Chapter Text
The room is too small for nine people.
Yoo Joonghyuk is standing in the corner with his arms crossed over his chest, watching. Lee Jihye is telling a story about something that happened in the last few years—something Kim Dokja missed—and her voice is too loud. She doesn't mean it to be. She's excited. They're all excited.
Kim Dokja is in the bed. The oxygen cannula is tucked under his nose, the tubing looped over his ears. The IV line runs from his arm to the bag hanging beside the bed, the tape holding it in place yellowed at the edges. His eyes are closed.
He was awake earlier, for maybe five minutes. His eyes tracked across the room, unfocused, not quite landing on anything. Then they closed again.
"—and then he said—"
Jung Heewon catches Joonghyuk's eye from across the room. She's leaning against the wall by the window and her eyes are telling. Are you doing this or am I?
He holds her gaze for a beat, then another.
He pushes off the wall.
"That's enough."
The room goes quiet. Jihye's mouth is still open.
Joonghyuk walks to the bed. He doesn't look at anyone else. He checks the oxygen cannula—still in place—and adjusts the blanket over Dokja. He doesn't know why exactly, it looks perfectly fine as is. Just something to do with his hands. Dokja doesn't stir.
"He needs to rest."
Han Sooyoung is the first to move. She stands and stretches, then gives the bed a look that's too casual to be real. "He's boring anyway. Sleeps all day."
Dokja doesn't react, doesn't even twitch. Of course he doesn't.
Heewon pushes off from the wall, moving toward the group with that kind of easy authority she's always had. "Okay, that's it guys. Let's go."
Jihye looks like she wants to argue, but Heewon is already herding them toward the door. Lee Hyunsung is wiping his face with the back of his hand, bowing too deeply at the door like he's leaving a temple. Yoo Sangah touches Lee Gilyoung's shoulder gently, but he doesn't move—he's standing at the foot of the bed, staring at Kim Dokja's face.
"Gilyoung-ah," Sangah calls out carefully.
He doesn't respond.
Shin Yoosung takes his arm and pulls gently, and this time he lets her. They file out one by one, and when the door finally closes, the silence that fills the room is almost physical.
The machines hum and the oxygen concentrator cycles on and off. Dokja's chest rises and falls, rises and falls, the cannula shifting slightly with each breath.
Joonghyuk pulls his chair to the side of the bed—the same chair he's been sitting in for weeks or even years, the one that's been here since before Kim Dokja opened his eyes—and sits down.
He doesn't touch Dokja's hand. He doesn't need to. Dokja isn't there to feel it anyway. He's somewhere else, in the space between waking and not, where Joonghyuk can't follow.
But he's breathing.
That's what they have right now. That's enough.
He leans back slowly and the chair creaks. His spine protests in three different places—he's lost count of how many nights he's slept in this position. His left foot is asleep, but he doesn't move to shake it out. The pins-and-needles feeling is something to feel besides the waiting.
Han Sooyoung is leaning against the wall with her hands in her pockets and doesn't look at him when he comes out. "They're going to keep doing that, you know. Showing up all at once. Being loud."
Joonghyuk closes the door behind him, the latch clicking softly.
"I'm not saying stop them," she continued. "I'm saying—" She stopped, looking at the closed door for a moment. "He's going to hate it. When he's awake enough to notice. These people watching him be like this."
Joonghyuk leans against the wall beside her with a hum. The wall is cool through his shirt, in a nice way. He thinks about the way Kim Dokja's eyes had kept closing, the way he'd been fighting to stay awake because his people were there and because he didn't know how to tell them to leave.
"So what's the plan?" Sooyoung raises a brow. "You're the one who's been here and who knows what he needs."
The question isn't small. Joonghyuk doesn't have a small answer.
"Lee Seolhwa comes at four," he said. "For the assessment."
"That's not what I asked."
"I know."
She's looking at him for a long moment. He can feel her weighing something, deciding whether to push. But her only eventual push was off the wall and she sighed, straightening her jacket.
"Fine, keep your plans. I'll handle the crowds." She paused, her hand on the door to the stairwell. "But when he starts getting better—when he's awake enough to be annoying about it—you're not doing this alone, idiot. I'm not asking."
She doesn't wait for an answer. The stairwell door swings shut behind her with a dull thud, and Joonghyuk is alone in the hallway.
He stays there for a few minutes, just leaning against the wall, looking at the closed door to Kim Dokja's hospital room. Through the small window he can see the edge of the bed, the corner of the blanket, and the slow rise and fall of the chest beneath it.
He's been looking at that rise and fall for a long time now. He is used to it.
He moves to stand straight and goes back inside.
Lee Seolhwa arrives at 4 PM exactly.
She always arrives exactly when she says she will. Joonghyuk noticed this weeks ago, back when the room was full of machines and Dokja wasn't in it yet, back when Seolhwa would come in with her clipboard and her calm voice and explain things he already knew but needed to hear from someone who wasn't himself.
She's done this before. Not this version of her, maybe, but her. In other regressions and other rooms, other times he stood at a bedside and watched her work. She's good at it. She's always been good at it.
She sets her bag on the rolling table by the window and pulls the curtain halfway closed against the afternoon light. "How has he been?"
"Awake for a few minutes this morning. Visitors."
Her lips tighten. "How long did they stay?"
"Too long."
She doesn't comment, and Joonghyuk thinks he might know why. He had learned, over the regressions of watching the scenarios survivors treatment, that visitors were a kind of medicine—necessary, but easy to overdose on.
Seolhwa pulls the stethoscope from around her neck and walks to the bed. Dokja is asleep—he's almost always asleep these days—and she checks the oxygen cannula's placement automatically, her fingers light against his cheek.
"Kim Dokja-ssi. I need to check your vitals."
His eyes don't open.
She waits and Joonghyuk watches her wait—she doesn't rush, doesn't repeat herself. She knows, the way he does, that rushing doesn't work. After a long moment, his eyelids move. Not opening, just shifting. Slightly, like something is happening beneath them that he can't quite surface from.
Seolhwa checks his pulse at the wrist, her fingers pressing into the thin skin there. "Heart rate's stable. Still fast, but stable."
She moves the stethoscope across his chest, his back, listening to his lungs. His breathing is shallow—it's always shallow—and Joonghyuk watches her face for something he learned to read across regressions. A slight furrow between her brows or the way her lips press together when something concerns her.
"The congestion is clearing," she says. "Slowly, but it's clearing."
She makes a note on her clipboard, then checks the IV line, the tape holding it to his arm, the bag hanging beside the bed. Total parenteral nutrition, his digestive system still isn't responding. They tried introducing liquid nutrition twice and both times, his body rejected it.
"We'll keep him on TPN for now," she says. "Try liquids again next week."
She says it like a fact, not a judgment, and Joonghyuk appreciates that about her. She was never the kind of doctor who made you feel like a failure for things you couldn't control.
Lee Seolhwa runs through the rest of the assessment—checking his hands for swelling, testing his reflexes with a small rubber mallet. His toes twitch when she taps his knee. That's something. That's more than last week.
When she's done, she pulls the blanket back up to his chest and adjusts the pillow behind his head. Kim Dokja's eyes haven't opened once.
"The speech therapist will come by next week," she says. "Just to evaluate. We don't expect him to talk yet, of course. The vocal cords need time, and the neural pathways are still rebuilding. But we need to start tracking the progress."
Yoo Joonghyuk nods.
She picks up her bag and Joonghyuk moves to open the door for her. It's a small thing, automatic, but she pauses when he does it.
"Joonghyuk-ssi."
He looks at her.
"He's going to be frustrated," she says quietly. "When he starts to wake up more and realizes how much he can't do. It's going to be hard for him, and it's going to be hard for you to watch."
She says it like a fact, not a warning. She knows him. Not in the way Kim Dokja knows him—no one can ever know him like Kim Dokja does—but she's seen him enough in this regression to understand the shape of him.
"I know," he says.
She looks at him for a moment—really looks—and he wonders what she sees. A man who'd been sitting in this room for months. A man who flinched every time a machine beeped differently than it should.
She doesn't ask anything else. She never asks, and that's something he appreciates about her across worldlines.
She just nods once and leaves.
The door closes and Joonghyuk stands there for a moment, then turns back to the bed.
Dokja's eyes are open.
Just barely—slits of dark under heavy lids, his gaze unfixed, not really seeing. His chest is still rising and falling in that same shallow rhythm. His hand lies on the blanket, fingers curled loosely.
He watches those fingers. The nails are getting too long, he should cut them. He's been meaning to cut them for days. It's the kind of thought that surfaces and drifts away, unimportant, until it is.
Joonghyuk sits down in the chair. "Lee Seolhwa says your lungs are clearing."
Dokja doesn't respond. His eyes track slowly across the ceiling, not landing anywhere.
"The speech therapist is coming next week. Evaluation."
No response. The oxygen concentrator hums and the IV pump beeps its slow, steady rhythm.
Joonghyuk leans back and the chair creaks.
After what felt like a while—but actually only two minutes, maybe five—Dokja's eyes close again. He didn't move, didn't make a sound. He just was there, for a few minutes, and now he isn't.
Yoo Joonghyuk stays in the chair.
***
The room is quiet.
Joonghyuk has been sitting here for hours—the light through the window has shifted from grey to darker grey, the shadows stretching across the floor. The machines hum. The IV pump beeps its slow rhythm. Dokja's chest rises and falls.
He's been asleep for two days. Not asleep—that's not the right word. Unconscious. His eyes haven't opened since the last time Joonghyuk talked to him, since Lee Seolhwa's visit, since Sooyoung came at night. The doctors say this is normal. The body conserves energy, the brain is rebuilding connections. There's nothing to do but wait.
So Joonghyuk waits.
He's been reading. Something Dokja's—one of the books Yoo Sangah brought from their old office that Kim Dokja left there forever ago and it survived only by a miracle, the one with the cracked spine and the coffee stain on the cover. He's not really reading it, his eyes move across the pages but the words don't stick. He's listening. He's always listening, even when nothing is happening.
The change in Dokja's breathing comes first.
It's subtle—a shift in rhythm, a catch that wasn't there before. Joonghyuk's eyes lift from the page and he watches Dokja's chest rise, fall, rise again. His face is slack, his eyes closed, his hand limp on the blanket.
Then his fingers move.
Just the right hand. The fingers curl inward, slow, like something is happening beneath the skin that he's not fully in control of. They relax, then curl again.
Joonghyuk's own hand moves before he tells it to. His fingers reach toward the bed—not touching, just hovering, like they're trying to bridge a distance his brain hasn't approved yet. He pulls them back when he notices.
He sits still for a moment, then sets the book down.
He doesn't move from the chair and he doesn't reach for Dokja's hand. He's learned, over the weeks, that touching him when he's like this doesn't do anything. Dokja isn't there to feel it. But he watches. He watches the fingers curl and uncurl, curl and uncurl, a rhythm that has nothing to do with the machines, nothing to do with the IV drip.
It's movement. Voluntary or not, he can't tell, but it's movement.
He watches until the fingers still, until Kim Dokja's breathing settles back into its shallow rhythm, until the room is quiet again except for the hum of the machines.
He picks the book back up. He doesn't open it again, just holds it, his thumb marking the place he wasn't reading, and watches Dokja's hand on the blanket.
The fingers don't move again.
But they moved.
***
He's in the chair when Kim Dokja's eyes open. He's always in the chair.
It's morning—the light through the window is pale, the kind that comes before the sun fully rises. Joonghyuk hasn't slept, he doesn't remember the last time he actually slept. There's coffee on the windowsill, cold and untouched. The book is on the floor where he dropped it hours ago, when a restless nap stole him for a couple hours and left him more tired than before.
His neck hurts. The chair has been his bed for so long that he's stopped noticing the angle, but today it's making itself known again.
Kim Dokja's eyes are open.
Not the half-lidded unfocused stare from before. Open. His gaze is on the ceiling, tracking slowly across the cracks, the water stain in the corner, the place where the paint is starting to peel. Joonghyuk has stared at that same ceiling enough times to know exactly where his eyes are going.
Joonghyuk doesn't move and doesn't speak. He's learned not to break the silence when it happens, learned that sound can pull Dokja back under before he's ready to surface.
Dokja's eyes move. From the ceiling to the window. From the window to the IV stand. From the IV stand to the chair.
To Yoo Joonghyuk.
His gaze lands and stays. For a moment—one breath, two—his eyes are focused. Clear. Not the cloudy unfixed stare from before. He's looking at Joonghyuk and he's seeing him.
Joonghyuk holds very still. His hand, resting on his knee, curls into a loose fist. He doesn't know why. Reflex, maybe, or the need to hold onto something.
Dokja's mouth moves, but nothing comes out. His throat works, his lips part, and Joonghyuk sees the effort in his face—the concentration, the frustration that follows when nothing happens. His hand twitches on the blanket.
"Don't," Joonghyuk says. His voice is rougher than he meant it to be and he clears his throat awkwardly before resuming. "Don't try to talk."
He wants to say something else. He wants to say you don't have to try so hard, you're here and that's enough. But the words won't come. They never come when he needs them.
Dokja's eyes don't leave his face. There's something in them—recognition, maybe, or just the effort of staying present. It's hard to tell. This is a face that's forgotten how to make expressions and is learning it all over again.
He pulls the chair closer to the bed. The legs scrape against the floor, loud in the quiet room, and Dokja's eyes track the movement. Follow him.
"You were out for two days," Joonghyuk says. "Lee Seolhwa says it's normal. Your brain is—" He stops. Dokja doesn't need the medical explanation, he's the one who lived through it.
He's also the one who would make a joke right now, if he could. Something dry and self-deprecating and foolish, something that would make Joonghyuk want to throw something at his head. The absence of that—the silence where the joke should be—is somehow louder than the machines.
Kim Dokja's eyes are still on him. His breathing is faster now, his chest rising and falling under the blanket, and Joonghyuk can see the exhaustion settling in already. The effort of being awake is costing him greatly.
He should let him rest. He knows he should let him rest.
But Dokja is looking at him. He's looking at him, and the time is frozen between them.
"Han Sooyoung came," Joonghyuk says eventually. "She said to tell you something terrible. She said you'd know what it means."
Something flickers across Dokja's face. Not quite a smile—he doesn't have the muscles for that yet, maybe, or the energy—but something close. Something that might have been a smile in another life.
His eyes close.
Yoo Joonghyuk watches his face relax, his breathing slow, his hand go limp on the blanket. The moment is over, Dokja is gone again, somewhere Joonghyuk can't follow.
But he was here. For a few minutes, he was here. That's more than yesterday. That's more than last week.
Yoo Joonghyuk leans back in the chair. The creak of it is familiar by now. He should fix it someday, but right now he can't be bothered. The ache in his neck is still there, the exhaustion sitting heavy behind his eyes. He doesn't move to fix any of it.
He picks the book up off the floor and opens it to the place he wasn't reading, staring at the page without seeing it. That's fine. He's not really reading anyway. He's waiting.
He's always waiting. He's not sure for what.
Han Sooyoung comes during the day this time.
Joonghyuk hears her before he sees her—the familiar footsteps in the hallway, the hesitation before the door. She doesn't burst in like Jihye or the kids. She doesn't knock softly like Yoo Sangah does. She stands outside for a moment, and Joonghyuk wonders what she's doing. Gathering herself, maybe, or just waiting to see if he's awake.
She finally pushes the door open and peeks in.
Dokja is asleep. He's been asleep since this morning, since his eyes opened and he looked at Joonghyuk like he was trying to remember something. The IV bag is almost empty. The oxygen concentrator hums.
Sooyoung stops in the doorway and her eyes go to the bed first, to Dokja's face, his closed eyes, his hand on the blanket. Then they go to Joonghyuk.
"He was awake this morning," Joonghyuk says.
She doesn't move. "Was he—"
"For a few minutes. He opened his eyes. Looked at me."
She crosses the room slowly, like she's afraid of breaking something. She pulls her own chair—the chair she'd claimed as hers—to the other side of the bed and sits down. Her hands are in her jacket pockets and her shoulders are up to her ears.
Joonghyuk watches her look at Kim Dokja's face, the way her eyes move across his features, cataloguing. The same way he does, probably. Looking for changes, looking for proof that he's still there.
"Did he say anything?" she asks.
"No. He tried."
She nods, her jaw is tight. "He'll get there."
It's not a question, but Joonghyuk answers anyway. "He will."
They sit in silence for a while. The machines hum. Dokja's chest rises and falls. Sooyoung's hands stay in her pockets, but Joonghyuk knows she's picking at her fingers until they go raw.
"You should sleep," she murmurs after some time. "You look like shit, really."
"I'm fine."
"You're not. You haven't slept in—" She stops and makes an accusing face. "When did you last sleep?"
He doesn't answer. The chair. The room next door with the bed he's used maybe two times since Dokja opened his eyes. He doesn't need to tell her that, she already knows.
She makes a sound that might be frustration or might be something else. "I'll stay, go sleep."
Yoo Joonghyuk looks at her. Her face is set, her expression stubborn, and he recognizes it. She's not going to leave. She's been waiting too. She's been coming alone at night, sitting in this chair, watching Kim Dokja's face. And Joonghyuk always lets her have her turn.
He stands up. The chair scrapes against the floor, and Sooyoung's eyes flick to the bed, checking to see if Dokja stirred. He didn't.
"I'll be in the hall," Joonghyuk says. "Thirty minutes."
"Joonghyuk." Her voice is flat. "Bed. Use it."
"I'm not leaving."
"I'm not asking you to leave. I'm asking you to go twenty feet. For an hour." She gestures at herself, at the chair she's settled into. "I'm here. I'll stay. I'll wake you if anything changes."
He hates to admit it, but she's right. The chair and the hallway couch are starting to feel permanent. The ache in his back is starting to feel like something he'll carry forever.
"An hour," Joonghyuk says.
"Take two."
"I'll be back in an hour."
She doesn't argue, already pulling her hands out of her pockets. Then she clicks her tongue at the bloody fingers and wipes them on her jacket unceremoniously. Joonghyuk watches her reach out and touch Dokja's hand—carefully, just for a second, the same way she did before. This time, she doesn't pull back as quickly.
Joonghyuk leaves the door open a crack.
The hospital room next door that he unofficially occupies is cold. He doesn't keep the heat on—there's no point, he's never in here. The bed is made with the same hospital sheets as Kim Dokja's, the blankets folded at the foot. A duffel bag in the corner with his clothes. A towel hanging over the chair. A notebook on the nightstand, empty.
He sits on the edge of the bed. The mattress is stiff, the way hospital beds always are. He lies down and sighs. The ceiling is the same as the one in Dokja's room. Same cracks, same water stain in the corner mirroring the one in Dokja's. Same pale grey light through the window.
He closes his eyes.
But he doesn't sleep just yet. He lies there and listens to the building around him. He can hear the distant sound of someone walking through the hallways somewhere and the hum of the ventilation system. If he listens hard enough, he can hear the machines and Han Sooyoung's voice, low and quiet, saying something he can't make out.
He doesn't need to hear the words, they're not for him.
He lets himself rest.
***
The speech therapist arrives at 10 AM.
Yoo Joonghyuk has been in the chair since before sunrise. The coffee on the windowsill is fresh this time—he made it an hour ago, drank half, let the rest go cold. The book is open on his knee but he closed it when he heard footsteps in the hallway.
He doesn't recognize her. She's young—younger than Seolhwa, younger than most of the people who come through these halls. New generation, probably. Her name tag says Kang Soojin, Speech-Language Pathology. She carries a bag over her shoulder and a tablet under her arm, and she pauses in the doorway to look at the room the way all of them do: the machines first, then the bed, then the man in the chair.
"You must be Yoo Joonghyuk-ssi," she says. Her voice is calm, professional. "I'm Kang Soojin. I'll be working with Kim Dokja-ssi."
Joonghyuk nods. He doesn't stand, he doesn't leave. He doesn't know if she expects him to, but he doesn't care.
She doesn't ask him to. She sets her bag on the rolling table by the window, pulls the curtain a little more open to let the grey light in, and turns to the bed.
Dokja is asleep. He's been asleep since yesterday evening, when his eyes stayed open for a few minutes and then closed again. Seolhwa said that was good. Progress. Joonghyuk is trying to believe her.
Kang Soojin pulls a penlight from her bag and clicks it on. She leans over the bed, her movements slow, deliberate. "Kim Dokja-ssi. I'm going to need you to wake up for a few minutes."
She waits. Joonghyuk watches her wait—the same way Seolhwa waits, the same way he's learned to wait. She just holds the light steady and watches his face.
After a long moment, his eyelids move.
Not opening, just shifting. The same thing he does for Seolhwa, the same thing he does when he's trying to surface and can't quite make it.
Kang Soojin doesn't push. She clicks the penlight off and makes a note on her tablet. "Does he respond to auditory stimuli consistently?"
"No," Joonghyuk says. "Sometimes. Not reliably."
She nods. She moves through a series of checks—shining the light to see if his eyes track, making a soft sound to see if he turns toward it, touching his cheek to see if he startles. He doesn't. His eyes stay closed, his face slack, his hand limp on the blanket.
Joonghyuk watches her work and doesn't say anything. He's watched Seolhwa do this enough times to know what she's looking for and what she's not finding.
She makes more notes. Her face doesn't change—she's professional and thorough, the same way Lee Seolhwa is. When she's done, she pulls a small device from her bag that looks like a tablet mounted on a flexible arm.
"We'll start with this," she says, positioning the device so the screen faces Dokja's side of the bed. "It's an eye-gaze communication system. He's not ready to use it yet—the cognitive load is too high—but we want him to start seeing it. Familiarity. When he's ready, it'll be there."
She turns the screen on. It glows soft blue, with a simple grid of images appearing across it. Common words, common needs. Water. Food. Pain. Yes. No.
Joonghyuk looks at the screen, at the images lined up like tools waiting to be used. He thinks about Dokja's hands, the way his fingers curl and uncurl. The way his eyes track across the ceiling, the way he tries to speak and nothing comes out.
"When he's ready," Kang Soojin says, "he'll look at the screen and focus on an image. That's how he'll start to communicate."
If he's ready, Joonghyuk thinks. He doesn't say it.
She packs her bag and makes a final note on her tablet. "I'll come back twice a week. Even if he doesn't respond, it's important that we keep the system in front of him. Familiarity is the first step."
Joonghyuk nods.
She pauses at the door. "You're his primary caregiver?"
Joonghyuk is silent for a bit, jaw working. He didn't think of it like that before.
"...Yes."
She looks at him for a moment—at the chair, at the book on his knee, at the cold coffee standing out of his reach. "This is going to take a long time. The communication piece, I mean. And even when he starts to respond, it's not going to be fast. He's going to get frustrated. You're going to get frustrated. That's normal."
She says it the same way Seolhwa does. Maybe they train for that. They definitely do.
"I know," Joonghyuk says.
She nods and leaves.
The door closes. The screen on the eye-gaze device is still on, glowing soft blue in the grey light. Joonghyuk watches it for a moment and then he looks at Kim Dokja's face.
Still asleep, still quiet. His hand on the blanket, fingers curled loosely.
Joonghyuk doesn't move the screen and doesn't turn it off. He leaves it where Kang Soojin positioned it, facing the bed, waiting.
He picks up the book. He doesn't open it. He just holds it, his thumb stroking the old yellowed cover, and watches the soft blue light play across Dokja's face.
Somewhere down the hall, a cart wheels past. The squeak of it is high and uneven—one bad wheel, circling back on itself with every rotation. Someone laughs, distant. A woman's voice, then a man's, then nothing. The world outside this room is still moving. Joonghyuk registers it the way he registers the hum of the machines: as background, as something that doesn't concern him. His thumb finds the edge of the book's cover and picks at it, making a small piece of the laminate peel away. He looks at it between his fingers and doesn't remember starting.
Familiarity, she said. The first step.
He's good at waiting.
***
The industrial complex kitchen is relatively modern—has been for years, since the complex settled in Seoul and the demon realm tech was replaced with something that actually works. Induction stoves, stainless steel counters, a walk-in refrigerator that doesn't leak coolant onto the floor. It's the kind of kitchen you'd find in a hospital, which is essentially what part of the complex has become.
Most days it's empty. The staff who remain use the smaller kitchen on the ground floor, closer to the wards. But Joonghyuk comes here when he needs to move, when the chair starts to feel like something that's growing into his bones.
He cooks without thinking about it.
The motions are familiar. Knife in hand, vegetables on the board, the rhythm of slicing that doesn't require his brain to be present. His body knows this. His body has known this for longer than he can remember.
He's making doenjang jjigae today. He doesn't know why he picked it. He opened the refrigerator, looked at the ingredients, and his hands started moving. The anchovies for the stock are already simmering, the potatoes are cut into even cubes, and the tofu is draining on a paper towel.
He doesn't think about Kim Dokja when he cooks.
That's not true. He thinks about him constantly, it's not a choice. But when he's standing at the stove, when the steam rises and the smell fills the kitchen, the thinking becomes something else. Less sharp, maybe.
He adds the gochujang. The color deepens, red and rich. He tastes it—needs more garlic. He minces three cloves. The smell sticks to his fingers—he'll still smell it hours from now, in the chair, no matter how many times he washes his hands. He knows this, he does it anyway. The garlic goes into the pot. He stirs and tastes it. Better. He stirs again and the spoon clinks against the side of the pot, a small sharp sound that doesn't echo. The kitchen is too big for one person.
The kitchen is quiet, there's no one else here at this hour—the morning shift doesn't start for another two. The complex is asleep, or as close to asleep as a place like this ever gets.
Joonghyuk looks at the pot. It's too much. It's always too much. He made enough for ten people, and there are three people in the complex who might eat it, and none of them will be awake for hours.
But he doesn't care. That's not why he does this.
He sets the pot to simmer and starts on the rice.
The training ground is in the basement of the east wing, repurposed from something else—he doesn't remember what. The equipment is old and simple, but it works. A punching bag. Weights. Mats that been patched so many times it's more tape than fabric.
Joonghyuk wraps his hands. The tape is old, the fabric fraying at the edges. He should get new tape. He doesn't.
He starts with the bag.
The first hit is always the hardest. Not physically—his body knows what to do, his fists know where to land. But there's a moment, always, when his mind catches up with his hands. When he thinks about what he's doing, why he's here, who he's not with.
He hits again. And again. The bag swings, chains rattling against the ceiling. His knuckles press into the worn leather and the impact travels up his arms, into his shoulders, a familiar ache that settles into his bones like an old friend.
He doesn't think about Kim Dokja when he's here, almost. That's the point. Here, there's only the bag, the rhythm, and the burn in his muscles. His mind goes quiet. The noise in his head—the waiting, the watching, the counting of minutes—fades to something he can ignore.
He hits harder.
The bag swings wide. He catches it with his forearm and steadies it. The impact jars something loose in his shoulder, and it's the kind of thing he'd ice if he cared. He resets his stance. The overhead light buzzes, flickers once, then stops. He's been here long enough to know that flicker. It happens every time someone uses the microwave in the archives two floors up. He knows this, yes, but he doesn't know why he remembers this. His breathing is loud in the empty room, sweat drips down his back. His hands are starting to ache through the tape.
He should stop. He doesn't.
He thinks about the chair. The creak it makes when he leans back. The way the light changes through the window, grey to darker grey, day after day. The way Dokja's hand lies on the blanket, fingers curled no more than naturally, not moving, not reaching.
He hits until his arms shake. Until his knuckles are raw under the tape. Until he can't tell if the ache in his chest is from exertion or something else.
He stops.
The bag sways, slowly, settling back into place. Joonghyuk stands there for a moment, breathing hard and irregular, his hands hanging at his sides. The tape is damp with sweat and his knuckles are red through the fabric.
He should unwrap and ice them. There's a first aid kit in the corner, the same one he's been using for years. He knows where it is. He doesn't move.
He thinks about the kitchen. The pot of jjigae, still on the stove, waiting. He'll bring some to Han Sooyoung later, maybe. Leave the rest in the communal fridge. Someone will eat it. Someone always does.
He starts unwrapping his hands and the tape peels away from his skin, leaving red marks where it was too tight. His knuckles are bruised, the skin broken in one place. He looks at it for a moment—the blood welling up, slow and dark—and then he walks to the first aid kit.
The hallway is quiet when he comes back.
He's showered and changed. The ache in his hands has settled to a dull throb, something he can easily ignore. He left the jjigae in the communal fridge with a note that said nothing, because he doesn't know what to say. He doesn't do it for them anyway.
Han Sooyoung is in her chair when he opens the door.
She looks up when he comes in. Her eyes go to his hands first—the bandage wrapped around his knuckles, the way he's holding them loose at his sides—and something flickers across her face. She doesn't say anything.
"How long was I gone?" Joonghyuk asks.
"Couple hours." She turns back to the bed. "He hasn't moved. Same as this morning."
Yoo Joonghyuk looks at the bed. Dokja is still asleep, his face slack, his hand on the blanket. The eye-gaze screen is still on, soft blue light casting shadows across his pale cheek. He hasn't looked at it. Of course he hasn't.
Sooyoung stands. She stretches, her back popping audibly, and Joonghyuk watches her work out the stiffness in her shoulders. She's been here longer than she said she would, but he doesn't call her on it.
"There's jjigae," he says. "Made too much."
She raises an eyebrow. "You're on it again."
"Mm.”
She looks at him for a moment—at his hands, at the chair, at the hospital bed with a breathing body in it—and something in her expression shifts. Not quite soft, something else.
"I'll take some," she says. "When I leave." She pauses at the door. "You should eat too, you know. You're not going to be any good to him if you starve."
She's gone before he can answer. She does it often.
Yoo Joonghyuk walks to the chair and sits down. The creak of it is familiar. His hands are sore, his shoulders tight, his body heavy with the weight of the day. He looks at the bed. Kim Dokja's chest rises and falls. The screen glows blue. The coffee is cold and undrinkable even if he wanted to drink it.
He doesn't get up. He doesn't move. He just sits, and watches, and waits.
The way he always does.
The coffee on the windowsill is cold for hours. He could get up and make more, but he doesn't want to. His neck hurts. The bandage on his hand is crooked. He looks at Dokja's face, the soft blue light painting his cheek, and thinks: I haven't eaten today. He can't remember if that's true.
He stays in the chair.