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Kim Dokja is gone.
Yoo Joonghyuk knows this. He knows it deeply and painfully well, the way he knows his own scars. He has seen Kim Dokja die. He's dealt death to him with his own hands. But sometimes, for Yoo Joonghyuk, Kim Dokja is still here.
It starts as a fleeting thing. Glimpses on the edges of his awareness. The flutter of a white coat at the end of a corridor. A distinctive laugh carried to him on the breeze. An unmistakable presence that sparks recognition in the deepest corners of his mind, that makes his jaw clench and his fingers itch to wrap around a slim neck. That makes his traitorous heart soar. Yoo Joonghyuk's mind turns to the thought of Kim Dokja the same way that a flower grows in the direction of sunlight — instinctively, inescapably, without any hope of ever reaching the sky. Like that, Yoo Joonghyuk reaches for Kim Dokja. He calls out for him without saying a word.
And eventually, Kim Dokja begins to answer.
"Yoo Joonghyuk."
Kim Dokja's voice is smooth, neither high nor deep, not particularly noteworthy. An ordinary voice in a crowded room. Not something anyone would turn their head upon hearing. Not something that should stick in Yoo Joonghyuk's memory like it does, as familiar to him as the sound of his own heartbeat.
Kim Dokja stands in front of Yoo Joonghyuk an arms-length away. He's smiling. Yoo Joonghyuk doesn't think Kim Dokja has ever smiled at him like that. He can't look away.
Those eyes, dark and full of stars, look back at him. Kim Dokja's hand lifts to Yoo Joonghyuk's cheek. His touch is impossibly light, like the brush of a page turning against his skin. But he can feel it. Even though Kim Dokja is gone, he's here, cradling Yoo Joonghyuk's face like he's something precious and fragile. It almost feels real. But his fingers are so cold.
"Joonghyuk-ah." Kim Dokja says his name again. He moves closer. Another hand joins the first, one on either side of Yoo Joonghyuk's face. It makes him shudder. It's far too intimate, far too tender for the Kim Dokja he knows. They've always communicated with fists or blades, terse messages with the distance of a system window between them. Never like this.
Yoo Joonghyuk is fully aware that this cannot be the real Kim Dokja. This is an illusion, an apparition that wears Kim Dokja's face. He should slash through it and banish it from his mind. At the very least, he should walk away. What he should not do is the very thing he does next, which is to lean into the touch, to tilt his head so that his cheek presses into Kim Dokja's palm. He shuts his eyes and covers Kim Dokja's cold hands with his own. He wills his body heat to thaw them. It's an indulgence, to allow himself this fantasy. Shameful. Weak. The real Kim Dokja would be disgusted by this. A stolen false memory of what it would feel like to have Kim Dokja's hands on his skin. But this Kim Dokja only laughs, soft as snow.
Yoo Joonghyuk feels him move closer, senses Kim Dokja entering his space. He leans close until Yoo Joonghyuk can feel his breath against the shell of his ear. He knows he should do anything other than allow this. But just for this moment, just for one pathetic moment longer, he wants to forget that Kim Dokja is gone, wants to set down the crushing weight of his grief and pretend that this is real, that Kim Dokja is alive and still with him and can touch him, like this.
And then Kim Dokja speaks. Right into Yoo Joonghyuk's ear. His voice spills directly into Yoo Joonghyuk's mind, like the true voice of a constellation.
"Were you able to protect everything you wanted to protect?"
Sweetly, gently, the words drive into Yoo Joonghyuk's heart like a knife sliding home.
His eyes fly open. He stares at the serene smile still on the false Kim Dokja's face — that face that's close enough to his own for him to count individual eyelashes — as those cold fingers move down to Yoo Joonghyuk's neck and squeeze, digging into his windpipe. Yoo Joonghyuk chokes. He grabs for Kim Dokja's arms — but not to stop him. He only grips Kim Dokja as tightly as Kim Dokja holds him, a mutual stranglehold of scarred hands and pale wrists. Despite the lack of oxygen, the pain of being strangled clears Yoo Joonghyuk's mind. This way of communicating, he understands. He knows now why Kim Dokja has appeared before him. He's being punished. He deserves this pain, he thinks, as Kim Dokja squeezes his throat hard enough to bruise.
"Maybe next time, you'll do better," Kim Dokja says around his smile. "That's what you're best at, isn't it? Fucking it all up, and then dying, and fucking it all up again. You really are hopeless without me, aren't you, Joonghyuk-ah?"
He sounds fond, but the words land like blows on top of old aches. This is not what Kim Dokja would say. These are Yoo Joonghyuk's thoughts in Kim Dokja's mouth, sweetened by his voice and sharpened by his tongue. All the more difficult to deny, when they come from one Yoo Joonghyuk failed to save. Yoo Joonghyuk offers no resistance. He can only blink through the darkness creeping into the edges of his vision, suffocating, with the details of Kim Dokja's face fading into a blur.
This Kim Dokja isn't real, but maybe death could be, if Yoo Joonghyuk wishes for it strongly enough. Maybe this manifestation of guilt could be made real through his pain just long enough to put Yoo Joonghyuk out of his worthless misery.
Kim Dokja coughs. His lips are suddenly wet and red. The scene has shifted. Yoo Joonghyuk's hands no longer hold Kim Dokja's wrists, but instead grip his sword, driven up to the hilt into Kim Dokja's chest. The world slides off its axis. No. No, no no no no.
Kim Dokja's hands are no longer around his throat, but the pressure is still there, preventing Yoo Joonghyuk from drawing breath. Kim Dokja is speaking. Yoo Joonghyuk hears it as if his head is underwater. "You really can't do anything without my help." The words come out wet with blood. Red blooms around the blade buried in Kim Dokja's heart. The Kim Dokja in front of Yoo Joonghyuk flickers, briefly overlayed with how he looked under the effects of the Demon King Transformation. A vision of black wings, twisted horns, and dark fractures covering his skin like a crumbling statue. And then he's disappearing again, turning to dust before Yoo Joonghyuk can even reach for him this time.
Yoo Joonghyuk falls to his knees with a sick, wheezing gasp, lungs screaming. He coughs convulsively until he almost vomits. By the end of it, he's left doubled over and shaking on the floor, and he is alone.
The frequency of seeing Kim Dokja intensifies after that. This is, of course, a bad thing. It's a sure sign that Yoo Joonghyuk's mental state is deteriorating. But buried in the unease that Yoo Joonghyuk feels every time he sees Kim Dokja's face is an undeniable thread of relief that he can't let go of. He's relieved that their previous encounter isn't the last time Kim Dokja will appear before him. Whether he ignores Kim Dokja or threatens him, whether he walks away from him until his feet blister or trains himself to the brink of exhaustion, Kim Dokja follows, inescapable as his own shadow. He watches Yoo Joonghyuk cut his way through monsters and offers comments on the increasing desperation with which he throws himself into the scenarios. He sits with him while he cooks, stands uncomfortably close during the times Yoo Joonghyuk can't avoid talking to other survivors. These opportunities allow Yoo Joonghyuk to confirm from everyone else's lack of a reaction to Kim Dokja what he already knew: this Kim Dokja is a hallucination produced by Yoo Joonghyuk's fracturing mind. No one else sees him. No one else hears his voice. For the rest of the world, Kim Dokja remains dead and gone. This Kim Dokja, the one who smiles at Yoo Joonghyuk so tenderly whenever their eyes meet, is for him alone.
Yoo Joonghyuk tries not to dwell on what it means for his sanity that he finds a twisted comfort in that thought. He tries to avoid thinking it from then on.
The repeated regressions have clearly wrecked his mind, for him to have such detailed and realistic hallucinations that persist for hours at a time. He hadn't known it was even possible to hallucinate something so convincingly vivid — for his mind to fully conjure up a ghost whose touch he can feel as realistically as any living person, whose voice and face are more real to him than any dream. But when, at the end of another day spent clawing out an existence in this ruined world, Yoo Joonghyuk is granted just a few moments of solace where he can pretend that Kim Dokja is still here, he just can't bring himself to care.
The hallucinations get worse, and Yoo Joonghyuk does, too.
Kim Dokja dies. Sometimes in ways Yoo Joonghyuk has seen before — with a gaping bloody hole where half his torso should be, or bleeding out on his back with Han Sooyoung's knife in his chest.
Other times, he dies in ways that are wholly new. As if he's become the sun itself, Kim Dokja burns to ashes from the inside out right before Yoo Joonghyuk's eyes. Once, he gives Yoo Joonghyuk a radiant smile and steps out a fourth-floor window, plummeting into the ruins below with his white coat fluttering around him like an angel's wings. Sometimes he dissolves into endless lines of tiny black text that flow out of him like the light from a star. Other times, he slits his own wrists and paints Yoo Joonghyuk's face with the blood, has them lie in it together until he is cold and still. Each time is a reminder of how Yoo Joonghyuk failed. No matter how many times he sees Kim Dokja die, Yoo Joonghyuk always feels a part of himself die with him.
And then Kim Dokja comes back. Like death is a momentary setback. Like he always has before. And if the small relief Yoo Joonghyuk feels from seeing Kim Dokja at his side again is the only thing able to piece his heart back together, can he really be blamed for clinging to that comfort, false though it is?
Kim Dokja talks to him, too. Maybe too much. He talks about the repetitiveness of the scenarios, or admonishes Yoo Joonghyuk for getting sloppy when his recklessness gets him injured. He asks Yoo Joonghyuk questions that leave welts in their wake and have him questioning every decision, every mistake. Without fail, every time this Kim Dokja appears, he asks that same question that threatens to drag Yoo Joonghyuk down to the bottom, like placing shackles on him and throwing him into the sea to watch him struggle and sink.
「Have you protected everything you wanted to protect?」
Yoo Joonghyuk never answers. There isn't any need.
Sometimes, Kim Dokja is kind. Usually, he is cruel. For Yoo Joonghyuk, the moments when Kim Dokja treats him with kindness might be the most painful of all.
Like now, when Yoo Joonghyuk sits on his bedroll with Kim Dokja's arms around him, draped over him like a blanket, or maybe like chains around his neck. The weight of him is as comforting as it is stifling.
"Joonghyuk-ah," Kim Dokja says, soft as a whisper. He sounds half asleep. His hands are always cold, but Yoo Joonghyuk has learned that the rest of him is warm — almost burning hot, like sunbaked sand. "Do you miss me?"
Yoo Joonghyuk turns his head to look at him. This Kim Dokja, who lives in his mind and can read his every thought, has no need for him to answer out loud. The Kim Dokja conjured by his imagination looks almost unreal in the moonlight, a contrast of shadows and highlights that fills Yoo Joonghyuk's head with unnecessary thoughts. One such a thought rises to the forefront before he can discard it. Yoo Joonghyuk's gaze falls to Kim Dokja's lips. He watches those lips curve into a smirk.
"Yoo Joonghyuk, did you always think of me like this?" Kim Dokja's voice is light, teasing. He lifts his head so he can face Yoo Joonghyuk properly. Their faces are so close that the tips of their noses almost touch.
Yoo Joonghyuk doesn't know the answer to that one, so it stands to reason Kim Dokja doesn't know, either. Kim Dokja's eyes shine like the night sky above them as he looks at Yoo Joonghyuk like he sees something amusing. Those eyes... When had Yoo Joonghyuk first noticed the way Kim Dokja's eyes — the real Kim Dokja's eyes — looked as if they held the stars? He can't recall. It's the same as asking when he first noticed the multitude of stars in the sky itself. Maybe always. Or maybe he's only truly noticing it now in Kim Dokja's absence, like seeing him for the first time through the veil of memory.
The way Kim Dokja is looking at him makes Yoo Joonghyuk's breath catch. Kim Dokja's eyes are half-lidded. His lips are parted, just so. Yoo Joonghyuk is abruptly very conscious of just how close they are, of how warm Kim Dokja's body feels against his own. Kim Dokja blinks as if in slow motion. The way his eyelashes catch the moonlight is devastating. He angles his head and leans even closer. Closer. Far too close.
Yoo Joonghyuk knows he should stop him. It's wrong, sinful to even consider allowing this from an imaginary Kim Dokja when the real one would never do something like this. When the real one is dead because of Yoo Joonghyuk. He's not allowed to want this, to think about what it would've been like. He doesn't deserve it. He needs to stop this.
Yoo Joonghyuk is a weak man.
Kim Dokja's lips touch his own. They're warm and soft and everything good that Yoo Joonghyuk is not allowed to have. Something in Yoo Joonghyuk's chest twists violently. With guilt, with longing to be treated more tenderly than he could possibly deserve, he doesn't know.
For a long while, all he knows is the feeling of Kim Dokja kissing him, holding him, the way each point of contact sends sparks across his skin and makes his heart pound like it might burst.
It's not real. This isn't Kim Dokja. This is a betrayal, a sick fantasy invented by a mind lost in loneliness and grief. But Yoo Joonghyuk has never foolishly, desperately wished for something to be more real than he does in this moment. Has never been more crushed by the certainty that it never can be.
Kim Dokja breaks the kiss, leaving Yoo Joonghyuk dazed. Yoo Joonghyuk presses into him, chases after him, desperate to keep the impossible moment from ending. Kim Dokja, merciless, ends it for him. He delivers the killing blow in that ordinary voice that haunts Yoo Joonghyuk's dreams, with sweet venom from the lips that had kissed him so softly. He asks the question that breaks Yoo Joonghyuk apart, piece by fragile piece.
"Were you able to protect everything you wanted to protect?"
And he smiles, because they both know the answer without Yoo Joonghyuk having to say it out loud.