Chapter Text
Cover art by hehearse
Why do I exist in this world?
The thought came to Kim Dokja suddenly and fully formed, as if it had been passed into his brain from somewhere else.
He was standing on the subway in the early morning, travelling to work among the press of other commuters. He had his phone in his hand, but the screen had gone black from inactivity. He couldn’t remember what he had been looking at before that thought had come out of nowhere and distracted him.
He tried to shake it off, but kept staring at the black surface of his phone. The faint reflection of his face looked back.
Well… If he had to answer a question like that, pointless as it was, he would probably say: who cares why anything exists? Things happen, one after the other. Effect after cause. The only place where one could ask why something exists, and get a clear answer for it, was in works of fiction.
And the life of the person called Kim Dokja… was very much not a work of fiction.
If it was, I would have asked for a much better story.
Kim Dokja lived a deeply unremarkable life. He was twenty-eight, scraped out a living working in the QA department of a software company, and came home every night to a cramped, empty apartment. It was a repetitive, boring, and stagnant existence shared by millions of people.
Maybe he felt a bit trapped—maybe that was why that thought came to him so suddenly, and why it had stuck in his mind like a sliver he couldn’t quite dislodge.
Why do I exist in this world? As the subway eased to a stop, he heard it again like an echo.
But, as he had just told himself… there was no why. It was a pointless question phrased in a pointless way. A person like him just kept on existing, regardless of any reason.
***
He often dreamed of people he had never met.
The person he saw most often was a short, slight woman with hair cropped above the shoulders. She had beautiful, sharply defined features, somewhat undercut by the occasional appearance of a demonic, self-satisfied grin.
In this particular “dream”, though, she looked exhausted, dark circles hanging under her eyes. She was staggering into a subway station, expression frayed, a hand flung out in front of her.
With a shock, Kim Dokja followed the line of her raised hand to see a familiar silhouette with his head ducked over his phone. Is that… me?
What do you want? Kim Dokja wanted to ask this exhausted, reaching person. Moments from grazing his shoulder, she froze up, her eyes glazing over. “Kim Dokja” walked away, oblivious, while she stood stock-still. Can you tell me? What is it you want from me?
“Kim Dokja.”
The wheedling voice startled him out of the vivid daydream.
Right—He was at work. In a meeting, even. The head of the QA department was calling him out directly for some reason. The room was utterly silent.
“I—I’m sorry. Could you repeat the question?”
That earned him a self-important lecture about paying attention, which he completely tuned out. What was the point? Both Kim Dokja and the department head knew that his contract hadn’t been renewed, so he would be out of this job soon enough.
When the long workday finally wound to a close, he took the subway back home staring dead-eyed at his phone. There was nothing at all interesting to hold his attention in there—it felt like there should be, but he could only idly refresh his email and check social media so many times.
Pages refreshed at his fingertips again and again. A formless anxiety began to churn in his gut. It felt like… he was forgetting something? Something really important.
When his phone’s clock turned to 7:00 PM, he instinctively looked to his left. The seat there was empty. For some reason, he felt his body tense even further, almost like he was waiting for something.
The time flipped to 7:01. The next stop arrived. Commuters began shifting around, getting ready to depart when the doors slid open.
Calm down. What is wrong with you? Kim Dokja put the phone away and leaned back in his seat. Maybe this job is getting to me more than I thought.
Groups of people shuffled out of the car while others shuffled in. When the empty seat left of Kim Dokja filled in, he moved his knee out of the way without so much as glancing in that direction, still deep in thought.
But then: “Hey. You’re Kim Dokja.”
Confused, he looked up—and stopped dead.
It was her. The woman with the sharp smile and exhausted eyes from his “dream” was sitting right there in the subway car. Her face was guarded, staring at Kim Dokja as if she expected him to leap up and attack. For a second, they both just looked at each other, completely at a loss for words.
Kim Dokja had never met this person in his life. So, why…
The tension abruptly broke when they both asked the same question at the same time.
“Who are you?”
***
The social protocol for this situation was an absolute mystery to Kim Dokja. They ended up getting off the subway and going to get coffee as if they were old friends meeting to catch up.
Except—this woman was still glaring at Kim Dokja like he was about to leap across the table and snatch her drink out of her hands. A friend wouldn’t be making that sort of expression.
“All right,” she said. “Stop bullshitting me and tell me the truth. What the hell is happening?”
“I don’t know,” Kim Dokja repeated for what had to be the third time. “I know exactly what you know.”
“You’re lying to me,” she snapped. “Kim Dokja.”
He had not said it out loud: I’ve been having dreams about you was the strangest, most embarrassing thing Kim Dokja could think of to say to a total stranger, never mind a woman. Dancing around the issue probably wasn’t helping, but, then again, what the hell could help this inexplicable situation?
Recurring dreams were one thing… but for them to have recognized each other from dreams made no sense at all.
“How do you know my name?” he asked her instead.
“That’s not the point of contention here. How come you recognize me if this isn’t your fault somehow?”
“Seriously, that’s the angle you’re taking on this?” he demanded. “You’re the one who sat next to me on the subway and called me by name, even though I have no idea who you are. Are you stalking me or something?”
“I’m not stalking you!” she exclaimed a little too loudly for the café, then quieted down as people glanced in their direction. “Look, don’t say things like that in public, people will get the wrong idea.”
“It’s really the only explanation that makes sense, though.”
“Yeah, right. The moment you saw me, I could tell—you may not know my name, but you recognized me.”
Kim Dokja really didn’t want to admit that she was right, so instead he said, “What is your name?”
He was not sure why she actually told him, or why, even as her lips were forming the syllables, he seemed to know the shape of it already. “…Han Sooyoung.”
“Kim Dokja,” he said by way of introduction, not that there was much point. “So, you already knew my name because…”
She grimaced, then seemingly decided to take the plunge. “I had this dream. That’s all. You reminded me of someone I saw in it.”
There it was. “And that person in the dream was also called Kim Dokja.”
“Yeah. My theory is that we must have known each other from a long time ago, and I subconsciously remembered you from then.” Her tone of voice was casual, but she was watching his face carefully.
“I don’t think we’ve ever met,” Kim Dokja said. “But, I also… I had a dream about you.”
“Creepy,” she returned immediately. “Is that a pickup line, do you really think I’d fall for that so easily? That’s perverted.”
Somehow, Kim Dokja had known she’d turn it into something like that the first chance she got. He tried to smile, feeling his eye twitch. “Stop messing with me, I’m being serious. I saw someone who looked just like you in dreams I’ve been having. Didn’t we both experience that?”
“But it doesn’t make any sense.” Hidden in her defiant glare, Kim Dokja thought that he recognized a kernel of fear. “I mean, having dreams of people you don’t know…”
“Maybe it’s like you said,” he suggested, speaking words he didn’t believe in the slightest. “Maybe we knew each other a long time ago.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” she agreed. Her eyes, though, were flat—she was also lying. Whether it was just to him, or to herself as well, he couldn’t say. “In that case—did we meet through work? Where do you work?”
It seemed like it might be a bad idea to respond, just in case she really was stalking him, but the only way Kim Dokja was going to get more information out of her would be to offer some of his own. He explained about his QA job as painlessly as possible and said, “What about you?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Why don’t you take a guess?”
“How should I know?” Despite his protests, something prickled in his memory… as if far away, through a deep fog. “If I had to guess… maybe, an author?”
Her face instantly contracted with some inscrutable emotion, then relaxed as she mastered it. “As if. I work in a coffee shop, idiot. What kind of a guess is that?”
“You asked me to guess,” Kim Dokja sighed. It was actually kind of a relief that some of these weird hunches were wrong. “So, you’re saying we probably met at the coffee shop?”
Han Sooyoung squinted at his face. “…Maybe. I do see a lot of people in a day.”
“I feel like I would have remembered a barista as unpleasant as you.”
“Unpleasant?” Han Sooyoung demanded. “Oh, please, as if you have beautiful young women lining up to ask you to take them out for a coffee. You should be grateful you got to meet me, you know.”
“Should I? We’ve only just met, and you’ve already called me both a pervert and an idiot.”
“I have a very good sense for people,” Han Sooyoung declared, leaning back with a satisfied smirk. It was so similar to the expression she sometimes wore in his dreams that it caught him, for a moment, off guard.
“… I’m not sure how you go around calling yourself beautiful with a straight face,” he said by way of recovery.
“As if you could possibly talk, with your looks…!?”
Well, everything else aside, this person calling herself Han Sooyoung was very, very easy to argue with. It should have been annoying, but the bickering, like so much else, felt faintly familiar. Nearly even comforting.
“Anyway,” Han Sooyoung said after a second, effortlessly dropping the disagreement, “maybe it wasn’t at work, then. Where did you grow up?”
As if they really were out on a first date, they exchanged all the basic information of their lives over coffee. No details, just the broad facts: the neighbourhoods, the schools, the first jobs.
While it seemed possible that they could have run into each other before, the maps they were drawing of their lives made it difficult to imagine how. Each time one of them had gotten a job or moved somewhere a little closer to where the other was living, the other person had swiftly relocated far away again. It almost seemed like they were avoiding each other on purpose.
“You really didn’t live anywhere else?” Han Sooyoung challenged him.
“No. I’m already up to the present day. It seems like we have never worked or lived in so much as the same general area.”
Han Sooyoung scowled. “… I really feel like we’re missing something.”
Kim Dokja opened his mouth to object, then paused. It… did feel a little like something was missing from the picture he’d just painted of his life, even though he’d accounted for every single change in life circumstances he’d ever had.
“Did you forget about somewhere you lived?” he asked, instead of confronting that.
“I’m not stupid, of course not.”
They sat in silence, both thinking hard.
“Actually… I have something else to ask you,” Han Sooyoung abruptly spoke up, pulling out her phone. “I’m going to show you a picture of someone, so just tell me if you recognize him.”
Kim Dokja blinked as she started scrolling through her phone. “… Okay?”
When she turned the screen towards him, he nearly leapt out of his skin.
Of course Kim Dokja recognized this person. His sharp jawline, elegant eyebrows, and stony expression… Well, he’d glimpsed them in his dreams.
The last “dream” Kim Dokja had had about this man had been completely inexplicable—he’d really thought it had been an ordinary dream, the sort of nonsensical scene his brain might shake up after blending up random daily experiences. He and this man in Han Sooyoung’s phone had been in Gwanghwamun, trying to beat the shit out of each other. Throughout the fight, Kim Dokja had been quite convinced: this guy was a total psychopath.
“That’s…” He swallowed. It felt so familiar, but even so, he knew for a fact he’d never seen this face before in his waking life. Even a second time, it was spooky. “I’ve seen him, too. But I don’t know his name.”
Han Sooyoung scrolled slightly up, revealing that she was viewing a profile on a gaming website. “I didn’t either, but I happened to see him in a video online and found out pretty quick. He’s called…”
“Yoo Joonghyuk,” Kim Dokja muttered. The characters of that name seemed to dance in his vision, taunting him with their almost-familiarity.
Even though he had no idea what was going on, and even though what he had dreamed of Yoo Joonghyuk so far made him less than eager to meet him, it felt like something agitated in his chest suddenly settled.
Han Sooyoung and Yoo Joonghyuk. Those two…
Somehow, in some way, they could give him an answer to a question he’d been asking.
***
Han Sooyoung displayed a concerning aptitude for actual stalking, quickly discovering where Yoo Joonghyuk would be the next day and wringing a promise out of Kim Dokja to meet her there.
Well… in fairness to Han Sooyoung, it was publicly available information. It seemed that Yoo Joonghyuk was a pro gamer with a pretty large following, so if he participated in in-person competitions, an entire subset of Twitter quickly knew about it.
That night, Kim Dokja very nearly came to his senses.
What the hell are we even doing? he thought, staring up at his dark bedroom ceiling. We’re tracking down this guy because we both had a dream about him? If he’s famous, didn’t we both just dream about him because we knew who he was?
When he finally fell asleep, the “dreams” came to him stronger than they ever had before.
He saw the face of Yoo Joonghyuk twisted in a mask of rage. A hand closed around his neck. The other punched into his stomach with brutal strength.
Kim Dokja floundered away from that scene only to end up in another. They were… fighting again, this time with swords? Yoo Joonghyuk’s expression was blank and oppressive. Kim Dokja felt it in his bones… if I make a wrong move here, he’ll kill me.
The final scene was the most brutal of all. He was speared through, falling against the body of the man who had stabbed him. Kim Dokja dreamed his own death in vivid detail: the taste of his own blood, the strength leaving his limbs, the choking gasp of his final breaths.
He woke sweaty and gasping for air, half-rolled off the bed.
Heart pounding, he hung there on the edge of the mattress with a hand on his chest, where he’d dreamed the sword had pierced him, and tried to get a hold of himself. It was dark, in the early morning. He was alone.
If these dreams had anything at all to do with reality… There was no way in hell he should be going to see this Yoo Joonghyuk guy. The dream almost seemed like a warning telling Kim Dokja to stay far, far away.
Except…
Why was it, in the dreams, when he looked at Yoo Joonghyuk’s face, he had felt something so mismatched to the situations at hand? In that last one especially, even though he had literally died at Yoo Joonghyuk’s hands, Kim Dokja had not felt afraid or angry.
No, he’d felt almost… content. Or maybe fulfilled, along with a hundred other things, all of it wound so tightly together it was impossible to fully comprehend. It was a feeling that he’d never once experienced in waking life. And as Kim Dokja died in his arms, stabbed through the heart, Yoo Joonghyuk’s expression had been…
Damn it. Yes, it was stupid, yes, the dreams seemed to suggest it could even be dangerous, but Kim Dokja could not make himself ignore all of this. He would go meet with Yoo Joonghyuk.
If he wanted to make sense of these feelings, he had no other choice.
***
He and Han Sooyoung chose to wait outside the building where Yoo Joonghyuk was attending his event, like groupies waiting to harass him for an autograph. Kim Dokja felt incredibly stupid.
“Did you have any dreams last night?” he asked Han Sooyoung, trying to take his mind off the situation.
To his surprise, she immediately bristled. “No! I didn’t.”
He gave her a sidelong look. “… that was weirdly defensive. Why, was it a weird dream? You don’t want to tell me?”
“Shut up. Don’t ask me invasive questions. You have no tact.”
“Aren’t the dreams the whole reason we’re doing this? I don’t see how it’s tactless.”
“Well, did you dream anything, then?”
Kim Dokja paused. “Well… yes, actually. About this guy we’re trying to meet.”
“Oh?” Han Sooyoung seemed happy to change the subject to his dreams instead. “Tell me the details. Anything stand out as important?”
“Well…” he struggled for words, which began to fail when he saw their target exiting the building just a short distance away. It looked like the competition was over. “He, uh, murdered me.”
“What?” Han Sooyoung muttered, then spotted Yoo Joonghyuk as well. A second later, he saw them.
Though there were a few key differences to the Yoo Joonghyuk in Kim Dokja’s troubled dreams, the similarities were more striking. He had the same confident stride, disconcertingly beautiful face, and muscular frame. Even without the black trench coat and sword, he gave off an intimidating aura.
Yoo Joonghyuk’s eyes lit with recognition—that was good. He immediately started stomping towards Kim Dokja and Han Sooyoung with murder in his eyes.
That was less good.
Warning bells screamed in Kim Dokja’s head. He quickly backed away, raising his hands. “Yoo Joonghyuk-ssi, wait.”
Yoo Joonghyuk only approached faster, his glare zeroing in on Kim Dokja. His left hand came up, and Kim Dokja was certain that he was about to be strangled to death on a public street. Kim Dokja’s back hit a wall.
And then he was… dreaming.
It was the clearest instance of the “dream” yet. He felt the wind on his skin; he smelled smoke and the acrid, bloody stench of rot. There was a hand locked around his neck, holding him over a crumbled section of the destroyed Dongho Bridge, threatening to drop him.
He immediately forgot that it was a dream at all.
“Name.”
“What?”
“What is your name?”
“Kim Dokja.”
“A strange name.”
“I’ve heard that a lot.”
A fist to the stomach and intense, blooming pain in the abdomen. As if the pain had sparked it, there was a brief but intense feeling of… understanding.
Kim Dokja’s dream self knew why this was happening—knew who Yoo Joonghyuk was, knew why he was being dangled over the bridge, and had a plan for what would happen next. Was still calculating that plan even as his feet dangled above the churning water far below.
Kim Dokja grasped desperately at that understanding, but it seemed to fall through his grasp like water. He could only hang onto the smallest pieces. Something… survival… ways to survive… what?
And then, in another flash, he was standing in the street with Han Sooyoung yelling on one side of him and Yoo Joonghyuk looming directly in front, his hand raised up just an inch away from Kim Dokja’s neck.
Yoo Joonghyuk dropped his hand as if it had been burned. Kim Dokja reached automatically for his own neck, still feeling the phantom squeeze of fingers. It seemed that, in the real world, Yoo Joonghyuk hadn’t even touched him.
“You,” Yoo Joonghyuk growled. He turned to encompass Han Sooyoung in his glare. “Who are you? What did you just do?”
“You saw that, too?” Kim Dokja asked faintly. “I should be asking you what you did. I’m not the one who tried to strangle somebody…”
“Okay, what exactly is happening?” Han Sooyoung demanded. “Saw what? You both just froze up and stared into space for like thirty seconds.”
Kim Dokja rubbed at his throat until the sensation of the gripping hand faded, clearing his throat with a light cough. “It was another one of those dreams, but… way more intense than usual. It was like I was really there.”
Yoo Joonghyuk shifted his glare in between Kim Dokja and Han Sooyoung. “Explain what’s happening, now.”
***
They did their best to explain without prompting any more strangulation attempts.
The facts were pretty simple. Han Sooyoung and Kim Dokja had both been having mysterious, recurring dreams of people they had never met. They had run into each other on the subway, and then had tracked down Yoo Joonghyuk.
“You recognized us,” Han Sooyoung said to Yoo Joonghyuk. “So, you must be having the dreams as well, right?”
In an effort to have a quiet conversation, they had moved away from the busy street. Ironically, the footpath they had found themselves on overlooked a familiar area of the Han River from a distance, Dongho Bridge just barely visible where it cut across the water. Whole and undestroyed, of course.
(…Had the bridge really been destroyed in that dream? What could have caused something like that?)
Yoo Joonghyuk looked between the two of them with open suspicion. “I have had dreams recently, but nothing like what we just experienced.”
“Me neither,” Kim Dokja agreed. The memory of the pain was still quite fresh. “Why do you think that is? I even had that exact same dream before, the one of you trying to kill me in the river, but it didn’t feel like that.”
“Maybe… it was like a flashback or something?” Han Sooyoung suggested. “I guess creating a similar situation to the one in the dream could have brought it to mind.”
“I was not going to strangle him,” said Yoo Joonghyuk.
Kim Dokja barked an incredulous laugh. “Are you kidding me? What was that then, stomping towards me with that look on your face and your hand like this?”
Yoo Joonghyuk glowered. “I suddenly felt you were dangerous. I am not sure why.”
“Dangerous?” Kim Dokja repeated in disbelief. “Me? Look who’s talking.”
Yoo Joonghyuk’s face went blank. His shoulders were very stiff—the man was clearly uncomfortable with this whole situation, and he wasn’t doing a very good job of hiding it.
Kim Dokja had been pretty apprehensive about meeting this guy. The Yoo Joonghyuk of his dreams was certainly some kind of psychopath, effortlessly enacting extreme violence with a blank face. Hell, Kim Dokja had even been murdered by him.
In real life, though, he almost seemed more awkward than dangerous. He didn’t have all the combat scars crisscrossing his skin, the huge black coat, or the sword that had killed Kim Dokja. He was just an unusually handsome guy with an unusually unpleasant glare who worked as a professional gamer. Kim Dokja couldn’t shake the feeling that this guy wouldn’t actually kill him.
Finally, Yoo Joonghyuk said, “I don’t know why I attacked you in that dream. For a moment, it seemed clear, but now I can’t remember.”
“It did seem so clear for a moment,” Kim Dokja agreed, leaning on the footpath handrail and trying to force his brain to work. It was a grey and unpleasant day, the city lights fighting off hazy grey clouds in the distance. The air was uncomfortably damp on his skin. “For a second, it was like I understood everything, but I only hung on to the tiniest piece afterwards. Do the words ways to survive mean anything to either of you?”
Both just stared and shook their heads.
“What about you, then?” he prompted Yoo Joonghyuk. “Did you hold onto anything at all?”
Yoo Joonghyuk seemed to briefly consider. “… I remember thinking that everything was your fault.”
When both Yoo Joonghyuk and Han Sooyoung turned rather sharp looks to Kim Dokja, he could only smile sheepishly. “… Well, I don’t know what that was about exactly, but the dreams aren’t my fault. I have no idea what’s happening to us either.”
“… Maybe we can find out,” Han Sooyoung suggested. “That flashback you two had, if it really was triggered by a similar situation to the one you dreamed about… We could try to recreate other things that happened in the dreams?”
“I don’t know. Some of those dreams are pretty unpleasant,” Kim Dokja said with a wary look in Yoo Joonghyuk’s direction. “Did I mention I saw this guy murder me?”
Something odd crossed Yoo Joonghyuk’s face at that comment, but he remained silent.
“Clearly it doesn’t require actually hurting each other,” Han Sooyoung pointed out, “since you had that memory of being strangled without him even touching you. And anyway, we must have some dreams we can test this on that don’t involve horrible violence, right?”
“I guess so.” There hadn’t been any violence in the dream he’d had about the exhausted Han Sooyoung on the subway, but she had seemed like she was suffering somehow. The thought of recreating that made him uncomfortable. “Yoo Joonghyuk?”
“I need more information about the dreams,” Yoo Joonghyuk said. “If that’s the only way, I will try it.”
There was something in the intensity of his expression that made Kim Dokja frown. “Is there some reason you’re particularly invested?”
“No.”
“Really? It’s certainly worth looking into, but you seem dead set on it.”
“It’s you who’s weird for treating it casually,” Han Sooyoung interjected, shooting Kim Dokja a look. “Whatever this is, it isn’t normal. We need to figure out what the hell is going on here so I can move on with my life.”
“Fine,” Kim Dokja sighed, deciding to keep a close eye on Yoo Joonghyuk on his own. “So, who has a good candidate for a dream to try recreating? I’m vetoing the ones where I die.”
“Ones, plural?” Han Sooyoung repeated, raising an eyebrow.
Kim Dokja ignored her. “What was yours about last night, Han Sooyoung?”
“We’re not talking about that one!” Han Sooyoung snapped.
“So, you did have a weird dream.”
“Just shut up. Don’t ask invasive questions of a woman.”
For a moment, they all stood there, looking at each other.
It was a bit uncomfortable, Kim Dokja had to admit. Han Sooyoung was presumably joking when she called his questions invasive, but explaining the dreams did feel… weirdly intimate. Whether it was getting murdered by Yoo Joonghyuk or watching Han Sooyoung reach out towards him at the subway station, they always felt so emotionally intense. Describing any part of that out loud was…
“I have one,” Yoo Joonghyuk finally said. Reluctantly, he held up his cell phone. “I need your phone numbers.”
Mystified but intrigued, Kim Dokja allowed Yoo Joonghyuk to fumblingly add him as a phone contact and then open a group chat that included all three of them. After that, though, he just stared at the screen.
Kim Dokja sent a message first.
Kim Dokja
So, what dream is this supposed to trigger?
Yoo Joonghyuk
Shut up. I should send a specific message.
Han Sooyoung
Go ahead and do it then, I don’t have all day.
Yoo Joonghyuk
I am trying to remember it.
“What, you forgot already?” Kim Dokja said out loud. “Is your memory that bad? Aren’t you only twenty-eight?”
“You’re plainly aware that the dreams are difficult to remember,” Yoo Joonghyuk growled. “How do you know my age?”
Kim Dokja wracked his brain. “I must have seen your birth date on your profile online. By the way, you’re actually a bit younger than me, so if you want to begin speaking more respectfully—”
“Can we argue less about stupid stuff and try to actually make progress on this?” Han Sooyoung complained. “Yoo Joonghyuk, what was the message about?”
Yoo Joonghyuk seemed like he was back to contemplating murder, but looked down at his phone after another moment. “It had something to do with the word ‘tryst’.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“Tryst?” Han Sooyoung repeated. “As in, romantic tryst?”
If possible, Yoo Joonghyuk looked even more uncomfortable. “I’m not sure.”
“What the hell weird type of dream—?”
Kim Dokja
Which one of us did you have a romantic tryst with, Yoo Joonghyuk?
Kim Dokja
To be honest, I don’t think I would do that with a man, so don’t ask.
Yoo Joonghyuk was briefly silent, then: “I’m deleting the chat.”
“No, no, no, wait,” Kim Dokja insisted, successfully suppressing his smile. “We may still need to use it to coordinate. Don’t delete it, you might think of the message you needed to send later.”
Yoo Joonghyuk stared at him, his face a warning, but slowly lowered his phone.
“Any other bright ideas?” Han Sooyoung suggested dryly.
After a moment's delay, Yoo Joonghyuk turned to walk away. “This is pointless.”
“Hey, hang on,” Kim Dokja called after him. “Why is it pointless?”
“I will solve it on my own.”
“And how the hell do you plan to do that? What exactly about this situation is there to solve?”
Yoo Joonghyuk was already halfway down the street, leaving the questions unanswered. Kim Dokja watched him go. “That guy has a terrible personality.”
“He'll give up and come back to us for help sooner or later,” Han Sooyoung muttered. “At least we've got his number, so we can keep pestering him.”
“I wonder if he saw something in those dreams that made him not want to trust us?”
“Maybe.” Han Sooyoung shrugged, then glanced in his direction. “Hey—Kim Dokja. Do you have a theory about all this? What are these dreams really about?”
He stared at her blankly. “Why would I have a theory?”
“I don’t know.” She narrowed her eyes at him appraisingly. “It just feels like you're the type of know-it-all who would come up with one.”
“… Well, I don’t have any theories,” he admitted. “If this were a novel, they would probably be memories of a past life or something like that.”
She snorted. “That's stupid.”
“It may sound stupid, but it's possible that something similar—”
“Oh, fuck!” Han Sooyoung suddenly hissed, looking at her phone. “I have an evening shift tonight. And a morning shift tomorrow, if you can believe it. Shouldn’t that shit be illegal? I barely have time to sleep.”
“Uh—”
“If you have any more dreams that seem important, put them in the chat,” Han Sooyoung said, waving her phone in his face. “We can try to see if there are any similarities, at least. Maybe we can get Yoo Joonghyuk to do that, too.”
“I’m not sure if he would cooperate.”
“Whatever. I have to go slave away for the next six hours, so just think of some ideas for what else to try. Write down your dreams.”
With that, she took off, leaving Kim Dokja alone and mystified on the street.
He opened the chat multiple times that night, wondering how he could even begin to describe some of the dreams he’d had so far. In the end, he decided it was best to simply summarize the vision he and Yoo Joonghyuk had experienced that day.
Kim Dokja
Met Yoo Joonghyuk on Dongho Bridge. He tried to strangle and kill me.
Well, maybe to drive the point home, he should add another one.
Kim Dokja
He also stabbed me to death with a sword at some point.
To think, this was what they had to work with and Yoo Joonghyuk was acting like Kim Dokja was the suspicious one? Looking at the dreams typed out like that, they looked suddenly very stupid. No one replied—Han Sooyoung was still at work, and Yoo Joonghyuk left him on read.
That night, Kim Dokja’s sleep was troubled once again. Strange scenes passed through his mind, an invisible force tossing him from one to the next like he was being dragged through a riptide.
He saw skies close over with apocalyptic, bruise-purple clouds. Gwanghwamun Plaza flew past several times, in various states of destruction. He saw a wall. He felt an indescribable pain like his body was cracking into disparate pieces.
Unfamiliar faces darted by, too. There was a pair of children. A large man with an earnest expression. A woman with a gentle beauty in her face and daggers in her hands. A pair of people wielding swords, one of high school age and one a woman wreathed in vengeful flames.
Kim Dokja had no idea who they were, but his heart ached as if he missed them terribly. When he reached out a hand and tried to call out to them, the vision dashed apart, leaving him alone.
No, not quite alone—Yoo Joonghyuk was there. He stared at Kim Dokja with a boiling fury that was far and above his usual prickly temper. He looked… hurt.
He turned to look at the other faces that were flickering just out of reach. Talking about Kim Dokja, he said: “That guy, he is deceiving you.”
In the inescapable logic of the dream, Kim Dokja knew without a doubt that he was right.
He woke up scrambling away from the incoming deathblow of Yoo Joonghyuk’s sword. His hands were tangled up in something, preventing his escape, and a moment later, a burst of sharp pain hit his cheekbone.
Only afterwards, lying flat on the floor, did he register what had happened. He had been fighting his bedsheets, fell off the side of the bed, and hit his face on the bedside table on his way down.
He could have laughed if the adrenaline from the nightmare wasn’t still pounding through his system. Instead, he lay there shaking until the stinging in his cheek prompted him to get up to check the damage in the bathroom.
Blearily, he turned the light on. He seemed to be bleeding—he must have really hit his cheek quite hard. Still dizzy and disoriented, he splashed water in his face, trying to clear away the blood and sweat.
When he looked up, the reflection that stared back was that of a monster.
He jerked away, back hitting the wall. In the space of an eyeblink, the specter was gone, but its image remained crystal clear in his mind’s eye: the two horns on the forehead, the ragged black wings, and the blank, white orbs in place of its eyes.
The hallucination was gone, but there was something on his mirror that should not have been there. A message had been scrawled up the mirror in bright red blood.
It read: DON’T REMEMBER.