Chapter Text
The telegram arrived without Yoo Joonghyuk.
Kim Dokja knew this before he even opened the door.
Not because anyone had written ahead. Some news announced itself long before it was spoken.
It was simply because there were sounds that belonged to ordinary visitors.
The impatient knock of Mrs. Shin from next door, asking for sugar. Children who forget their manners halfway through making themselves known. Han Sooyoung pounding on the door with enough force to rattle the door, never willing to wait for someone to answer when she had already decided to let herself in.
Joonghyuk had never knocked. The spare key had lived in his pocket for so long that Dokja could no longer remember which one had suggested it. Perhaps neither had. When they first moved into their home, it had seemed practical to have two keys. One for each of them.
Afterwards, they never thought about it again.
If Joonghyuk came home, there would be the soft scrape of the key finding the lock, followed by the quiet click of the latch. His boots would pause briefly on the threshold while he slipped them off, always placing them neatly beside the door despite returning caked in mud more often than not.
Their home had learned those sounds. So had Dokja.
This wasn't one of them.
The house had settled into its usual evening quiet. Steam gathered beneath the lid of the kettle, escaping in thin breaths that clouded the small kitchen before fading into the rafters overhead. Damp firewood smouldered beneath the stove, its earthy scent woven into the paper walls and worn floorboards until the house itself seemed to breathe it. Somewhere in the adjoining room, the clock measured the passing minutes with patient ticks.
Then from beyond the front step, came the faint scrape of leather against old wood.
It stopped almost as soon as it began. A soft shift of weight. Someone standing perfectly still. Then nothing. Whoever had come lingered outside the door, suspended in a hesitation that felt strangely deliberate.
Then—three soft raps against the door. A pause. Then one more. Neither hurried nor uncertain. Simply practiced.
Dokja stared at the door, standing motionless in the middle of the kitchen. The kettle hissed louder. He should've taken it off the stove. Instead, Dokja drew the sleeves of his cardigan closer around himself, suppressing another cough into the crook of his arm. The medicine on the counter remained untouched.
He wiped his hand on the dish towel hung over his shoulder and crossed the room. Halfway there he stopped. His eyes drifted towards the cedar coat rack beside the entrance. It bowed slightly beneath the weight of winter coats it had carried for years.
Joonghyuk's coat still hung where he'd left it before his enlistment, the dark wool untouched by the spring that had come and gone without him. A single button clung to the cuff by a loose thread.
Once, he had gathered a needle and thread with every intention of mending the loose button before winter. Joonghyuk had looked up from the newspaper just long enough to tell him not to bother. It was only a button. Dokja had answered that it would fall off if he left it alone.
Winter had passed. And another season after it. The thread remained where it was, too stubborn to give way, too frail to hold. Dokja never packed the coat away. He had never needed to.
The knock did not come again. Whoever stood outside knew there was no urgency anymore.
Dokja's hand rested against the brass doorknob. The metal felt cool beneath his palm, dulled where countless hands had polished it smooth. He did not open it immediately. The kettle began to whistle behind him.
At last he eased the door open, the hinges giving a quiet, familiar creak.
A young soldier stood on the porch. He looked scarcely older than Joonghyuk had been before he enlisted.
Rain beaded along the brim of his cap pressed against his chest, held so tightly that his knuckles turned pale. The water darkened the shoulders of his uniform, darkening the coarse wool. Mud had settled into the seams of his boots from roads that had seen too many departures and far too little returns. His face was almost boyish, and whatever years the uniform tried to lend him had not yet reached his eyes.
For one impossible moment, the boy became every version of Joonghyuk that had existed before the uniform. Dokja wondered if this was what Joonghyuk had looked like to other people all along. Not a soldier, only someone's son, dressed in a uniform too large for the life it demanded of him.
A cream coloured telegram was pinched carefully between his fingers.
There was nothing remarkable about him save for the way he held the envelope and the quiet, practiced look on his face — as though he had learned there was no gentle way to interrupt another person's life.
For a moment neither of them spoke. The boy drew a slow breath through his nose. His eyes dropped to the telegram, checking the words already committed to memory before looking back up. He shifted his weight once, then stood perfectly still again, as if stillness might somehow soften what he had come to deliver.
"Mr. Kim Dokja."
It wasn't a question.
"Seargent Yoo Joonghyuk's unit came under heavy enemy attack while stationed at a forward position. Surviving personnel were ordered to withdraw before all members of the unit could be accounted for. Continued military operations have prevented search and recovery parties from re-entering the area. Sergeant Yoo Joonghyuk is currently listed as missing in action."
The boy folded the telegram again, before bowing and holding it to Dokja.
"I'm to deliver this into your care."
Dokja merely glanced at the telegram. The boy's hand retreated.
Behind him the kettle began to scream in the little house. And Dokja let it scream.
The boy drew a measured breath before reopening the telegram and continuing.
"Search efforts will resume as operational conditions permit, and…"
The words fell one after the other with practiced certainty. They left no room for questions, and somehow, no answers.
Dokja looked at the boy. The boy's mouth continued to move. More explanations followed.
Dates. Locations. More terms that Dokja had never heard before and knew he wouldn't remember. They reached him through a thick haze, muffled and distant, slipping away as soon as he heard them.
The words reached the space between them and vanished. Dokja caught hold of none of them.
Water dripped from the edges of the boy's uniform. One drop struck the porch. Then another. Dokja found himself counting without deciding to. By the sixth, the explanation moved on. By the ninth, he realised he had not understood a single word.
At any moment, Joonghyuk could push open the door with the spare key tucked into his pocket. He would grumble about the rain and shrug off his coat, his eyes finding Dokja before they settled on anything else. His expression never changed much but it never had to.
Joonghyuk rarely said much when he came home. There was never any need. There was the scrape of boots left neatly by the door. The quiet thud of his coat finding its hook. The way his shoulders eased, almost imperceptibly, once he stepped inside.
Dokja had learned those small movements long before he realised he had been paying attention.
Then Yoo Joonghyuk would chide him for coughing again. Dokja would wave him off with the same tired excuse and tell him it's nothing. Joonghyuk would never believe him. And after a beat, he would simply say the two words that had become the most ordinary part of their evenings.
"I'm home."
Any moment now.
The boy fell silent. For the first time since speaking, his eyes left the paper and settled on Dokja. His eyes studied Dokja's face for a moment, searching for something. Shock, grief, or perhaps even relief. Whatever he had expected to find never came. Dokja's expression kept still, fixed somewhere beyond the telegram in the boy's hands.
Only then did he ask,
"Are you a relative of Sergeant Yoo?"
The question lingered between them.
Dokja opened his mouth. There wasn't an answer that felt complete.
No word for the man who kept a spare key because it was easier than knocking. No title for years of shared meals, late nights, and quiet routines that had become so familiar neither of them had thought to question them.
"…No."
The answer came more easily than expected. It wasn't a lie. It just wasn't the whole truth. The only truth the world would ever make room for.
The boy gave a small nod, unsurprised. He reached into his satchel and withdrew another folded document. Dokja accepted it along with the telegram with steadier hands than he expected.
Family.
Dokja looked down at the documents resting in his hands. To the army, he was nothing more than the address written beneath Emergency Contact.
Nothing. More.
They didn't know Joonghyuk drank his tea before it had time to cool, no matter how many time he burnt his tongue. They didn't know he left his boots by the door no matter how many times Dokja complained. They didn't know the medicine bottle was always moved a little closer to Dokja's place at the table before anyone sat down. Or that every evening he asked the same question.
"Did you take it?"
This was nowhere in the form of those things.
"I… am required to tell you there's still hope while a solider is listed as missing."
The sentence sounded unfamiliar in his mouth, as though it had not been printed on the page.
"I hope he's among those who come back."
The boy lowered his eyes before speaking the final word. Dokja nodded once, saying nothing. He wasn't sure whether he was acknowledging the words or dismissing them.
The boy bowed. He turned and walked back down the narrow street, the sound of his boots vanishing into the evening rain until there was nothing left but the thrumming of raindrops against the rooftops.
Dokja looked down at the telegram. Rain had begun to soak through the envelope where it remained unopened in his hands.
Only when the sharp smell of burnt metal reached him did he remember the kettle.
He crossed the kitchen with measured steps, one hand resting briefly against the wall when another cough caught in his chest. By the time it eased the whistle had become a dry, strained cry.
Dokja lifted it from the stove, its handle almost too hot to touch, and placed it carefully beside the sink. For a long while, he merely stood there.
"You'll complain about this," he murmured. Whether he meant the burnt kettle, the forgotten medicine, or the cough tightening itself in his chest, even Dokja wasn't sure.
The words disappeared into the empty house. No one answered.
Outside, the rain continued with quiet persistence, washing the boy's footprints from the narrow street one by one. On the kitchen table, the unopened telegram laid beside the untouched medicine.
Neither of them moved.