Chapter Text
6:55 pm
There’s a moment, a gap, a tiny fragment of time between the start of the scenarios and the end of the last regression. In it, the scenarios do not exist. Or rather, not yet.
A few minutes, nothing more.
Each second slips away between Yoo Joonghyuk’s fingers, impossible to grasp, like water rushing past in a flowing river. There one second, gone the next.
He breathes out and then in. Each breath settles in his lungs with a quiet sense of finality. Another regression.
His eyes take in the familiar sight of the subway car, the faces of the passengers around him having almost been forgotten in the length of time it had taken since the last regression began. So many years erased in a single death.
The last turn weighs heavy on Yoo Joonghyuk’s shoulders. An invisible weight draping itself over his back, heavier than the invisible shackles Anna Croft had hung on him, heavier still than the weight of his child in his arms and the quiet words he’d whispered in the dead of night. I’ll protect you.
His jaw clenches. This time will be different.
He’ll tear down every star in the sky if he has to.
A girl laughs, clear and bright, breaking through the endless spiral of his thoughts. Her voice carries through the subway car, pitched slightly above the murmurs and rattle of cars speeding along the tracks.
“—can’t believe it—”
“…soulmates.”
Soulmates.
The word echoes in the back of his mind, the word worn soft at the edges by endless musings.
Yoo Joonghyuk’s eyes flutter close, a finger rubbing against the flesh along the inside of his wrist. He tries to imagine it, black ink scrawled in an unfamiliar font across the skin. Would the letters have flowed like water into the next in a curling cursive? Or scratched in, tightly packed together and barely legible? Or—
His jaw clenches. There’s no point dwelling on what ifs. He lets the image of ink on skin disappear.
“He really said that?” The girl giggles, shifting to rummage through her bag, one hand propping up her phone to her face. The flash of ink on skin catches Yoo Joonghyuk’s eye as the sleeve around her sleeve rides up. “—I can’t imagine anyone’s first words being—”
Yoo Joonghyuk’s fingers dig into his wrist, tight enough to bruise. The blank expanse of his wrist glares back at him. The subway car trundles along, the shriek of steel and muttered conversations blurring out her voice as he looks away. He’s heard this conversation before. There’s no point in listening to it to the end again.
“—searching for you?”
It’s almost time. The seconds are slipping away…
“…sure they’re waiting for me too…”
The subway car plunges itself into darkness, the ear piecing sound of grinding metal filling the car as it screeches to a halt. In the darkness, Yoo Joonghyuk’s eyes close, for a moment, trying in vain, to hold onto the last few seconds before—
The clock flashes to 7:00.
[The free service of planetary system 8612 has been terminated.]
[Main Scenario #1 has begun.]
Screaming, loud and high, no longer carefree and clear, a dokkeabi hovering over them like an executioner and then—
The girl’s head is gone and the only thing left is a body, swaying and then falling to the floor. If a tree falls and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
The scent of blood and iron is in the air again, thick and pervasive, impossible to ignore. Familiar, like a second skin. The Dokkaebi is laughing, the constellations are watching and the people around him are either dead or soon to be dead.
Faster, he thinks, it’s best to finish this faster.
The metal ring in his finger glints, the weight of the bomb is light yet feels impossibly heavy in his hands. He doesn’t hesitate to pull it.
A click.
Then the screams stop, the crackle of fire and ping of coins filling his wallet the only sounds to fill the vacuum of sound.
“Have you met your soulmate, Yoo Joonghyuk?” Lee Seolhwa had asked in the 0th turn. Yoo Joonghyuk remembers the conversation vaguely, far off and distant like something out of a dream but still with far more clarity than most of his memories from that turn.
It had been a simple question, unremarkable in nature, not unlike asking someone about their favourite colour. Still, it had thrown Yoo Joonghyuk off balance. He had heard people mention it in passing before, but the question itself had never been directed towards him.
“No. Why do you ask?”
“I was curious,” she went on, “About what kind of person they would be.”
“I see,” Yoo Joonghyuk paused. He had never thought of that before, about who in the world he had been made for and who had in turn, been created for him. Two halves of a whole, filling in for what the other lacked. What would it look like to have such a connection? “Have you met yours?”
“Yes, but they’re not here anymore” Lee Seolhwa answered slowly, emotion wavering just beneath the surface. “At least I got to keep my words,” she chuckles softly, rubbing her wrist. “Not everyone got to.”
“Words?”
“Their first words to me,” Lee Seolhwa expanded, gesturing towards the tattoo of letters curling around her wrist. They look like chicken scratch, jagged and nearly illegible in the hurried rush they scrawl themselves across her wrist. It looks like doctor’s handwriting.
What do those mean? He’d seen them before, it’d be impossible to miss, but how were they connected to soulmates?
“Explain.”
“Explain what?” Lee Seolhwa questioned, a flicker of confusion crossing her face, “First words?”
He looked at her wrist pointedly and nodded, “Well?”
“These tattoos—” she hesitated before pointing at her wrist “—are the first words your soulmate says to you. That’s how you find them, when your words and their words match up. It even copies their handwriting, that’s why you’ll see such diversity in the writing…”
Yoo Joonghyuk felt sick.
“What does having a blank wrist mean?”
It felt like heading down a familiar flight of stairs and forgetting about the last step. Your foot overs over nothing for a second before passing through and that sickening drop in your stomach as the floor falls out from underneath you.
“That… means you don’t have one.”
“You. Who are you?”
This is new. Something dark and cold twists in Yoo Joonghyuk’s chest as he calls out to the unfamiliar figure standing across from him. The man freezes, eyes darting towards him, wide and full of stars.
“You. How the hell are you alive?”
In the next instant, Yoo Joonghyuk’s hand closes around the man’s throat and pulls him into the air. This close, the details of his face fall into clarity. His hair is dark, like a splash of ink against his pale skin. His features are plain and unremarkable, the kind of face the eye passes over easily in a crowd. Forgettable, yet Yoo Joonghyuk’s gaze lingers on them.
“Name,” Yoo Joonghyuk demands.
Nothing but a rough, slightly strangled gasp escapes the other man as one of his hands grab at the one choking him.
“I asked for your name.” His grip tightens, a thinly veiled threat.
The man’s other hand rises, fingers moving in an unfamiliar pattern.
A message rose into Yoo Joonghyuk’s ears [Skill, Interpreter Lv.11 is activated.].
The movements of the man’s fingers falls into place. Kim Dokja. His name is Kim Dokja and he is mute.
“Strange name,” Yoo Joonghyuk comments, eyes only widening slightly at the realization.
Kim Dokja smirks, signing: ‘I get that a lot—’
One of his fists coil back and strike Kim Dokja in the stomach. Interesting. He’s never met anyone mute before. He’s an enigma. An anomaly. In the last regression, he didn’t make it past the first scenario. He had been… just another body to walk past on his way to meet the others. Lee Hyunsung and Kim Namwoon should have been the only ones to make it out of that car.
Instead, Kim Namwoon is dead and in his place stands Kim Dokja. Who is he? An ally or an enemy? Or—
It’s a foolish choice to entertain the thought. To have this conversation. He’s wasting time. But there’s something about this stranger that intrigues him, more than him claiming to be a prophet.
‘…Make me your companion. I can fill in the parts you're lacking.’
Lacking. Yoo Joonghyuk almost laughs, his thoughts from long ago echoing in his mind. Soulmates, two halves of a whole, filling in what the other lacked. How foolish.
Kim Dokja’s heart jumps under his fingers.
He might be useful. But can Yoo Joonghyuk trust him? A companion. Something dangerously close to want flickers to life in his chest. It stinks of longing and hope. Things he let die in the previous regression, or so he’d told himself.
He rips away his gaze, away from those star filled eyes gazing back at him with such certainty—towards the sleeve over his own wrist. He can see it, vividly, the blank flesh, devoid of even a hint of something, his mind desperately grabbing at the vision like a tether. A line, a path to silence, away from this, this person. To emptiness, to shut off his emotions, to think clearly.
He can’t will himself to look away.
His companion. He shouldn’t—not after the last regression, after everything he’s learned. But… just one couldn’t hurt.
His eyes flickered to the water beside them, churning with ichthyosaurs hungrily searching through the waves for their next meal.
“I’ve decided. I’ll make you a companion.”
The answer was clear, a strange feeling of serenity overtaking him as he dragged Kim Dokja to the other side of the bridge. It was a simple answer. If this man wanted to be his companion, he’d have to prove his worth.
“One last question. Will I open this hand or won’t I?”
Yoo Joonghyuk doesn’t have a soulmate.
No one was made for him and he was made for no one. An existence that lived only for itself.
He’s come to terms with it.
He doesn’t need it. He doesn’t need a soulmate. He’s not here to make friends. He can do it alone. There’s no companion, no home waiting for him at the end of this.
Nothing at all.
Just one regression onto the next.
It was a reminder, through every turn, that he wasn’t allowed to have nice things. In his second regression, he had tried to touch on it, on something he wasn’t meant to have with Lee Seolhwa once. Just once.
He remembers the way she used to run her fingers against the dark ink on her wrist when she thought he wasn’t looking. The way her eyes lingered on his face as if searching for a different one to appear. How she would whisper a name that wasn’t his in her sleep. And then she was dead, along with their unborn child and then that entire world. Gone.
Anna Croft had laughed when she’s forced him to pull up the sleeve of his arm to see his wrist. A short, cruel laugh. Then the words; “I should’ve known. There’s no one in this world who could love a monster like you.”
He didn’t try again after that.
Companion. What a foolish word.
Kim Dokja survives the Ichthyosaur. He becomes Yoo Joonghyuk’s companion.
He’s different from anyone Yoo Joonghyuk’s met. A different sort of companion. He doesn’t look up to Yoo Joonghyuk with eyes full of hero worship or seek his leadership and strength like a beacon. He is… an equal.
He’s also an idiot.
“Don’t touch that.”
‘Why not?’ Kim Dokja smirks, a shit eating grin filling his face.
“You know why,” Yoo Joonghyuk huffs, grabbing Kim Dokja’s hand away from the suspiciously pulsing flesh like substance growing on the wall. It’s huge, stretching across the entire wall in lumps like some sort of strange fungus.
‘No I don’t,’ he smiles, signing with his free hand as he inches back towards the lump he’d been eyeing earlier.
“It’s not safe.”
‘Look, it’s so friendly!’ Kim Dokja gestures towards the wall, where the flesh has started moving towards him, in an eager sort of anticipation as if sensing an easy meal. ‘I think it wants to be friends with me!’
“It’s going to eat you,” Yoo Joonghyuk glares back at him grip tightening.
‘Why on earth would it do that? Don’t stereotype fleshy walls, it’s rude.’
“It has teeth.”
‘Which is perfectly acceptable. Some walls have teeth, that doesn’t make it any different than your normal wall.’
Yoo Joonghyuk drags a hand down his face. “Kim Dokja.”
‘Is this really how you want to start our day? By fighting with me?’
“No,” Yoo Joonghyuk grits out. “Get away from the wall, Kim Dokja.”
‘One little wall is not going to hurt me,’ Kim Dokja replies, rolling his eyes. The wall is quite literally glowing now.
“If it looks like that, it will.”
‘Are you seeing the same thing I am? Maybe you should get your eyes checked because all I see is—’
The wall lunges towards Kim Dokja, flesh opening up to form a giant mouth—Yoo Joonghyuk cuts the wall in two, blade slicing through the flesh with such force the cut goes through the stone wall behind it.
‘Like I said, harmless,’ Kim Dokja smirks, ‘Let’s head out, we should regroup with the others, they should have finished up by now.’
Yoo Joonghyuk glares at him but doesn’t let go of his hand.
[The story, Life and Death Companions is continuing]