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Kim Dokja is up to something.
He isn’t good at hiding it.
For someone who so frequently manages to slip out of Yoo Joonghyuk’s grasp, he would think that Kim Dokja would at least be a good liar. But he’s terrible at it. He’s terrible, and yet, he somehow manages to get away with all his cons regardless.
It’s been a week of him acting more and more shifty. He sleeps less and less, is obsessed with his phone, and too often Yoo Joonghyuk hears him discussing numbers with Han Sooyoung.
Not strategy.
Not anything that makes sense.
Just literal numbers.
Sixty seven, Kim Dokja will declare, rushing over to her.
I couldn’t fucking care less, Han Sooyoung will say, her voice dead.
Fine, then sixty eight.
Please get help.
Kim Dokja will disappear just as quickly, but then he’ll be back with a new number. This process would go on until Han Sooyoung smacked him in the head with the nearest object. That would always keep him quiet for a while.
The most frustrating thing is—no one else seems to find his behaviour odd.
It’s like the company has finally accepted that their leader has gone nuts and that there’s nothing they can do about it. Yoo Joonghyuk will find Kim Dokja flat on the ground, mumbling numbers like he’s truly gone insane, and Shin Yoosung will walk in cheerfully and ask if either of them wants any fruit.
Yoo Joonghyuk is getting dangerously close to just stabbing someone to get the story out of them.
He doesn’t say anything to the rest of the company about it, but perhaps they can feel his irritation spiking, because Jung Heewon takes him aside one day when he’s glaring at Kim Dokja with his fingers twitching dangerously over his sword.
“He isn’t going to kill himself,” she says firmly, eyeing his sword warily.
Yoo Joonghyuk snorts.
“I can swear it,” she insists. “He’s obsessing over… uhh… something else. Something completely harmless. I can swear it.”
If anything, that makes it even more suspicious.
What could Kim Dokja be so worried about, so much so that he’s losing sleep and losing focus on the scenarios—and yet, the rest of the company can call it something completely harmless?
Jung Heewon wouldn’t lie about something like this. She’s almost as violent about Kim Dokja’s lack of self preservation as Yoo Joonghyuk is himself.
“What is he obsessed with?” he asks, when it doesn’t seem like she’s going to give him an answer.
“I can’t tell you,” she says easily. “But you’ll figure it out soon.”
That raises even more questions.
Uriel sends him too many notifications in rapid succession, and Yoo Joonghyuk doesn’t spare them a glance.
/
In the middle of the night Yoo Joonghyuk’s door slams open.
It’s Kim Dokja, staring at him seriously.
“What’s wrong?” Yoo Joonghyuk asks instantly, afraid that a scenario had started while they were unaware.
“What about fifty?” Kim Dokja asks instead.
“Fifty what.”
Kim Dokja stares at him a bit longer.
Then he mumbles under his breath and leaves.
Yoo Joonghyuk has never wanted to strangle him more.
/
It only gets worse.
He finds Kim Dokja too often in the kitchen, staring mournfully at pots and pans as if they’re the sole cause of all of his misfortune. He finds him seated on the floor by his bed, with papers spread across in front of him, muttering numbers furiously. He finds him zoned out, staring at Yoo Joonghyuk in some kind of deep dilemma and oblivious to the monster sneaking up behind him.
Yoo Joonghyuk stabs the monster easily and then grabs Kim Dokja by the collar for good measure.
“What’s wrong with you?” he snaps.
“Oh,” Kim Dokja says, like an idiot. “I didn’t see that.”
Yoo Joonghyuk shakes him. Kim Dokja dangles in the air, still not looking particularly perturbed.
“What’s gotten into you?” Yoo Joonghyuk pushes. “What’s making you so useless?”
Kim Dokja winces. “That’s a little rude.”
“You nearly died.”
“I was distracted, you asshole.”
“By what.”
“Multiplication.”
“What.”
“I’m not that good at multiplication!” Kim Dokja almost shouts, trying to escape Yoo Joonghyuk’s grasp. “I wasn’t great at math, okay?”
“Why are you doing math when there’s a monster behind you?”
“I didn’t know it was there!”
“Why are you doing math at all?”
“Because Sangah-ssi said I have to work on it myself!”
No part of this situation makes sense to Yoo Joonghyuk, so he solves it by dropping Kim Dokja to the floor. The man lands unceremoniously with a pained ow, glaring up at Yoo Joonghyuk.
“Get yourself together,” Yoo Joonghyuk snaps, “before you get yourself killed.”
He spares a glance to the side, where Yoo Sangah is watching them. She catches his eye and smiles, her expression teasing.
Yoo Joonghyuk’s mood darkens.
/
“It gets worse,” Kim Dokja says, slamming the door open.
“How so,” Han Sooyoung asks, like she wishes she were anywhere else on Earth.
“I left out the Dark Stratum.”
“Hey, Kim Dokja.”
“What.”
“If you don’t shut up I’ll drive this lollipop through your skull.”
/
Surprisingly—unsurprisingly? It’s Lee Gilyoung who finally tears apart the sham of a facade.
“Hey, sooty bastard.”
Yoo Joonghyuk doesn’t look up. He stays seated, cleaning his sword, as if the child hadn’t spoken at all.
“Hey!”
Yoo Joonghyuk still doesn’t look up.
“You wanted to know why hyung is so distracted, right?”
That gets him a raised eyebrow.
Lee Gilyoung has his arms crossed, glaring furiously at Yoo Joonghyuk as if he really wishes he was dead. Yoo Joonghyuk stares back, less impressed by this kid every moment.
“If I tell you,” Lee Gilyoung says, “You have to promise to be nice to him.”
It’s such an absurd request that Yoo Joonghyuk blinks in shock.
“I have to what?”
“Hyung is going crazy,” Lee Gilyoung says patiently, matter of fact, as if it’s something he’d seen coming all along. “But he’s also very determined to cook for you, and he doesn’t know how to do it when you won’t touch his food. So you have to be nice to him.”
Yoo Joonghyuk really doesn’t understand this situation.
What even.
“Why is he determined to cook for me?” Yoo Joonghyuk asks, more baffled than irritated.
Lee Gilyoung looks at him like he’s the crazy one.
“Isn’t your birthday coming up?” he asks.
…oh.
Oh.
That does explain his obsession with the kitchen.
That fool.
“And the counting?” Yoo Joonghyuk asks gruffly.
Lee Gilyoung looks a little embarrassed.
“He’s trying to figure out how old you are,” he says. “He doesn’t know how many candles to put on the cake.”
/
In Lee Gilyoung’s defense, he had told Yoo Joonghyuk to not tell anyone what he’d told him.
Unfortunately for him, Yoo Joonghyuk couldn’t care less.
“Kim Dokja.”
“Hm?”
Kim Dokja is sprawled across the couch, scrolling furiously on his phone. He doesn’t look up at Yoo Joonghyuk.
“Stop doing unnecessary things.”
Kim Dokja’s eyebrow twitches.
“What did I do this time,” he mutters, clicking the side of his phone so his screen turns off.
“I won’t eat anything you make.”
Kim Dokja’s face does a weird spasm. It settles into an even more annoyed look.
“Bastard. Who told you that?”
“I don’t eat food made by others.”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever.”
He turns back to his phone, still annoyed, but also a little—hurt.
Yoo Joonghyuk is getting too good at reading Kim Dokja’s emotions. It’s been like this ever since he’d been dragged into the library behind the Fourth Wall.
He sighs.
“I don’t celebrate my birthday,” he says quietly.
There isn’t much to celebrate, in the midst of a constant apocalypse.
“I know, I know,” Kim Dokja says.
“We haven’t celebrated anyone’s birthday.”
“I know.”
That’s also true. Several of their birthdays have passed, multiple times, and the most they do is a pat on the back, a silly song, awkward wishes and a joke that they hope they’ll all live to see the next year, which wasn’t actually a joke at all.
Kim Dokja’s own birthday had passed and he’d made no mention of it to anyone.
This fuss over Yoo Joonghyuk, it’s unnecessary.
It’s stupid.
It’s wrong.
In the middle of an apocalypse, it’s the most ridiculous thing that Kim Dokja could be focused on.
“I know,” Kim Dokja says again, quieter.
It makes even less sense, because he hadn’t put up this fuss for anyone else. Just for Yoo Joonghyuk. Kim Dokja is foolish—such a desire is bound to come from the guilt that he can’t let go of. Or something equally stupid.
He must feel that he needs to pay Yoo Joonghyuk back for something.
And Yoo Joonghyuk hates it.
How many times must he forgive this fool before he stops trying to earn it?
“So stop it,” Yoo Joonghyuk says firmly, staring him down.
Kim Dokja frowns, but he nods. He doesn’t meet Yoo Joonghyuk’s eyes.
“Okay,” he says quietly.
Yoo Joonghyuk turns away, but even as he leaves, even as he hears Kim Dokja shifting back to read more on his phone—he can’t shake off the feeling that he’s done something wrong.
/
Kim Dokja goes back to normal like clockwork.
He goes back so easily that it’s almost like the past week of chaos had been a hallucination. He’s suddenly focused, although still sleep deprived, and he doesn’t make any of the unhinged mentions of numbers that make everyone in his vicinity want to kill themselves.
He acts so normal that at one point Han Sooyoung goes up to him.
“I think you need to add another three for the time in the Demon Realm in 555,” she says.
“Okay,” Kim Dokja says, and goes back to planning the scenario.
She stares at him, and then looks up to stare at Yoo Joonghyuk, and then seems to realize she doesn’t care all that much and shrugs and walks away.
Yoo Joonghyuk can’t say he isn’t worried himself. It’s true that this is how he wanted things to be, but—the silence is strange. It’s off putting. The fact that Kim Dokja had brushed aside all of that insanity with ease because of one word from Yoo Joonghyuk feels—wrong.
It’s Yoo Sangah who actually confronts Yoo Joonghyuk about it.
“Yoo Joonghyuk-ssi,” she starts, her eyes twinkling oddly. They don’t talk much, the two of them. Their relationship is odd, since it had started with pure animosity, and now they’re both the only people who know what it’s like to be inside Kim Dokja’s head.
“What.”
“I agree that Dokja-ssi is an odd person. But you realize that he doesn’t need to have a messed up reason for everything he does, yes?”
That doesn’t sound right at all.
Kim Dokja always has a messed up reason for doing anything.
It’s the only consistent thing about him.
“We might be in the middle of the apocalypse,” Yoo Sangah says. “But it’s normal to want to celebrate the birth of the people you love.”
Yoo Joonghyuk scoffs.
But despite it, there’s a twinge in his stomach.
The people you love.
The person Kim Dokja loves the most.
“You’re his life and death companion, aren’t you?” Yoo Sangah says. “He’s trying to show you that he’s glad you exist.”
“He’s shown me that countless times,” Yoo Joonghyuk says flatly. With every time that Kim Dokja had died for him, for instance.
Yoo Sangah shakes her head. “And for once, he’s trying it in a way that doesn’t involve bodily harm,” she says, with a straight face. “It sounds like he’s learning, to me.”
She turns to leave, but the words play over and over in Yoo Joonghyuk’s head.
He’s trying to show you that he’s glad you exist.
It sounds like he’s learning, to me.
It is true that neither of them know how to show each other they care in a way that doesn’t involve heartbreak, an apocalypse, or imminent death.
But Kim Dokja was trying.
In his own foolish way, he was trying.
Yoo Joonghyuk sighs, looking back towards the Industrial Complex.
/
He finds Kim Dokja dozing off on the couch.
He’s sitting upright, his phone screen still on in his hands, shoulders slumped and head hanging as he sleeps. He looks tired, but he always looks tired, and Yoo Joonghyuk should probably let him sleep.
He’s about to leave when Kim Dokja blinks awake.
“Yoo Joonghyuk?” he asks blearily.
“I’ll eat it,” Yoo Joonghyuk says quietly.
“What?”
“If you make me something. I’ll eat it.”
There's silence.
And then—
The smile in Kim Dokja’s eyes is almost painful to see.
It’s always painful to see the simple affection in his expression when he forgets to hide it.
“Glad you came around,” he says, his tone as annoying as always but there’s no hiding the genuine happiness in his face.
Yoo Joonghyuk can barely stand to see it.
He turns away.
“You won’t regret it, Joonghyuk-ah,” Kim Dokja calls from behind him. “I promise not to poison you.”
/
Kim Dokja’s Company has done no small number of stupid things. They’ve fought tooth and nail to bring people back from the dead, they’ve killed gods at a whim, they’ve let Han Sooyoung cook their food despite knowing that it was the most dangerous thing they could ever do.
Kim Dokja’s Company has done no small number of stupid things.
But not firing Kim Dokja may have been the stupidest of them all.
“So you see,” Kim Dokja is saying, stabbing at the paper in front of him with a pencil. “You’re at least eight thousand years old.”
He looks a little crazed, eyes wild and dark bags under his eyes. Yoo Joonghyuk doesn’t think he’s slept in three days.
“Are you stupid?” Han Sooyoung asks, because someone has to. “How the fuck should we get eight thousand candles on a cake?”
Kim Dokja ignores her. He continues to scribble his calculations fervently. “Wait—I may have miscalculated. Yoo Joonghyuk, how many years did you spend in the Dark Stratum in the 81st round?”
Yoo Joonghyuk, who can not remember the 81st round for the life of him, and honestly couldn’t care less, just stares at him.
“I’ll just assume another one hundred. Let’s say an even eight thousand and one hundred years. But wait—”
“Kim Dokja.”
“—The 451st regression also doesn’t make any mention of the Dark Stratum. Did he go in that round? Or didn’t he?”
Kim Dokja grabs his smartphone again, muttering under his breath as he scrolls.
Yoo Joonghyuk wonders if he should strangle him to get him to shut up.
After Yoo Joonghyuk had spoken to him, Kim Dokja had, apparently, lost any hold he had left on reality and decided to go back to obsessively calculating how old Yoo Joonghyuk is.
“This doesn’t even make sense,” Han Sooyoung snaps. “Time doesn’t mean anything for a regressor.”
“Time means everything for a regressor,” Kim Dokja spits back, acid in his voice.
Yoo Joonghyuk, the actual regressor, wishes everyone in this room was dead.
“But this age only matters if we consider all of the regressions,” Kim Dokja continues. “What if we just consider three?”
“...”
“But then there’s the entire 41 regressions that happened before Shin Yoosung was sent back as a disaster.”
“Hey, you,” Han Sooyoung says, pointing her lollipop at Yoo Joonghyuk. “Can’t you just make up a number to shut him up?”
“No,” Kim Dokja almost shrieks, affronted. “It has to be accurate.”
“Why does it have to be accurate? Just call him an old man and be done with it!”
“He’s not old—”
“You just said he’s lived eight thousand years—”
“And you lived more than fifty, you’re also old—”
“—are you even hearing yourself?”
Yoo Joonghyuk glances away from the chaos that truly makes him want to strangle someone, and catches Yoo Sangah’s eye again.
She’s still smiling, her expression even more teasing.
Damn her.
/
It’s the night before Yoo Joonghyuk’s birthday.
Kim Dokja is still awake.
He’s been awake forever at this point. Yoo Joonghyuk is tempted to just smack him in the head with the hilt of his sword and knock him out.
He’s about to call out, and tell the man to sleep if he doesn’t want to be killed, but he pauses when he catches the hunch in Kim Dokja’s shoulders.
The man usually carries himself tall, as if trying to prove something. The only time he lets his shoulders fall is when he thinks that he’s alone.
He’s hunched up now, leaning over the kitchen counter as he stirs something furiously.
Yoo Joonghyuk lets himself look at him. Really look at him.
This foolish man, who has spent weeks trying to plan the perfect birthday for a man who may not have even been truly born.
His gaze passes over to the papers spread all over the counter. They’re filled with writing—a recipe, it looks like. Yoo Joonghyuk looks closer, and then realization hits.
“Did you—” Yoo Joonghyuk’s eyes widen.
The sprawling papers set over the counter, they’re covered in Yoo Joonghyuk’s handwriting. A recipe, written in excruciating detail, the sort that only he could have written.
But Yoo Joonghyuk hadn’t.
Kim Dokja jumps, finally noticing his presence. “Yoo Joonghyuk?”
“You—”
Kim Dokja raises a hand instantly, as if to shield his face. Yoo Joonghyuk can catch the spike of anxiety with ease.
He’s too attuned to the man’s tells by now.
“Don’t be mad,” Kim Dokja says quietly. “I just got a bit of help from the constellations.”
“You went to the Plotter?”
“No! No, he came to me.”
Yoo Joonghyuk narrows his eyes at him. “He came over to give you a recipe.”
“He did, I swear!”
“What did he ask for in return?”
Kim Dokja is quiet for a long time. “Nothing,” he says, but it isn’t the truth.
“Don’t lie to me, Kim Dokja.”
Kim Dokja doesn’t meet his eyes.
Yoo Joonghyuk is on the verge of grabbing him by the collar when he finally speaks.
“He wanted me to ask you how many candles you wanted.”
Yoo Joonghyuk stops.
Throughout the past few weeks, despite all of Kim Dokja’s terrible attempts to do math, he has never once asked Yoo Joonghyuk this question.
He’s never dared to.
And Yoo Joonghyuk knows why.
Because Kim Dokja is an idiot. And as idiots do, he gets too caught up in his own head and is too terrified to ask him the most basic of questions for fear of what his answer would be.
How old is Yoo Joonghyuk?
It’s not a real question.
The real question, the one that Kim Dokja refuses to ask him is—
How many of the long, long years that he’s been alive is he willing to call his life?
Yoo Joonghyuk, who has walked forward for so long that time means nothing to him and everything all the same. How many years of this madness of existence is he okay with considering his life, and not a torture that he’s lived through?
Eight thousand is not the answer.
But neither is twenty nine.
Yoo Joonghyuk doesn’t remember most of his life. He’s put himself together as fragmented, disjointed memories. He doesn’t remember being a child, he doesn’t remember being a teenager, he doesn’t remember if his parents had ever been real or if he’d sprung into existence as an adult. Twenty nine years of his life mean as little to him as the eight thousand that he’s left behind.
Kim Dokja is still watching him carefully, eyes darting away, like he can’t decide if he wants to hear this answer or if it will destroy him.
How many candles does Yoo Joonghyuk want?
“You always celebrated with one,” Yoo Joonghyuk says.
“Huh?”
“On my birthday. You lit one candle.”
Kim Dokja looks confused for a second, and then flushes abruptly.
Because Yoo Joonghyuk may not have his own memories, but he does have Kim Dokja’s.
He has the memories of a young boy who had, every August 3rd, scraped together his spare change to buy the fanciest cupcake he could find at the store. He’d place a single candle in it, blow it out himself, and whisper—
Happy birthday, Yoo Joonghyuk.
Every year.
No matter what happened.
No matter what dead apartment he was living in.
His own birthday meant nothing to him, but he never forgot Yoo Joonghyuk’s.
The man in front of him now, working on a recipe from their most dangerous ally and trying to make the day perfect in the middle of a fucking apocalypse—he looks to him now like the boy that Yoo Joonghyuk had seen in his memories.
Yoo Joonghyuk feels something in his chest soften.
“Well, yeah,” Kim Dokja mumbles, embarrassed. “I couldn’t fit too many candles into a cupcake.”
“Then one is fine.”
“Hey—what? You don’t have to worry about that, we can have more now—”
“Kim Dokja.”
“Yeah?”
Yoo Joonghyuk stares at him for a moment. At his earnest expression. He truly hasn’t slept in a week, desperate to get this right.
Even though neither of them know what right feels like anymore.
Nothing has felt right to Yoo Joonghyuk in thousands of years, except the idea of Kim Dokja staying with him for the rest of whatever terrible amount of time he has to keep living for.
“I haven’t celebrated my birthday in a long time,” Yoo Joonghyuk says quietly. “You were the only one who ever did.”
Kim Dokja stops. He starts to say something, cuts himself off.
“One candle is enough,” Yoo Joonghyuk says firmly. “It’s what you’ve always done for me.”
In the shattered pieces of Yoo Joonghyuk’s memories, there’s very little that he can grasp at and call a life well lived. There’s very little that he can even call a year.
But every year, Kim Dokja had placed a single candle into the cake and marked off another year that they had been there for each other.
Yoo Joonghyuk doesn’t know how long he’s been alive. He’s well past the point where he can ever find out.
But he can do this.
He can count off year, by year.
One step after the next.
“It’s another year,” he says. “That’s all.”
Kim Dokja searches his face, but then he smiles.
He’s getting worse and worse at trying to hide the affection in his eyes.
“Okay then,” he says. “One candle. For the Yoo Joonghyuk that lived this year without turning back.”
Yoo Joonghyuk nods, and takes his place by Kim Dokja’s side to help him with the cake.
“Hey, what, you aren’t supposed to help!”
“The sooner you get this done, the better it is for all of us.”
“That ruins the entire point—”
One candle, Yoo Joonghyuk thinks, for another year that they have kept each other alive.
/