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Han Sooyoung would laugh so hard that tears would spring to her eyes if she saw how fast Yoo Joonghyuk perked up at the sound of keys inserting to the front door.
There would be a 50/50 chance of Joonghyuk feeling shame, though never in the moment.
After all, Yoo Joonghyuk was a private person. Very few had a key to his apartment.
The few who did were very dear and limited, making every visit one that he would pause his stream for, or have anticipated before arrival.
So why would he be ashamed of the immediate way his day brightens on the chance that one of them have come by?
And as it was five in the afternoon of a very mundane week day, it must be one of his favorite people.
The one with the key used the most, decorated with stupid keychains the man had recieved from their neighbors and friends (Joonghyuk had contributed a flimsy WOS themed one that he loved to shake that hung beside the stupid squid keychain).
“I have to go.” He cuts the live before the chat could spam him for details.
(Y)URI3L could beg him for details later.
Light footsteps paused somewhere near the door as the figure kicks of his shoes before dropping lifelessly onto the couch.
(Somewhere hidden behind a new lifetime of memories, something in Yoonghyuk’s soul shudders at the thought of lifeless and Kim Dokja being within the same sentence.)
“Dokja.”
“Ah,” Kim Dokja tilts his head up, lying stomach down with a lazy smile. “Hyuk-ie.”
He sits up when Yoo Joonghyuk scowls and nudges his calf with his elbow, taking the sign to scoot over so Joonghyuk could sit beside him.
“…Kim Dokja.” He loved saying the man’s name.
A true grin splits on his boyfriend’s face as Joonghyuk settles just beside him, shoulders brushing.
The sight makes something inside his heart flutter like a school girl.
No, not flutter, that word was too flimsy to describe the feeling that Kim Dokja places within his very being.
Somehow, the bastard had wormed his way into being completed adored by Yoo Joonghyuk.
It should be a fact of the universe that Kim Dokja, in any shape or form that he allows to Joonghyuk, carves out a fundamental piece of clockwork that makes his life have meaning.
He’s the gears, the chambers of his heart, the thought in his mind, the dreams he escapes to when reality becomes too harsh to bear.
Joonghyuk doesn’t say any of it, doesn’t dare even attempt to put into words the meaning of this man to his soul.
It would pale in comparison and leave him ridiculed by Dokja anyways.
Instead, his scowl deepens even as his eyes grow lighter with endearment. “You’re late.”
Dokja, at least, has the sense to look partially sheepish before he counters, “The train ran late today, cut me some slack, Joonghyuk-ah. I had to catch the second since I was distracted talking to Sangah-ssi about the new novel at the office and had to wait…”
Right. While Joonghyuk’s silently satisfied that Dokja was getting along well with his coworkers at his new job, he would rather enjoy if he was on time.
Dokja pressed his face into the back of the couch cushion and despite the sight becoming a common occurrence since they started dating, Joonghyuk reveled in how right it looked for Kim Dokja to look so at home in his apartment.
(Yoo Joonghyuk shivers in disgust thinking about the shoebox Kim Dokja used to live in.)
“You could have send a message,” Joonghyuk admonishes, reaching to tap Dokja on the head. “Dokja,” he can’t help but add the other’s name with a huff.
The teasing smack morphs into his fingers rubbing through soft dark strands, traitors.
Kim Dokja leans in, undoing his tie with a roll of his eyes and tossing it across the room to put in the laundry later.
If he wasn’t in such a good mood, Joonghyuk would have shoved Kim Dokja off the couch to go put it away properly.
Instead, he shakes his head as Dokja grins at his minor victory.
“Always on your phone anyway,” he continues, “Kim Dokja, always reading those stupid webnovels.”
The rare tranquility of Kim Dokja not running his mouth shatters and the crown of his head almost collides into Yoonghyuk’s jaw as he snaps to attention.
“Take that back!” Dokja smacks him on the shoulder like he was swatting a rather irritating fly. His eyes are bright with protest.
Fireflies, Joonghyuk thinks silently, with a light to grace the earth. Isn’t it lucky how a sight like that is so common to see? That I can come home and have that look of pure, fire-bright delight for myself?
(It brings Joonghyuk back to the times where he would let Dokja irritate him, purposefully making his reactions more comical as it seemed to please the other man immensely.
Little did he know that nothing Kim Dokja did would truly anger Joonghyuk, not when he was absolutely infactuated to the point of no return with the annoying rat.)
He tunes back into the conversation, knowing Kim Dokja might get upset if he realizes he had been ignored for what might have been a couple minutes passed.
Is it really Yoo Joonghyuk’s fault that his every waking moment is distracted by thoughts of Kim Dokja, even distracting him from Kim Dokja?
A voice in the back of his mind that sounds horrifyingly like both Lee Jihye and Han Sooyoung jeer, “Simp!” like an airhorn before he can fall back into his thoughts.
“The writing, character development,” Dokja complains, sprawling his hands out in front of him as if pointing each one out as Joonghyuk slides his palm across the back of his neck, “And it’s all free! You would know if you ever tried it, I give you recommendation after recommendation, for nothing! Uncultured!”
“I would pay for a better platform if you asked,” Yoo Joonghyuk replies calmly, hiding his smile as he drops his face to the crook of the other’s neck. “Kim Dokja.”
“I don’t want that,” Kim Dokja shoots back, an age old conversation that Joonghyuk insists on bringing up.
His face heats up at the reminder of his companion’s attention to his hobbies, to the point of willingly shelling out money for something he finds unnecessary without complaint.
“I like the spelling errors and stupid ads, it gives character. Besides, that’s where I cyberbullied Sooyoung for the first time.”
Dokja scoffs, but his eyes soften as he hesitantly adds, “Anything without a little fault makes the good in it feel less meaningful. Sometimes, reading something so beautifully human makes other things that are less than perfect feel… better. Forgivable, even something better.”
Joonghyuk thinks of Dokja’s lopsided smile when he’s truly happy, of the assymetrical squint he makes when he’s truly thinking of something and how his eye color, which once seemed like the average Korean man’s, was truly made of small, gorgeous stars of a universe Joonghyuk craved to know more about.
He think of Kim Dokja, who’s loud and annoying, amusing and gorgeous, with all his blundering charm yet brimmed with smooth intelligence.
How he doesn’t know his own beauty, how he lights up a room and draws people in like moths to the offered warmth of a flame.
How Joonghyuk wouldn’t ask for anything more, less, or other than Kim Dokja in this lifetime or the next.
“I understand,” he admits, drawing Dokja closer with a hum.
Kim Dokja exhales a small laugh, patting Joonghyuk’s forearm fondly before stiffening.
“Wait— are you calling me faulty?” He swivels in Joonghyuk’s hold with an accusing expression. “Yoo Joonghyuk, you bastard.”
“I’m calling you beautiful,” Joonghyuk corrects and revels in the surprised fluster that warms Dokja’s face. Devastatingly so.
As if the man could be anything short of that word. Joonghyuk really didn’t understand how Kim Dokja critiqued himself so devastatingly, as he really couldn’t see anything other than divine on his features.
Even the tired sheen of his eyes after a long day’s work was sweet, as it was so authentically Kim Dokja.
“Fool,” he adds stiltedly.
Dokja snorts, kicking Yoo Joonghyuk’s shin with his socked foot. He fished out the TV remote from somewhere inside the small couch.
“Asshole,” he comments airily as he flicks through shows.
Yoo Joonghyuk hums again, not able to hide his content in the lazy afternoon routine, “Idiot.”
“Dumbass. Is every one of your insults about my intellect? You know that I’m as smart as Han Sooyoung, yes?”
“Han Sooyoung is not someone you should compare to in terms of intelligence,” Joonghyuk argues, though he knows that it’s a lie.
A gorgeous, insane strategist whose mind was as quick as a bullet and read just as fast, and a woman who had critically acclaimed novels racked up at the age of seventeen.
The two dumbasses he had watched turn tteokbokki into gritty ash on his poor stovetop.
It was strange, how Yoo Joonghyuk was surrounded by stupid geniuses.
Kim Dokja clicks his tongue. “I’ll tell her you said that. Sunfish.”
A beat of silence. Dokja stares unblinkingly up at him as he buffers.
“Sunfish?”
“Eh? Yeah, have you seen articles about them? So stupid,” Dokja shakes his head like he was genuinely befuddled by the animal’s lack of IQ.
Knowing how quick Dokja’s brain worked, Yoo Joonghyuk wouldn’t be surprised that the thought of anything being genuinely dumb would confound him.
“They’re so big,” he adds, concemplative. “Doesn’t even defend itself when in danger, just keeps going. Kind of like when Gilyoung-ie was trying to gnaw your hand off yesterday.”
He gingerly whips out his phone, the screen halfway to hell with the cracks webbing over the light, to present a couple clips to Joonghyk.
The ugliest thing that Joonghyuk believes he has ever seen in his life (and he knows Sooyoung) swims sluggishly across the shattered device’s screen.
Yoo Joonghyuk makes a mental note to purchase a screen protector before Dokja could cut his thumb on the broken glass.
A spark of michief glows in Dokja’s constellation eyes. “See how I was reminded of you? Plus, the nickname felt… familiar somehow.”
Despite the teasing tone, the last part of his sentence seemed thoughtful, almost distant.
“Hm.”
Sometimes, it feel like he knew Kim Dokja in another life. It was moments where the feeling of Dokja’s hand held in his felt too familiar for just a few years of companionship.
It was the way Dokja soothed a yearning chasm somewhere inside, or how his dreams had a figure dressed in white with an identical smile, and how he’d wake up and search for the man after aforementioned moments like he would turn to dust before his eyes.
Like his time was running out with the love of his life(times?), or as if it had already ended.
Yet Kim Dokja was there every morning, eerily familiar like he was cut from the same cloth of the past, and he came home every night like a promise made in another life.
Whenever Joonghyuk thinks about it for too long, he has the overwhelming urge to call up everybodythen to check on the whereabouts of his stupid lover.
They might have stared in a tragedy, that would explain the beating of his heart whenever Dokja was out of sight. They could have ended terribly a lifetime ago.
I won’t let that happen to us, Joonghyuk vows, not again.
Joonghyuk might have survived the first time, but he doubts he would persist through such a loss once more after a taste of a soft life with Dokja. He wouldn’t handle losing these afternoons of light conversations and his hand in Kim Dokja’s hair with the sound of his beating heart pressed to his chest.
He couldn’t imagine a life without Kim Dokja after he found out what having him really meant, like finding a piece of himself as corny as it was.
(Everthing he thought of Kim Dokja was corny.)
They had been plotted, entwined in the stars, or perhaps, Dokja had left to become one much too early.
Joonghyuk used to dismiss the idea of past lives, but after meeting this familiar stranger, turned life or death companion as their eyes met for the first time, he knew he must have done something amazing to get this second chance to fall in love again.
And he knew Kim Dokja must have felt the same.
“Dokja, I—“
An intense rattle at their door splits the soft moment of silence, as a disgruntled curse, muffled from the hallway, erupts. The burglar apparently gives up trying to shove a key into their door as rapid knocks shake the front door like hyperactive gunfire.
Kim Dokja blinks, giving Joonghyuk a pointed look.
He groans, getting to his feet and opening the door with unrestrained misery.
“I am coming in, better not be making out in here or I swear, I will tell Heewon!” Han Sooyoung brushes past him like she owns the place, diving onto the spot Joonghyuk had been sitting in.
She lands halfway onto Kim Dokja, making the man wheeze as her elbow arrives unceremoniously into what may have been his left lung.
“You would not believe the day I just had,” she bemoans instead of offering a greeting.
“You would not believe the damage your pointy ass elbows have done to my stomach,” Dokja coughs. “Do you sharpen them? Is a sharp tongue that gets you in trouble not enough?”
She drives her shoulder into his jaw. It doesn’t do any damage, but it annoys Dokja and that seemed to please her. “Says you, squid.”
Joonghyuk rolls his eyes. He told Dokja not to give her a copy of their key.
(It had been an unspoken agreement between the two and Joonghyuk had been the one to give them to her.
He had placed them in her computer bag without saying anything after a group meet up and she had barged into their home mere days later to steal all their food and laugh.)
“I saw Sangah-ssi today,” Kim Dokja announced with a sing-song lilt to his voice.
Han Sooyoung sits up and Joonghyuk almost doesn’t get there in time to stop one of Dokja’s books from getting flung off the couch. “Did you tell her about my new chapter coming out?”
Kim Dokja notices the look in her eyes and glances away quickly, “Uh—“
“Hah?! And you didn’t recommend my books to her?” She flicks his forehead. “What kind of friend are you? After I helped you get with your trope partner, what about me?”
“Trope partner?” Joonghyuk deadpans
She points accusingly at him, venom narrowing her gaze as she groans despairingly, “Hot and sucessful,” she turns her hand to land on Dokja’s nose, “Pretty and smart.”
Eyes crossed, Dokja moves to bite her but Sooyoung redraws her hand before he gets the chance.
She opens her mouth to complain to Joonghyuk about his possibly rabid boyfriend, when she catches the soft, loving stare emitted from beside them.
Dokja notices and offers a sweet smile back. She twitches, as if pondering the instinct to scream in irritation.
Han Sooyoung grumbles as Joonghyuk tries to dislodge her to claim his rightful place beside his companion. “When am I gonna get my pretty and smart, wonderful partner?”
She flinches, as if just realizing she offhandedly referred to Dokja as wonderful in her analogy.
Kim Dokja winces, “I’m not—“
“Dokja,” the two snap at him in unison, a moment of alliance before they went back to their brawl for the only other spot on the couch, “Shut up.”
Dokja gives them both a flat, embarassed look. “Whatever.”
“Besides,” Sooyoung adds as she elbows Joonghyuk in the gut, “You’re not the successful one out of the two of you. Also too much of a loser to be hot. At least Joonghyuk can pretend.”
Joonghyuk resists the ever present urge to noogie the snark out of the woman like he would (much more carefully) do with Yoo Mia when she was being a (much, much more adorable) little pest.
(Sometimes, he’d threaten to do so with Han Sooyoung, when she was getting on her nerves. At some point, the threat of rubbing her head to the point of making her go bald had become a part of his typical vocabulary.)
“Hey, Sooyoung, I wanted to show you something.”
Han Sooyoung cements herself next to Dokja. Yoo Joonghyuk watches his companion and the woman the two internally claimed as a sister figure, and accepts his defeat, dragging his feet into the kitchen.
At some point, the quiet moment between two of the people Joonghyuk cares for the most erupts into entropy, as aparently the two can’t go more than fifteen minutes of peaceful editing without Kim Dokja bringing up a picture of a ratty looking cat to compare to Sooyoung’s face, and the two settle into pestering each other.
Then, the discussion of superior tropes get brought up. Joonghyuk gave it ten minutes before it got physical.
“I have food.”
The two perk up immediately, twin pairs of greedy eyes locking onto his position as they leaned over the back of the couch.
It reminds him of a clip Jihye sent him of a cat darting to attention at the sound of a dinner bell.
The two glance at each other before reaching an unspoken truce ad file into the other area peacefully.
“Already?” Dokja hums appreciatively, reaching up into the cupboards to get three plastic bowls.
Each had a rather cartoony print of either an animal or a bug for some reason. Joonghyuk decides it must have been an impulse purchase on Dokja part for their small neighbors, who seemed to spend more time at their house monopolizing his lover’s time than staying at their own apartments.
“I had it ready earlier,” Joonghyuk sighs, looking away. “But you came home late.”
“Trouble in paradise?” Han Sooyoung snickers. Dokja flings a chopstick at her and it lands in her choppy hair.
“I told you that the subway train runs late, Hyuk-ie,” Sooyoung fake vomits at the fondness in his tone, “You don’t have to wait up on me.”
“Let me pick you up from work instead. I don’t like when you take the train,” Joonghyuk grumbles.
He blames it on past lives, but the subway train makes his skin crawl. He’s not sure as to why, but when Kim Dokja texts him about a delay, it feels like he’s never coming back.
Like it’s happened before—
“Hey,” Sooyoung interjects, “Save the lover’s quarrel, I want to eat.”
Joonghyuk looks over and watches Dokja’s form for a moment, before exhaling.
“Right.”
Joonghyuk sets up the table, which quickly gets wrecked by Sooyoung’s manners, and Dokja kicks him under the table on accident.
Then, apparently, study school is let off for the day and Lee Gilyoung, Yoo Mia, Shin Yoosung, and Biyoo all come squabbling into their apartment.
Dokja laughs and gets up to prepare four more servings for the children. He brushes past Joonghyuk with a soft pat on his shoulder as he moves past.
Joonghyuk’s gaze follows Dokja into the kitchen, where the settling light of a coming evening leaves beams of soft rays over his figure.
He wouldn’t trade a moment of this for the world. Joonghyuk knows how lucky he is to have this.
And he’d do anything to keep it. This life, this peace, his reader.
The universe loves tales of tragedy, it’s true, but what most crave, according to his most beloved reader, was a beautiful happy ending that was far sweeter after the bitterness of sorrow.
This must be their epilogue after the blood of a lost lover.