Work Text:
Yoo Joonghyuk had never been interested in romantic relationships. Growing up, people felt the need to persistently claim that he would feel the need for romantic companionship once he was older, but that need never came. Instead he lived his life focusing on his career, hobbies, friends, and family.
Now, at the ripe old age of ninety-seven, after living a full-filled and enriching life, he unwillingly entered an assisted care facility for the old. He was still fit and spry and good at getting around better than a lot of people, but his littler sister Mia, who was on the way to being an old lady herself, told him: “If I, my husband, or your nephew find you dead in your home because you were being stubborn, then I will make sure you never have a proper funeral and burial. You will never know peace in the after life!”
So, not wanting his ashes desecrated, he decided to heed his sisters wishes and move into a care home. It was a boring place with people younger than him but worse off in mind and body. Despite the staffs attempts to help him make friends, he chose to be on his own, either playing video games or exercising. He was known as the scary old man who both the residents and staff avoided.
He was content with his life in the care facility until a shriveled old man in a wheelchair chair came through the door one day. He was small and slight in form and very old and wrinkly and about as unattractive as an old person could be. The man clearly hadn’t take off himself during his life. But despite all that, Joonghyuk—much to everyone’s surprise—was smitten. Since the man named Kim Dokja didn’t have any friends or family as he preferred to be left alone to read, Joonghyuk claimed him as his friend and companion—even when Dokja rebuked Joonghyuk’s advances of companionship.
At first the staff was certain that the two old men despised each other, with the way they traded insults, barbs, and banter back and forth. But as the staff soon noticed, the two men did literally everything together, even when they were doing nothing, they still remained side by side.
Joonghyuk could honestly say that he had lived a good and contented life, but after meeting Kim Dokja, he could no longer say that the life he had lived had been a happy one. The last year he had spent with Kim Dokja had been the happiest he had ever felt, with this single year being equivalent to all the happiness he had ever felt in his ninety-seven years of life prior to meeting Kim Dokja.
Of course, all good things must come to and end.
Kim Dokja’s health had been steadily declining over the last month. He hadn’t been in good condition when Joonghyuk had met him for the first time and he was in even worse condition now. His time of death was close and all Joonghyuk could do was sit in despair by the man’s side waiting for the moment his dearest friend would take his last breath.
Kim Dokja had been unconscious for the past three days but Joonghyuk still refused to leave his side. He stared at his friend’s ugly wrinkled squid like face for so long that beneath the wrinkles and spots he could see the faint form of youth and what his face must have looked liked before old age. Joonghyuk thinks he must have been quite the pretty man. As he continued stare and try to piece together what Kim Dokja had looked like in his younger years, he felt a strange tingling in his head— then a flood of memories, so many of them, in fact, that he spent the better part of five hours staring into space trying to process them all.
How cruel to remember his past lives now after all this time. If he had remembered when he was younger, he could have found Kim Dokja and shared a whole life with him. One measly year wasn’t enough. He wasn’t ready to see his love die again, not so soon after meeting him. He wished he hadn’t remember at all.
“I wish I had met you sooner.” Joonghyuk softly lamented.
To his surprise a quiet voice, husky and labored, responded back. “Next time Joonghyuk-ah.”
Joonghyuk turned quickly to look at the previously unconscious man’s face. He gazed into starry eyes that were rapidly losing their light, and returned Kim Dokja’s faint smile with one of his own dashing smiles. “Next time.” He said, his words searing like an oath.
Kim Dokja tried to laugh but failed, the time between his breaths becoming uncomfortably wide. His eyes crinkled in mirth one last time as he said his final words and took his last breath, “Handsome bastard.”
———————Universe 333————————
An unruly kid with a mean face and wild fluffy black hair approached another small child on the preschool playground. The small child, slight in frame with an adorable face, had been quietly playing in the sand box when he was approached by the unruly black haired boy.
The small child known as Kim Dokja, was preparing to be bullied, as every kid seemed to want to bully him, but was taken by surprise when the black haired boy claimed:
“I’m Yoo Joonghyuk and you’re mine.”
“O-k?” Kim Dokja passively agreed, just going along with the kids declaration.
The kid seemed satisfied with Dokja’s confused affirmation, and plopped down bedside him in the sand box.
Little Kim Dokja had no clue at the time that Joonghyuk took his claim very seriously and from that point on would always be by Dokja’s side because ‘he was Joonghyuk’s’. Which is how they remained their whole lives, all the way into old age. At the age of ninety, going on their seventy-first year of marriage, they were both living a happy retired life together.
They sat on their porch one spring morning, drinking herbal tea while watching the sunrise. Dokja cooled his tea with his breath before telling Joonghyuk, “Thank you for finding me.”
Joonghyuk turned towards Dokja with a raised eyebrow, wondering what brought the smaller man to say such peculiar words. Dokja, who could read his husband’s verbal cues like a book, elaborated. “I had a strange dream—I can’t quite remember what it was, but I felt that I needed to tell you that.”
Joonghyuk wrapped his arm around Dokja’s shoulder and pulled him closer. “I will always find you.”