeting or not?

YJH:
...Where?

KDJ:
The cafe at 22nd ? 6 a.m.?
[LOCATION ATTACHED]
Or do you prefer somewhere with less caffeine and more existential dread?

YJH:
I’ll be there.

KDJ:
not dying though, right?

YJH:
Right.

The green dot beside Kim Dokja’s name held steady. The chat stayed quiet.

It was only after several long minutes of silence that Yoo Joonghyuk found himself typing again.

He didn’t even know why.

YJH:
What will you be doing till then?

There was no response.

Seconds passed. Then minutes.

Yoo Joonghyuk clenched the phone tighter. Stupid question. He should’ve just let the conversation end there. He had never been good at this. Why did he care, anyway?

Why was he still looking?

Then—

KDJ:
reading a web novel.

KDJ:
you ever heard of ‘Three Ways to Survive the Apocalypse’?

KDJ:
the MC has your name btw.

Yoo Joonghyuk’s brows furrowed. He typed back:

YJH:
Yoo Joonghyuk?

KDJ:
yeah.

KDJ:
he’s probably got your personality too.
handsome, broody, and an absolute dick with the emotional range of a toaster oven.

Yoo Joonghyuk scrolled back up to double-check the message. Shamefully, his eyes lingered not on toaster oven , but on handsome .

He clicked his screen off and set the phone down.

Then picked it up again.

YJH:
Goodnight.

He tossed the phone across the bed like it burned.

And that should’ve been the end of it.

But five minutes later—

KDJ:
so in chapter 34, there’s this part where the protagonist just straight up dies and comes back via regression like “anyway” and I'm like??? is this man okay??? No trauma??

Two minutes after that—

KDJ:
also it’s very sweet how he pretends not to care about his companions but he’s actually a big softie. Also? Asmodeus is an asshole

KDJ:
and there’s so much LORE. Unclear. There’s so many beings from history and myth called ‘constellations’.
I think I know who the big bad boss is gonna be though, it's the dokkaebi king. But hey, that's just a theory
A NOVEL THEORY! (that I'm very sure of thanks for listening)

KDJ:
btw if you’re not a reader i genuinely don’t care I'm explaining it all anyway.

And just like that, the messages didn’t stop.

Yoo Joonghyuk didn’t answer any of them.

But he didn’t mute the thread either.

He lay on his side, screen turned away from him, listening to the soft buzz every few minutes.

It was annoying.

It was persistent.

It was company.

And Yoo Joonghyuk smiled.

Very reluctantly.

But he smiled all the same.

Chapter Text

5:37 AM

The streets were quieter than they should’ve been.

Yoo Joonghyuk walked with his hands stuffed in his pockets, the collar of his jacket pulled high against the early morning chill. His footsteps echoed on the pavement, accompanied only by the occasional rustle of a tree or the dull whir of a distant car engine. The city hadn’t quite woken up yet. Neither had he, in truth.

Despite Seoul’s reputation as a sleepless, always-breathing, technicolor sprawl, this part of the city was still wrapped in something like slumber. Hongdae always moved slower in the early hours—less neon and cheer, more fog. It felt oddly suspended in time, as if the world had paused to give its dying a moment of peace. A stillness that hadn’t been there the day before.

And Yoo Joonghyuk found himself noticing everything.

The soft scrape of his shoes on uneven stone. The flickering of a half-dead sign above a convenience store. The dull hum of a streetlamp overhead.  A woman inside folding laundry behind the counter. The early scent of garbage trucks somewhere in the back alleys. Seoul, stripped of its skin and make-up, felt more like a memory than a city. He hadn't realized how empty it could look.

It didn’t help that despite being the heart of a relentless metropolis, this neighborhood felt sleepy at this hour. Only the places that catered to Deckers—the dying—remained open: all-night diners, corner cafés, convenience stores with unblinking fluorescents. Islands for the sleepless, for those who didn’t know if the next dawn would be theirs.

He passed a man staggering down the sidewalk across from him, clearly drunk—barely upright and humming something tuneless under his breath. Joonghyuk grimaced and instinctively looked away.

“Hey—hey, handsome!” the man called, voice slurred but startlingly loud in the stillness. “You dying today?”

Yoo Joonghyuk didn’t stop walking.

“I’ve got the cure to death in my pants! Wanna check it out?”

He slowed, just for a second. The punch itched in his knuckles. The only thing that kept him from vaulting across the street and decking the man flat was the distance between them—and the fact that the idiot was probably a Decker himself.

Joonghyuk didn’t pity him. He just hated people like that.

People who accepted death like it was a given. Who folded themselves around it and lived as if they were already dead. No fight left. No anger. Just rot, turned inward.

Perhaps he was being hypocritical.

After all, hadn’t he torn his own streaming setup apart in a fit of rage just hours ago? Hadn’t he smashed a monitor against the wall because he couldn’t bear the weight of his own helplessness? He hadn’t made a will. He hadn’t packed. He hadn’t called a single person. Not even Uriel. He hadn’t done anything except download some ridiculous app and talk to a stranger.

He should have just slept.

And yet—

Here he was.

Heading to some random café near Hongdae because Kim Dokja had suggested it. Because they agreed on meeting at six. Because for reasons he still didn’t understand, he had said yes.

The world wasn’t supposed to end like this. Quiet and slow. Waiting for dawn with someone he didn’t know, just because a stranger had typed a sentence that mirrored his own.

Everything I couldn’t do.

He kept walking.

Joonghyuk kept walking. The man behind him shouted something else, but it was drowned out by the quiet hiss of a bus braking somewhere around the corner.

His phone buzzed once in his pocket. He ignored it. A few steps later, it buzzed again. This time he pulled it out.

KDJ:
I’ll be there in five. If you ditch, I’m haunting your sorry ass.

Yoo Joonghyuk snorted. Of course. Threats via text. Charming.

He didn’t bother replying.

The man was consistent, he’d give him that. Relentless, in the same way a dripping faucet was—maddening, and eventually impossible to ignore. He hadn’t stopped messaging even once during the night. Paragraph after paragraph about some webnovel with a main character named Joonghyuk and constellations playing at god. It should have been infuriating.

But it hadn’t been.

He'd read every line. No, absorbed them. Every stupid update. Every enthusiastic comment. He'd even looked up the story when Dokja stopped texting around four. He hadn't clicked the link. But he'd hovered over it.

Pathetic.

And yet, the silence after the last message— You’re probably asleep, right? I’ll see you at six. Don’t forget. You promised. —had been louder than all the chatter before it.

Now he turned a corner and stood across the street from the café.

It was smaller than he expected. All soft light and foggy windows, uneven chairs littered the front and it probably was the only working outlet. It was tucked between a laundromat and a stationery store, humming quietly under a flickering streetlamp. The “open” sign swung gently in the breeze, as if inviting him in or daring him to walk away.

Joonghyuk stayed outside.

He could still turn around. Go back home. Pretend this hadn’t happened. Pretend that someone on the other end of a chat window hadn’t made something shift in his chest in the space of a few hours.

He stared at his reflection in the glass. Still him. Still alive.

For now

Still time to run.

He exhaled slowly.

It wasn’t his last day.
He would prove that.

But until then he could spend a few hours with someone who didn’t feel like a stranger anymore.

It might not be memorable but I suppose beggars can’t be choosers.

He took a breath and pushed the door open.

.

.

.

.

.

6:03 AM

The coffee was lukewarm now, but Kim Dokja didn’t mind.

His hands cradled the ceramic cup like it was something fragile. The heat it offered was faint, barely enough to chase away the lingering chill of pre-dawn, but it gave him something to hold on to. Something to ground him.

Outside, the light had shifted from dark blue to gray. Early morning traffic murmured in the distance—buses wheezing to a stop, a few bikes skimming past the shuttered storefronts. Seoul lay draped in a soft hush, the city’s edge blurred by the pale, silver hour between night and morning. But in here, the café seemed suspended in time. A glass dome of warmth, faint jazz music leaking from the speakers, and the low hum of conversation.

Kim Dokja watched people filter in and out. A couple at the counter were arguing—not in anger, but in the ridiculous way lovers did, whisper-yelling over which milkshake to order as if it were a life-altering decision. A girl in a blazer tapped furiously at her laptop. An old man poured sugar into his tea with shaking hands.

Kim Dokja was not scared.

No one here was dying, except him.

Kim Dokja knew this with the certainty of someone who had spent too long watching people, cataloguing expressions like checkboxes. These people weren’t carrying death in their pockets. They weren’t glancing at the clock like it was an executioner. They weren’t counting hours, minutes, breaths, wondering which one would be their last.

They were carefree. If not happy, then at least untouched by the invisible weight pressing against his spine.

But maybe, if he counted the small, flickering green light next to a stranger’s name on an app, maybe he wasn’t dying alone.

He glanced at his phone.

6:05 AM.

Still no reply. Still no new ticks on the message thread. Just the last message he’d sent last night— Don’t forget. You promised.

He hadn’t really expected Yoo Joonghyuk to show up. He’d told himself not to get his hopes up, told himself that people on the internet were always unreliable, that this was some last-day-dream that would pop like a soap bubble at sunrise. And yet, he’d come here early. Ordered a drink. Picked a seat next to the window with a clear view of the door.

He didn’t blame the guy. Not really. No one wanted to spend their last day alongside some stranger.

So much for Han Sooyoung

Maybe he should go. If he left now, he could still walk the city, alone, the way he always had. Or maybe he’d find a rooftop to sit on. Watch the clouds pass. Pretend the hours weren’t disappearing under his feet.

But before he could move—

A soft chime. Barely audible, like the brush of wind through chimes on a window ledge.

A man stepped inside.

Yoo Joonghyuk stepped inside, the glass door swinging shut behind him with a soft click that cut the café’s hush in two. He paused, silhouetted in the doorway for a breath too long, the light from outside limning the edges of his black coat, his shoulders, his profile. He looked like a dream too vivid to be real—something the sun might dissolve if it rose too fast.

Kim Dokja’s first thought, simply, was:

Wow.

His second was a little less charitable.

Damn protagonist bastard.

He felt a petty, irrational surge of offense. Not because the man was beautiful—though he was—but because it felt so unfair . Kim Dokja wasn’t ugly. He knew that. He was average in the way a hotel room painting was average—fine at first glance, unmemorable the moment you looked away. He wasn’t sure why it stung now. And yet here was Yoo Joonghyuk, looking like the universe had hand-selected every feature and set them in perfect alignment, as if beauty could be used like a weapon.

Still, there was something more than just the symmetry of his features. Something raw beneath the surface. The way his eyes kept moving. The way his hands flexed at his sides, as if expecting a fight. His body was here, but the rest of him was halfway elsewhere—lost someplace he didn’t know.

Yoo Joonghyuk frowned, brow furrowing as he looked around. Probably searching the room for him. Dokja once again thought of how unfair it all was, even his scrunched-up face looked adorable.

And then their eyes met.

For a moment, everything narrowed to a single point—two gazes locking across a half-full café at dawn. He blinked once, unsure why his pulse stuttered. 

Kim Dokja raised a hand—a small, almost sheepish wave.

Yoo Joonghyuk’s expression softened.

Kim Dokja blinked, unsure why his pulse stuttered. 

It didn’t shift by much. Not in a way anyone else would have noticed. But to Kim Dokja, a man who had spent most of his days in silence, reading web novels and observing people in subways, it was unmistakable. A flicker at the corner of his mouth. A subtle change of tension in his brow. A breath released.

A smile.
There, and gone, like a ghost passing through sunlight.

Kim Dokja sucked in a breath without meaning to. It caught somewhere in his throat and didn’t leave.

He’d seen a lot of faces in his life. Most of them blurred now, faces in office cubicles and train compartments and empty waiting rooms. There were very few people in his life that he considered precious to him, and those faces he would never forget. But he knew—he knew —that this one would stay burned behind his eyelids for the rest of the time he had left.

Joonghyuk made his way towards him, pulling off his coat mid-stride and draping it over his arm.

He sat a little straighter. Fingers curling once around his cup before letting go. Something unfamiliar stirred in his chest. Not quite hope. Not quite dread. Anticipation?

But something.

Something alive.

He grinned like an idiot.

At least today will be interesting

.

.

.

.

.

6:10 AM

The door gave a soft chime as it closed. Inside, the air was warm, if a little stale, thick with the bitter smell of old espresso beans and something overly sweet from the pastry case. The kind that clung to clothes.

The place was quiet, sparsely filled. Almost liminal.
A young girl sat curled over a laptop in the far corner, fingers paused above the keys as if she'd lost her train of thought. Two people stood at the counter, whispering over a menu and an old man stirred tea in silence while pulling a newspaper from his bag.

Yoo Joonghyuk scanned the room for his stranger.

There was no sign of the person he was here for. No stranger with a sign, or holding a phone, or looking like they were waiting for someone they’d never met. Just tired, early risers in a quiet part of the city.

He frowned.

Maybe he’d been tricked.

He wouldn’t have been surprised. Maybe it was someone’s idea of a joke—conning a dying man to waste his time waiting for a stranger who never shows. At least it wasn’t a mugging. Not that he’d particularly mind the opportunity to send someone to the hospital on his supposed End Day.

He didn’t care—he shouldn’t care—but the thought tugged at something in him. Something sour. He had shown up. He’d come here, made the effort, pulled himself out into the open like an idiot—

His eyes landed on someone sitting near the window.

A man. Slender build, pale, sitting with his shoulders slightly hunched over a cup of something hot. One look and you could tell that the guy seemed to belong to the early hours. That wasn’t what bothered him though, the guy seemed malnourished to him for some reason, even though there was no trace of it on him.

Their eyes met. The man blinked once, then lifted his hand slightly in greeting. It was barely more than a twitch of fingers.

Kim Dokja.

So he had come.

Yoo Joonghyuk didn’t realize he’d been holding his breath until he exhaled it. The tension didn’t leave him—of course it didn’t—but something in him loosened, just enough to step forward.

He didn’t know why he was relieved. Maybe because he’d half-expected to be alone again. Maybe because part of him had prepared for this to be a waste of time. That kind of thinking had always come easily to him—expecting the worst.

He squared his shoulders and walked toward the table, eyes steady, footsteps quiet. The café buzzed faintly with a machine behind the counter. The low murmur of other lives filled the background. The light outside stayed gray.

Nothing had changed.
But something was different.

He was here. And so was the stranger.

Kim Dokja looked up as he approached, eyes flicking briefly to the clock above the counter and then back to Yoo Joonghyuk’s face.

“Hey there stranger,” he said brightly.

Yoo Joonghyuk sat down without a word.

The chair made a soft sound as it scraped against the floor. The table between them was clean, a little sticky near the edges. He glanced once at the cup in Dokja’s hand—coffee, probably cold by now. Kim Dokja didn’t seem bothered by his silence, just tilted his head slightly, studying him.

“You know, you look even better in person.” 

Yoo Joonghyuk blinked. The compliment was so unexpected, so flatly delivered that it didn’t immediately register as one. For a moment, he considered saying Thanks. You too. It was the polite thing to say, wasn’t it? But it felt awkward, like he’d be forcing a line in just for the sake of it. He wasn’t sure if it would come out sarcastic or sincere. Either option made his skin crawl.

God, I haven’t done this in so long

As it turns out, being an antisocial shut-in really had its drawbacks! Who could have possibly known.

He kept his mouth shut.

A waiter came by, set a menu on the table between them, and hurried off without a word, off to serve some new customer that had stepped in.

Dokja pushed the menu toward him.

“So you’re not a big talker, huh?” he asked, conversationally. “I figured. It’s alright though, no pressure.”

Yoo Joonghyuk exhaled slowly, leaned back against the chair.
“I speak perfectly fine,” he said, calm and clipped. “You just talk too much.”

Kim Dokja gasped in mock delight, “So you can talk!”

If the corner of his mouth twitched at that, he didn’t register it.

Kim Dokja grinned, entirely unfazed.

They sat like that for a moment in awkward silence, with the faint buzz of machines behind the counter and the soft murmur of the laptop girl’s music bleeding through tinny earbuds across the room. The light outside was still gray, but growing paler. The sun still hadn’t quite arrived, but the edges of the world were beginning to soften.

Yoo Joonghyuk hadn’t expected it to be this easy.
He wouldn’t call it uncomfortable—tolerable seemed to be a better word.

“So,” Kim Dokja said.

“So…” Yoo Joonghyuk echoed, uncertainly.

Dokja stared at him for a moment, then sighed and slid the menu closer with two fingers like he was nudging a cat that wouldn’t come near. “I’m going to assume you haven’t eaten.”

Yoo Joonghyuk opened his mouth to agree—because no, he hadn’t, and he didn’t plan to until—
Before he could get the words out, a waitress approached their table with a notebook and a rehearsed smile.

“Hi there! What can I get you both this morning?”

Yoo Joonghyuk blinked at her. His mind blanked. For years, he’d either cooked for himself or eaten in silence at places that didn’t require conversation. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had to answer this question out loud.

Kim Dokja beat him to it.

“We’ll have anything, as long as it’s quick,” he said, tapping the glass of his watch face with a finger. His smile was polite and apologetic, if a little tired. “We’re a bit pressed for time you see.”

The waitress stilled. Her eyes darted from his face to Yoo Joonghyuk’s and back again. Something registered. The breath left her in a soft oh before she said, “Oh—I—I’m so sorry. I didn’t— I’m really sorry.”

Yoo Joonghyuk sat there, stiff and expressionless as the girl stumbled through her apology. Dokja waved a hand.

“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”

She vanished toward the kitchen like she’d been given a government directive. Yoo Joonghyuk glanced at the counter where a handful of people were still waiting in line—one of them noticed the sudden shuffle and narrowed their eyes. Pity. Those poor souls were going to be bumped down the list.

Silence settled between them again. It wasn’t heavy, but it was noticeable.

Finally, Yoo Joonghyuk spoke. “You do that a lot?”

“What, order food?” Dokja asked, raising an eyebrow.

“No. Talk like you’re an expert at dying.” He mimicked Dokja’s voice and tapped his wrist where a non-existent watch sat. “We’re a bit pressed for time you see~”

Dokja frowned, “I do not sound like that.”

“You do. It’s got this air of pretense.”

Dokja’s eye twitched. “It’s a skill,” he said, picking up his cup again. “Perhaps you should try it, might make you more tolerable.”

Yoo Joonghyuk scowled. “You’re the one who talks like we’ve known each other for years.”

Dokja gave him a lopsided smile. “We’ve been texting since midnight. In internet years, that’s practically a decade.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Thank you.”

Yoo Joonghyuk leaned back in his chair, arms crossed, expression flat. “You don’t take this seriously.”

“On the contrary,” Dokja said mildly. “I’m just choosing not to scream in public.”

Yoo Joonghyuk rolled his eyes. “Right. Because sarcasm is your coping mechanism.”

“And brooding silence is yours? How very chunni of you.”

“At least mine doesn’t make me sound like a sitcom character.”

“At least mine doesn’t make people assume I’m planning a murder.”

Yoo Joonghyuk fumed in silence, his glare fixed on the man across the table like it might spontaneously combust him.

He’d changed his mind.

Kim Dokja was not tolerable.

Not at all.

In fact, he was the most insufferable, irritating, absolutely maddening person Yoo Joonghyuk had ever had the misfortune of meeting—and that included the dozen halfwit streamers he’d been forced to collaborate with last year, one of whom had accidentally set his sleeve on fire during a con.

He had no idea what kind of delusion had made him think, even for a second, that this man might be decent company. Perhaps it was the sleep deprivation. Maybe it was the existential dread. Maybe it was a momentary lapse of judgment caused by how harmless Kim Dokja had looked in his profile picture.

Yoo Joonghyuk’s fingers twitched against the table.
He wanted to wipe that smug look off his face. With a chair. Or the blunt edge of a butter knife. Either would do.

Across the table, Kim Dokja took another lazy sip of coffee, eyes glinting over the rim like he knew exactly what Joonghyuk was thinking and found it deeply entertaining.

Yoo Joonghyuk’s jaw locked.
Smug bastard.

He leaned forward half an inch, already imagining how satisfying it would be to—
And then, mercifully, the food arrived.

The waitress returned, balancing two large trays in her arms, plates clinking gently, and the table was suddenly covered in toast, eggs, rice porridge, hash browns, fruit bowls, and a large pot of omurice still steaming from the kitchen.

Kim Dokja smiled at her like she’d just rescued him from a burning building.

Yoo Joonghyuk sat back, scowl intact, muttering under his breath.

Lucky bastard.

The waitress hesitated only a moment after setting down the last dish. Then she straightened, wiped her hands on the apron around her waist, and smiled—soft and sad, the kind of smile people wore when they’d taught themselves to live with a fracture that had never quite healed.

“Don’t worry about the bill,” she said.

Yoo Joonghyuk blinked. Just because he was a Decker didn’t mean he needed charity from random strangers.  “We don’t have any problem paying—”

She shook her head gently, already anticipating the protest. “It’s on the house,” she said, voice quiet, but unwavering. “I, uh… lost my brother last year. And Dad took it—I took it—pretty hard.”

Her eyes flicked briefly toward the counter, where an older man with graying hair moved behind the register, sorting receipts with mechanical focus. The resemblance was immediate: the curve of their noses, the way their hair fell,  the stubbornness in the line of their jaws. The man at the register turned, spotted her and yelled, “ Ei pakhi! Taratari ai! ” The language was something foreign so Joonghyuk didn’t understand what was being said, but it wasn’t hard to parse the love beneath the seemingly annoyed words.

The girl’s smile turned fond. “Baba won’t take no for an answer anymore.”

She looked back at them. Her expression shifted, not quite pity, but something adjacent. Respect, maybe. Familiarity.

“Enjoy your End Day,” she said, the words landing like soft snow, neither warm nor cold, simply real. Present.

Then she was gone, vanishing into the back kitchen without waiting for a reply.

Yoo Joonghyuk sat still, a fork resting limply in his hand. There was something caught in his throat, something heavy and unnameable. He didn’t know what the right thing to say would’ve been. Thank you didn’t seem like enough, and I’m sorry wasn’t his to say.

What were you supposed to say to someone who had made peace with loss, only to offer kindness to strangers walking into the same storm?

He had no idea.

Kindness of such kind was hard to come by.

Across from him, Kim Dokja had neither touched his food nor his coffee again. He was still looking in the direction the waitress had gone with an unreadable expression on his face, not quite staring, not quite lost—but distant in a way that made something about his sharp face blur around the edges.

They dug into their food in silence.

The plates clinked quietly between them—forks brushing ceramic, toast edges scraping across buttered porcelain. Most of the people had left, so there was a strange kind of silence pressing in from all directions.

Outside, the gray of the sky was lightening by degrees, smudging into the gold of seven in the morning. Somewhere beyond the walls, the world was waking up. But inside, everything felt thick, like it had all been suspended in honey. He was acutely aware of his breath, the itch at the back of his head, suddenly the entire space seemed warmer than comfortable.

Yoo Joonghyuk chewed absently, the food tasting like nothing in his mouth. He didn’t notice when he’d stopped registering the warmth of the scrambled eggs or the salt in the sausage. His mind kept drifting back to the waitress, to her sad smile, to the story she hadn’t needed to tell in full.

I, uh… lost my brother last year. And Dad took it—I took it—pretty hard.

The sentence replayed in his head like a quiet echo, as if his thoughts were trying to fill in the silence she had left behind.

He wondered how many people had lost something—someone—before this day had even begun. How many had died half-way down in the dark haze between twelve and three before Death-Cast could have a chance to call. How many had been forced to pick themselves up afterward, shape their mourning into something superficial, something they could carry to work every morning like a commuter bag? Was that what he’d look like, if Death-Cast was right and his name ended up on some stranger’s lips tomorrow?

But what stranger would remember me?

Would Uriel? Halfway across the world, would she mourn a man she’d never met? He hoped not. He’d given enough grief to people throughout his life, he didn’t wish to make matters even worse. Although that wouldn’t stop him from wishing that someone would remember, carry it around and think; Look, here was a man. 

Would his sis—

Would Mia?

The wave of emotion that crashed into him at the thought of his sister was overwhelming, he felt water rushing over his head, flooding into his lungs, suffocating the breath from his throat—

Of course not, he thought bitterly. I’ve done enough damage there.

He gripped the edge of his plate tighter, jaw tightening. The ache behind his sternum was pressing deeper again, slow and heavy like water filling a sealed room.

Then Kim Dokja spoke.

“Don’t get swept up by it.”

That snapped him out of it. “Wha—”

Dokja didn’t pause.

“We’re here,” he said, voice calm, eyes still on the plate in front of him. “At the edge between eternity and the end. So there’s not really any point in dwelling in the past, is there?”

Yoo Joonghyuk looked at him.

Kim Dokja still wasn’t smiling. His face was unreadable, closed off like a book with the cover torn away. His fingers were loose around his fork, his shoulders relaxed—but there was something else beneath that ease, something brittle. It was impossible to tell whether he was talking to Joonghyuk or himself.

“So what?” Yoo Joonghyuk said at last, his voice quieter than he intended. “Grief doesn’t sit around to understand logic. Different people take it differently.”

Kim Dokja slowly swallowed the piece of toast he’d been chewing, and washed it down with a sip of water. He didn’t look up.

“Of course. The grief we collectively share is absolutely real. But that doesn’t change its nature.”

His tone hadn’t changed, but the words carried weight.

“Even as we speak, there are farewells happening all across the world,” he continued. “Some louder than others. Some in languages we’ll never understand. Some that don’t make a sound at all. There’s nothing special about ours. So I suggest you remember that.”

He reached for his coffee again, eyes still fixed somewhere in the middle distance.

“It might help you focus on the here and now.”

Yoo Joonghyuk stared at him.

The man hadn’t raised his voice. He hadn’t looked up. But the way he spoke was like someone who had learned, very early, that pain would never leave room for negotiation. Someone who’d carved detachment into a second skin and was now trying to convince others that it looked good on them too.

And yet.

There were flaws in what he said. Yoo Joonghyuk knew it. He could see them in the gaps between words, the quiet contradictions—

If it doesn't matter, why show up at all?
If grief is just noise, why let it take up this much space?
If ends and the grief that followed aren't special, why do you sound like someone who has memorized the weight of it?

He wanted to call him out. He wanted to argue, poke holes in that smooth, practiced logic. He wanted to grab those calmly placed words and shake them loose of whatever curtain they were hiding behind.

But something told him that would be a grave mistake.

Whether it was instinct or something else Yoo Joonghyuk didn’t know. But regardless, he swallowed the words clawing at his throat and asked instead, “Were you perhaps a literature student?”

Kim Dokja blinked.

Then—he laughed. Light and sudden.

The tension hanging between them cracked like a thread pulled too tight, finally snapping.

Joonghyuk didn’t know why, but it sounded like an exhaled breath that had been held too long.

“Of course not,” Kim Dokja said, smiling now, “it’s just from another game. Sometimes I wonder if you’re actually the gamer here.”

Just from another game.

And sometimes the player believed the universe had spoken to it through the zeros and ones, through the electricity of the world, through the scrolling words on a screen at the end of a dream.

You. You. You are alive.

Yoo Joonghyuk made a scandalized noise, part protest, part huff.

Kim Dokja grinned, pleased with himself, and reached for a slice of toast. “All I’m saying is, don’t worry too much about dying.”

Yoo Joonghyuk froze.

There it was.

The stranger who had peeled him open in less than a few hours. A handful of words, and somehow Yoo Joonghyuk felt like he’d been seen through completely, like all his clothes had been drawn back without him noticing.

It’s almost like he can read my mind.

He didn’t voice any of that, of course. Didn’t dignify it with more than a scoff. Instead, he said, evenly—firmly, like if he said it enough it might be true—“I’m not going to die today.”

Kim Dokja sighed. “That might have been more convincing if your denial wasn’t so half-assed.”

Yoo Joonghyuk bristled, refusing to let the jab land. “I’m not going to die today,” he repeated.

Kim Dokja smiled this time. A quiet, dry thing. There was a sardonic tilt to his mouth, but it was tired too—worn-in like a shirt that had been ironed too many times. He leaned forward, elbow on the table, chin resting against his palm.

“Humor me then,” he said. “In the completely hypothetical situation that you were about to die—what would you want to do on your last day, Mr. Yoo?”

Joonghyuk told him.

The two of them sat in that café as the world outside brightened slowly into morning. Two strangers sitting across from each other, sharing a meal on the last day of their lives.

And still somehow, it didn’t feel like a tragedy.

Chapter Text

Phoenix, Arizona

13th February , 20xx     11:14 AM

Death-Cast hadn’t called Han Sooyoung because she wasn’t dying today.

But her best friend was.

She slammed the Uber door hard enough to rattle the frame and threw a thick wad of bills into the passenger seat. “Make it quick. I don’t care if you get arrested.”

The driver glanced at the cash, then grinned like he’d won the lottery. “You got it missy.”

The car lurched forward, tires screeching faintly as it tore down the road.

The air outside was sweltering, all searing heat and white light, the Arizona sun really was unrelenting. But inside the car, her skin felt like ice. Every breath was shallow. Every second dragged like a deadweight behind her.

She blinked hard, fighting the sting in her eyes, and glanced at the bag beside her. Just one. She hadn’t bothered with clothes. It held only the essentials—passport, visa, a crumpled folder of old documents, a half-charged power bank, and her wallet, half-zipped, cards jutting out like careless teeth.

She pulled out her phone next, the screen still black. Her own reflection stared back at her in the smudged glass—skin pale, lips pressed thin, hair in disarray. She should unlock it. Find a flight. Do the sensible thing and figure out the logistics of flying halfway across the goddamn world.

But her fingers felt stiff, her thumb hovering just above the screen like it’d forgotten how to move. The cold inside her wasn’t grief anymore, not quite. But it was horrid, clinical and clean and with enough strength to split her down the middle.

Death-Cast's default dialogue whispered around her cranium.

Hello,
I'm calling from Death-Cast.
I regret to inform you that sometime in the next twenty-four hours you'll be meeting an untimely death.
On behalf of everyone here at Death-Cast, we're sorry to lose you.
Live this day to the fullest, okay?

Like anyone could neatly package a lifetime's worth of living and compress it into a day.

He isn’t dead yet, she reminded herself repeatedly. Don’t mourn the living.

Somewhere between the call and now—between Kim Dokja’s voice cracking through the static and her sprint out of the hotel lobby barefoot and into the morning light—her fear had calcified into resolve. Not because it hurt any less. But because if she let herself feel it, really feel it, she wouldn’t move at all.

Her knuckles whitened around the phone.

She’d thought he was joking at first. That dry voice of his. The indifference in his tone.

“You better be dying, Kim Dokja.”

“I am.”

And then—nothing. A silence so complete it rang in her ears, hollow and deafening, like the world had exhaled and forgotten to breathe back in.

Then she’d screamed.

She didn’t remember how loud. Just that her throat had burned after. That the hotel room around her had gone blurry and too bright, like her grief had punched through the sky.

She had screamed at him, her best friend, her stupid, infuriating best friend. Screamed at her beta reader, her partner-in-crime, the first person who had truly understood her—words and all—for caring so little about his own life. Her stupid, brilliant, impossibly quiet friend who never asked for help, never reached first. For letting go like it didn’t matter. For answering death like it was a scheduled appointment. Again. Again.

After everything

After all the pieces they had picked up.
After the blood and grief and work it had taken to keep him tethered to this world.
And it hadn’t been just her.

They had all fought for him—herself, Sangah, Heewon, Hyunsung after his military service, and much later when the kids came into his life with little understanding but all of the love, they'd tried as well.

A whole ragtag chorus of people who had seen Kim Dokja’s ruin and decided to love him anyway.
They had fought tooth and nail to drag him out of that abyss, and he—
God, he had let them.

It had taken years.
Years of gentleness disguised as banter.
Of shared meals and side-eyes across rooms.
Of emergency phone calls at 2 a.m., quiet gifts left on doorsteps, long silences where no one said I’m glad you’re still here—but meant it anyway.

Kim Dokja had never been easy to love, but they'd done it anyway. They’d done it with everything they had.

They had built something together. A fragile, tentative life. They had made room for him in it. He'd allowed room for them in his.

And now, it was crumbling.

Because Death-Cast had called him. Because fate, or bad luck, or a misfired god had decided that today was his last page.

The car swerved past a slow-moving van. A blaring horn. Sooyoung didn’t flinch.

The driver muttered something under his breath in admiration—probably about how empty the roads were today, which never happened. She didn’t care. It felt like the world was holding its breath with her.

6,272 miles . That was the distance. Phoenix to Seoul. Ten thousand kilometers of steel, land, ocean and everything she hadn’t yet gotten the chance to say.

The phone finally came to life in her hands. She opened her browser with robotic precision, typing Flights from Phoenix to Incheon today so hard she nearly cracked the screen. A dozen results. None fast enough. She filtered, sorted, searched for layovers short enough to count on her hands.

Time. Time. There was never enough of it. It leaked between her fingers like blood.

She groaned and set the phone down, the weight of it like a stone on her thigh.

The flights were a disaster.

The fastest one—thirteen hours—wouldn’t even leave for another six. And even that was a gamble, a distant maybe. An eighteen-hour flight was more realistic. A whole lifetime away. By the time she landed, she might only be arriving for the funeral.

She slammed her head back against the headrest with a muted thud, earning a concerned glance from the driver through the rearview mirror. She waved him off without looking. Her hand drifted absently to the platinum ring twisting around her finger—clockwise, then counterclockwise, again and again like a rosary for a god that wouldn’t listen.

There were options, but none she could live with.

She could call Sangah. Ask her to go after Dokja, to track him down wherever he was in that city of glass and steel and dying hours and keep him safe. But then she’d have to explain the situation to her wife. And she had promised. 

Sangah’s gonna kill me once she finds out

She scrolled to the next contact.

Jung Heewon.

They hadn’t had the best of a relationship recently, far too many sharp words, differences in opinion. If this was a normal day, she’d feel bad about calling her on the day of her engagement party, but today was not a normal day. And when it came to Kim Dokja they’d always been on the same side. There was very little they wouldn’t do for that idiot.

She hit call. The phone rang. Once, twice—
Six times.
And then the dial tone melted into a flat, expressionless voice:
"The person that you're trying to reach is currently unavailable. Please try again later.”

Her stomach twisted.

She cursed and dialed again. No answer.
Lee Hyunsung was next.
Same result.

Her jaw clenched.

Of course.

Of course the universe chose today —of all goddamn days—to play cruel tricks.

Her fingers hovered over the screen, trembling slightly. She managed to type out a quick text:

Send me your live location

A pause.
Three seconds later, the dot blinked into existence—still at his apartment.

Of course the bastard was dragging his feet on the one day he couldn’t afford to.

Another message arrived before she could put her phone down.

Found a potential Last Friend. He seems nice over text.

Sooyoung stared at it.

Then her fingers flew.

'Seems nice over text’ is literally the prelude to a true crime documentary. Are you actually dumb.

Dokja responded almost immediately.

I had the same thought. But oh well. If he’s a serial killer, at least the day won’t be boring.

She read the message.

Then she reread it.

And a fury unlike anything she'd felt in years ignited in her chest.
Acidic. Cold and corroding and sharp at the edges.

She nearly screamed.

How could someone be so fucking stupid?

She set the phone facedown on her lap like it had burned her.
Breathed in through her nose.
Out through her mouth.

Then picked the phone back up with steady hands and opened a different browser.
If commercial flights were too slow, she’d just charter a private jet.

Expensive? Sure. But she’d cover it with sales from the next book. Or the one after that. What the hell was money for, if not this?

She skimmed the website, rapid-fire. Most charters required advance bookings unless you owned the damn plane. Which meant she'd have to go there in person and attempt to pull strings until something snapped.

Fine.

The car took a dangerously fast turn onto the highway, making her sway. She leaned her head against the window and closed her eyes for half a second, the vibrations humming against her skull.

Her fingers drifted to her wrist.

The band was still there—purple and teal woven with a white thread running through the center. 

It was a decade old now, fraying at the edges and had almost lost color.

She pulled it off. Curled it into her palm. And in that quiet, shaken breath that came after, she sent up a prayer to a God she didn’t believe in.

If there’s anyone up there listening, please. Don’t let me be late this time.

Not again.