Chapter Text
Shin Yoosung looked at the darkening night outside the small bookstore she passed by chance on her way doing her errand. There was a time where she feared those stars; there was also a time where she longed for one particular star – the brightest one of all. Yet there she was, sitting behind the cashier chair with the familiar smell of dust and old paper, like the one on Han Sooyoung’s study. Her eyes were still glued to the person leaning on the doorway, with a thin book in his hand.
“Is the story interesting?” She asked then, her voice quiet, as if that was a test. Or maybe it was. Because her untrusting heart was so used to broken promises and bad endings.
Kim Dokja shrugged his shoulders, thinking, “not really,” he had known of the ending, and had read it many times during his time there. It was not like the story was groundbreaking nor famous. But how could one stop the plot from unfolding; how could a human have the power to stop the time?
Unsatisfied, Shin Yoosung asked him again, “then why are you reading it?”
Then a chuckle, a nostalgic sound that seemed to bring back the tales that have been forgotten, “Do they have to be interesting to be worth reading?”
Shin Yoosung, with eyes that yearned for even a quarter of the love he gave to the stories, walked up to him and again, latched her fingers on the left sleeve of Kim Dokja’s shirt.
Used to the gesture, as it happened a few times in their short meetings, as if it happened a hundred times and more in a different story where they were not strangers, Kim Dokja continued, “When is your guardian going to come?”
“They don’t have to come.” He heard her mumble, with eyes casted downwards, clenching the stories from spilling and spoiling him stories that he shouldn’t read yet.
“Shin Yoosung.”
Both of them raised their heads to the call. Outside, a lavish car was parked on the front porch of the bookstore. The bumper of the car was buried inside the cement wall, creating a crack, with the wheels hadn’t been straightened out and half of the car body was on the sidewalk. But none of them seem to care. Not the man who called Shin Yoosung, nor the girl who abruptly jumped out of the car and ran past the man towards them.
“Kim Dokja you bastard!”
There was a different story, where instead of being confused and frozen in front of the bookstore, he would laugh and give sarcastic remarks that would make her angrier in return. But no matter how similar it was, even plagiarizers couldn’t tell the same story.
But that didn’t stop Han Sooyoung from jumping into him, which made her slip in the process and ended up pulling his neck to the floor where she fell. And later, when this also became a story of the past, she would say that the tears that fell from her eyes were caused by the cold hard ground hitting her back too hard.
Although it was not the cold hard ground that pushed all the breath out of his lungs when he fell down, “You…”
But there was nothing he could say. Because sometimes, when he found empty gaps between the books in the shelves, he couldn’t remember which book was missing, leaving only a layer of thin dust. And he would try to fit another book with similar size, sometimes forcing them in. Still, they didn’t tell the same story.
Yoo Joonghyuk looked at him, because he might no longer be the story that this man loved the most, but he already did his share in this lifetime. It is time for Yoo Joonghyuk to repay him and thread between the words that made his story.
“Kim Dokja,”
He grabbed Kim Dokja’s hand and pulled him up, leaving Han Sooyoung groaning and clutching her back on the floor. Kim Dokja peeked at the face between the long curl of Yoo Joonghyuk’s bangs. The stories, giddied by the unexpected meeting, dance with tales that Kim Dokja could not read yet. Or probably the stories just past its expiration date. But that did not matter. At least for Yoo Joonghyuk.
“I–,” still, it would be a lie if Kim Dokja said that there was nothing there, “do you know me?” know . When the stories bound their souls with familiarity.
“Yes.”
Because there was no truer answer than that.
Kim Dokja blinked, his hand covering the fingers wrapping his upper arms, trying to push them away. When the fingers did not budge, he turned his head to Shin Yoosung instead, “Yoosung-ah, your… guardians are here, it’s time for you to go back.”
“No.”
A choir of voices chirped quickly, making Kim Dokja almost gagged.
And when he felt that something hit the back of his head hard only to open his eyes in the sight of dark ceiling of the car with Shin Yoosung sleeping on his thigh, he could only sigh at the two shadows sitting in the front and say,
"You do know kidnapping is illegal, right?"