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“Sometimes, I feel like I hate him.”
The admission doesn’t gain anything further than a brief, unimpressed look from Yoo Joonghyuk.
He shrugs, unbothered, “So does everyone in this damn city.”
One couldn’t be as unapologetic as Kim Dokja without making enemies.
Jung Heewon shakes her head, watching the silvery outline of Kim Dokja being pulled farther off, accompanied by the clamor of his two kids dragging him off like a shared ragdoll, bickering.
The light catches serenely against his features (that are quickly covered in a layer like mist in her mind), and the beginning of a smile smooth over his mouth as he leaves.
She resists the urge to surge forward as he disappears behind the building.
Yoo Joonghyuk huffs. When she turns questioningly, she finds the the man’s gaze is locked on the corner Dokja had passed moments earlier with a grimace on his (according to Dokja, at least) handsome “protagonist” face.
His hand twitches even as his dark expression remains smooth, betraying the perfect, unbothered and cool image he was probably attempting to portray.
Heewon nudges him with her elbow and he rolls his eyes.
She finds a sense of solace in his sheer annoyance, in the way he tensed when the flicker of a white coat leaves.
Jung Heewon was no stranger to that sense of panic.
Losing Kim Dokja nearly scares her to death each time despite how, every time, he comes back with a casual apology with a hand rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly.
The kind of reaction one would give after tripping over a lawn chair or making it to a meeting late because of traffic.
It’s terrifying how casual it is. It’s even worse when he doesn’t see the issue again and again.
Jung Heewon was a woman who vowed to go down fighting no matter what. If she had to die, it would be with skin between her teeth and hands stained with red against the evil who dared to strike her down.
She had learned defiance against death, to win the life she had been given with a fire bright greed.
Jung Heewon would survive.
It fueled her, motivated each strike as she refused to die.
But when she looked at Dokja?
What a wonderful, wicked man. Does he know how his smile makes her bleed? That every time he died, a piece of her broke?
What use was a sword to a dead man?
And how could she protect someone who has no idea of how much he truly means to her? Who has no qualms with leaving her behind?
Living is not a salvation as much as it was a failure, each and every time she sees Kim Dokja’s blood spill unforgivingly.
“I… can’t hate him,” she amends after a moment. “I— hate how he can’t love himself.”
She looks away. “It hurts.”
Heewon loves Kim Dokja so much, like he was a part of her. Jung Heewon would easily declare Dokja as family, and she knows he would do the same in a heartbeat.
So of course it broke something in her when Dokja can’t allow that kind of affection to truly stay, like he had never believed it.
Heewon’s not insensitive enough to assume her adoration for him means nothing to Kim Dokja, but there was also the part of him that never accepted her love, or anyone else’s at that.
Yoo Joonghyuk’s silence grows heavier. “I know.”
She doesn’t doubt it.
“Why?” Heewon hisses, feeling powerless as she clenches her fist around the wrap of her sword.
Why can’t he see the damage he does?
Why is it so hard for him to comprehend that his death isn’t the salvation he thinks it is?
Why can’t I protect him, even from himself?
“I don’t know,” Joonghyuk responds, raising an eyebrow at her silent seething, though his eyes seem understanding as he draws forward, “he is… strange.”
Strange isn’t even close to the peculiar stupidity of Kim Dokja; it was a sentiment the both of them silently agreed on.
Heewon hates how this man means so much to her, how she’s unprepared to lose him even when he has shown time and time again that he would leave without a second thought.
“He’s not real,” Yoo Joonghyuk’s deadpan expression startled her, a silent question forming on her lips.
Joonghyuk seemed somewhat surprised himself, like he hadn’t realized he had said it out loud.
Disgruntled, he adds, “…Kim Dokja.”
Heewon glances from the serious set of his mouth to the awkward intensity emiting from his stance. “What?”
Maybe seeing Kim Dokja fling himself into danger too many times has cracked Yoo Joonghyuk’s mental state.
“Kim Dokja… doesn’t think he’s real, or carries the same worth, as the rest of us.”
Yoo Joonghyuk’s eyes darkened.
Ironic, how Kim Dokja sees the characters of his beloved book more deserving of life than he is.
“And… since he means nothing,” Joonghyuk adds, voice low like it pained him to say. Heewon twitches. “Then to him, we have nothing to lose in his absence.”
Heewon can’t reply, not without lashing out in a frenzy of sheer frustration.
She laughs bitterly instead, long and angry, as Yoo Joonghyuk turns and leaves without another word.
Jung Heewon had fought for justice, but Kim Dokja was the one to teach her how to fight for herself. Everyone who lasts learned that lesson.
Heewon had to stay alive in order to make change, to die for a cause meant to lose her chance to advocate.
Yoo Joonghyuk, the masterful protagonist he was, kept going with the promise of a better future motivating each step. She found his unrelenting spirit to be his greatest weapon, one that she wielded every time a new challenge caused her to falter.
Kim Dokja was the other side of the coin, she found. The man wanted to reach the ending for everyone but himself, a promise to give rather than take the exit that he was trying so hard to find.
Kim Dokja had no life that he had wanted to live.
From the very fiber of his weary bones, Kim Dokja was a story’s reader through and through.
Someone like that didn’t see themselves as part of the narrative.
Jung Heewon had found that one cannot be a protector of good without being a complete hypocrite.
She has the voices from above on her side, but even the angels are biased in nature; a heavenly justice spares no mercy on a sinner despite their desperate situation.
Most demons in a perfect being’s mind are deemed as such because of commiting the most common sin: simply being human.
A mother might kill thousands for her son, and a victim may wipe out an abuser’s entire lineage in retribution. It all begins to sound the same after a while: justice, payback, retribution.
It’s a matter of how far it goes that determines where a villain is made and when a hero saves the day.
Good is relative, evil lies in an absence of sympathy, and fairness is something that Heewon knows she can never get close to, yet still continues to chase.
She fights, because the only other option is falling to her demons and losing the most valuable part of herself.
Jung Heewon has blood on her hands, an unforgiving sway in her hands when she holds a sword, and a pleading of empathy that taunts her at night.
As a protector, she can’t afford to falter. As a person, she needs to allow herself to feel guilt.
Apathy comes with repetition. No matter how many monsters are slain, she torments herself with wondering if she had made the right decisions.
She has to think before it becomes an unconcious motion. If killing becomes natural, the kind of choice that goes without thought, that’s how a monster is made.
Justice is relative, yes, but that doesn’t make it any less important to her. She fights for what she believes is right, because that’s all anyone can do.
The most terrible atrocities committed had been paved from a place of love after all. As a protector, Heewon doesn’t have the luxury of faltering when mercy can quickly become a mistake.
(Heewon knows that she is the monster on someone else’s stories, but none of them matter when it’s a sole reader that she vows to protect. It’s just the price she has to pay to secure that is hers.)
She knows that surviving may be the closest thing to good that might exist now. It’s all a matter of perspective, of what lies spilled easily from the tongue are forgivable, and which are the point of no return.
Heewon drawls her line, others will do the same, and at the end of the day, it’s whoever tells the story that makes their judgement clear.
Jung Heewon decides early on that she will not bring more suffering than already exists in this place, but she cannot stand and give more grace than the world offers. An executioner can be a mother and child with every scenario, so every version of good and evil resides only on an individual’s eyes.
Kim Dokja is a sinner and a protector, as one can rarely be either without becoming the other.
Meeting Kim Dokja introduces her to one of the most unassuming realizations of evil.
Selfishness, and how it comes hand in hand with salvation, it appears.
Both of them are selfish. Kim Dokja, in his tendency for inconsiderate sacrifice, and Jung Heewon, in her desperation to keep him alive.
One of them had to fail for the other to succeed.
Objectively, thinking about how each of Kim Dokja’s plans had worked at the expense of his life, Dokja is somehow the most selfless inflicter of pain she’s ever met. Could he be considered selfless, when all she feels with his sacrifice is pain?
Objectively, Kim Dokja is kind, perhaps pragmatic in his approaches to scenarios.
Personally, he is painfully cruel in his love.
He fills her with a sense of hopelessness that she’s never experienced before. With every warm moment shared, each domestic conversation and snarky joke shared between them both, she can’t help but wonder if this would be the last moment she has with him.
Kim Dokja has the power to take one of the most important people in the universe to her away in a snap, and he abuses that ability unknowingly every time she has to wonder if he’ll ever open his eyes again.
Dokja kills her in a way he’ll never understand, not until he learns to love himself.
Heewon can’t declare a devil from a saint, but she can choose who she wants to protect.
So be it, that it’s the most difficult demon of a savior that she has and will ever know.
So she fights, with a sense of justice that’s rare in their new, broken society as Kim Dokja promises them an end.
He is the world she wants to protect.
“I can’t save you if you don’t let me.”
No matter what, Jung Heewon would defend Kim Dokja. It just became far more difficult when her adversary in these battles was the man himself.
The ground is soft beneath her, and the world carelessly sound asleep. It’s jarring, the kind of serenity enters the night when the mornings are filled with bloodshed.
“Is that what you want?” The stars seemed to twinkle in reply, irritatingly cheeful with a pure, sparkling sheen.
She clenches her hands, the grass tickling her white knuckles.
How such cruel things could be so beautiful.
Heewon closes her eyes to block the delicate lights from her sight. She couldn’t look up at the sky anymore.
Not after what she has seen, felt, and knows.
Not after everything that has happened.
Even the stars are guilty, no matter how blessed they shine in the night.
She wants to scream when she sees constellations in the night sky these days. Their untouchable nature makes her crave retribution like nothing else.
She wants to make them feel loss like she does, see how they like it when their world is taken away.
“Give him back,” she wants to snarl and terrify them into admission for what they’ve done, but Heewon would just as quickly beg for Kim Dokja to breathe again if the stars were truly willing.
Jung Heewon would have been satisfied if Kim Dokja had nothing he had to do for the rest of his life. She would have preferred for him to fall back, live a casual life that was warm and unproblematic.
Jung Heewon wishes that the universe could be kinder for her Kim Dokja, to allow him to slack off at home with a book in his lap, reading glasses low on the bridge of his nose instead of saving a blasted world that had never deserved him.
She wishes he never knew the pain that had led him to believe his life was unimportant.
But Kim Dokja sought out danger like he had never been a person for a day in his life, as if there was no meaning to his existence other than fighting.
Heewon just wanted him to be happy, to stay with her and live a longer life than he allowed himself to pursue. Was she truly so selfish in her desires?
(Kim Dokja’s body cools once more and Jung Heewon has no choice but to keep fighting as the light leaves his eyes.)
Had it truly been too much to ask to have peace of mind? To sleep with the easy comfort that Kim Dokja would be there in the morning, not having to worry if he was using his infamous keen wit in another plot that would rip him away from them?
To see his smile and not feel a freezing sense of terror that shocked her blood into panic? To not have to run with tears in her eyes and love without fear?
For all the good she tries to place into this ruined world, could it not have given her one thing in return?
(Jung Heewon waits and prepares for the chance to try helplessly to save him from himself.)
“It’s all I could ever ask for.”
(I’ll save you,” she whispers to the night air, “I’ll save you, and one day, I might be able to forgive you for the suffering that you’ve caused me.”
Jung Heewon loves that man more than he could ever imagine. The moniker, Demon King of Salvation, seems to have resided deep within his actions even before that final scene.
A lonesome tear slides down her face, one that she has no doubt will be joined by more as she thinks of her most hated savior and beloved evil, “I’ll forgive you for the rest of time as long as you make your way back to me.”)