Chapter Text
Han Sooyoung doesn’t like idiots. It’s just so frustrating to watch someone make stupid decision after stupid decision, knowing that you’re going to have to clean up their mess and rescue everyone and fix everything. It’s why she worked alone for so long, and why she avoids getting involved with idiots where she can – it’s just easier when you only have to worry about yourself.
Unfortunately for her, Kim Dokja is an idiot, and she is way too involved with him to back out now.
Yoo Joonghyuk probably feels the same, never mind that she also thinks he’s an idiot. But they have the same goal, and they’re stuck in this stupid scenario together, and Sooyoung resigns herself to working with Yoo Joonghyuk to save Kim Dokja (even though she isn’t sure if that tiny, lifeless kid was actually Kim Dokja or some twisted illusion conjured up by the scenarios).
It's only dawn when she and Yoo Joonghyuk open their eyes in that distant corner of Seoul again. She knows they have about four hours until that kid topples out of a window, surrounded by people who don’t care. She knows where they can find him, the fastest route to get there, and how long she’ll be standing on that stupid subway for. She knows the thought of seeing an ambulance in a school parking lot is sickening.
They don’t have time to be researching and wandering around Seoul this time. Han Sooyoung can inexplicably feel Kim Dokja slipping away the longer they hang around doing nothing, so when Yoo Joonghyuk sets off towards the subway station, she follows him without a word.
Realistically, they should be early. They should get to the school before the school day has even begun, and maybe they would run into Kim Dokja as he walked through the gates and whisk him away. But then the subway breaks down and when they try to leave the door gets stuck, and in the end it takes them almost an extra hour to even reach the school gates.
“What the fuck,” pants Sooyoung as they walk through the gates, “is going on? That didn’t happen last time. Hey, Yoo Joonghyuk, that didn’t happen last time, right?”
He only grunts and shoulders forward. Bastard, she thinks, and jogs a little to match his longer stride.
There’s still time, Sooyoung notices as they pass a clock telling her that it’s thirteen minutes past eleven. It was almost midday before she saw those lonely, sad, familiar eyes drifting shut, so there’s still time.
There should be time. Why can she hear yelling?
Without thinking, she begins to run. Yoo Joonghyuk is running too, a little ahead of her, and she runs faster, willing her legs to move, move, move. The yelling is definitely coming from the classroom that Kim Dokja was in. She shoves a kid out of the way and pulls herself around the door, coming to a halt next to a frozen Yoo Joonghyuk. His face is unusually stricken.
“Where is he?” Sooyoung demands, shaking him. She cranes her neck over the crowd. “Where-”
There are kids looking out the window, down at the ground, murmuring. On their faces is a kind of morbid curiosity, disgust and pity and fascination wrapped into one. Sooyoung’s heart falls.
“No,” she says distantly, staggering forward. “We have time. It’s not midday yet.”
Students give her strange looks as she pushes past them, weaving around desks. The window looms in front of her, impossibly large, its curtains fluttering. Kim Dokja will probably be hiding behind one of those curtains, she decides, wrapped up in the white fabric in a way that would look so eerily similar to the Kim Dokja of thirteen years in the future. Her fingers twitch towards them, reading to pull them back and reveal a tiny little fifteen-year-old who will grin up at her and say, “Surprise!”
In the end, Sooyoung doesn’t touch the curtains. The possibility that there might be nobody behind them is too much to bear. She finally reaches the window itself and grasps the windowsill, knuckles white. They’re so high that she can be eye level with the nearby apartments, several stories up. It almost feels as though she could reach out and touch the clouds.
Sooyoung looks down, down, down. She sees Kim Dokja. She does not see him moving.
She’s going to be sick.
“Hey!” she yells, leaning out of the window so her words reach the ground below. “Hey, Kim Dokja! Wake up, you idiot!” A hand grabs her collar and pulls her back before she can fall out, and she looks up to see Yoo Joonghyuk’s blank face.
“We were early,” she tells him. “We were meant to be early this time.”
He nods, a small, jerky movement.
Han Sooyoung grits her teeth. Why would it change? Why did the subway stall, why did Kim Dokja jump early? Is it impossible to save him?
No, she decides, straightening her shoulders. No, they’ve only had two runs of it. She will not let this scenario end until that guy is alive.
“Yoo Joonghyuk,” she says. “I don’t accept this ending. Do you?”
He meets her eyes. “No.”
The world ripples, and Sooyoung opens her eyes in Seoul at dawn.
---
This time, they do not hesitate. The second her eyes are open, Sooyoung is sprinting down the street, Yoo Joonghyuk mere paces in front of her. They ignore the subway and simply run the entire length of the city, lungs aching and legs burning.
This time, Sooyoung thinks. We’ll make it this time.
But the road is closed off – some kind of construction, or maybe a car crash – and everywhere they turn there is someone telling them that no, they cannot go through here, there’s a detour available over here, it will add an extra thirty minutes to your journey.
Thirty minutes is time they cannot afford.
But they take the detour, and Sooyoung pushes herself to go faster and wishes she had access to any of her skills or stats. Even though the scenario had only told them they didn’t have access to their skills, Sooyoung knows she can go faster than this and for longer. She doesn’t have time to open her stats window, though, and so she makes do with what she has.
They are still too late, but this time Sooyoung gets to watch Kim Dokja fall.
“No!” she yells, the cry tearing itself from her throat, and the world ripples.
---
“I don’t know if this is a stupid idea,” Sooyoung gasps as she and Yoo Joonghyuk sprint across the city. They’re taking a different route this time, but still there are crowds to push past and roadworks to avoid. “But what if we just... catch him?”
Yoo Joonghyuk grunts. He doesn’t elaborate, but the fact that he doesn’t immediately fix her with a disgusted glare means he’s not entirely opposed to the idea.
So when they burst through the school gates, they run to that spot on the grass where Sooyoung has seen Kim Dokja’s small and broken body far too many times. There is already a tiny boy falling through the air, and Yoo Joonghyuk pushes forth with his arms outstretched, a hint of desperation in his steps that Sooyoung rarely sees. He reaches the exact where Kim Dokja should fall, and Sooyoung breathes a sigh of relief, her eyes watering despite herself when-
Somehow, Kim Dokja’s trajectory shifts, and Sooyoung hears a crunch and then a scream. It takes a moment for her to realise the scream has come from her, and that Kim Dokja is on the ground, shattered, barely a metre from Yoo Joonghyuk’s fingertips. God, there’s so much blood, and his arms are twisted at such an unnatural angle, and Sooyoung has seen some horrific things in the scenarios but this is Kim Dokja, and he is only fifteen years old. He is only fifteen years old, but Sooyoung can see glimpses of ivory amidst the crimson, and her stomach churns.
She’s ended up on the ground at some point, and she crawls closer, almost in morbid fascination. Some part of her registers that Yoo Joonghyuk is on his knees, arms still outstretched, his pants stained with grass and blood. His face is slack, and he looks as sick as Sooyoung feels.
“Kim Dokja,” she rasps, her voice thin and reedy. “Wake up.” She shakes his shoulder, and it’s so small and thin that a wail escapes her.
“This is fucked up,” she wheezes, her chest tight. “What the fuck? This is so so fucked up. This isn’t fucking fair, this isn’t how it ends, reset the fucking loop already, I’m not standing for this, reset it-”
The world ripples.
---
Sooyoung opens her eyes and slumps onto the asphalt, inhaling deep gulps of air as the sun pokes through the morning fog. Yoo Joonghyuk remains standing, but his face is stricken. It takes ten minutes for Sooyoung’s breathing to calm enough for her to form words.
“Thank fuck that reset,” she sighs eventually. Yoo Joonghyuk glances over at her. His face makes a strange in-between expression before settling into its usual neutral, as if he were awakening from a trance. He does not respond and simply fixes his gaze on the Seoul skyline. After a moment, he opens his mouth.
“That was a terrible idea.”
“Obviously,” she grouses, pushing away the afterimage of Kim Dokja’s lifeless eyes. “I won’t suggest it again.”
They’re both quiet for a little longer. Sooyoung honestly doesn’t know Yoo Joonghyuk well enough to tell what exactly he’s thinking, but she wonders if he too is considering how hopeless this scenario feels. Is there any way for them to even get there before Kim Dokja falls? Is some other force – a dokkaebi, maybe, or even a constellation – watching their every move and nudging Kim Dokja towards that window at just the right time?
Sooyoung frowns. Now that she thinks about it, the constellations have been quiet. This would usually be something they flocked to, marvelling at the tragedy of it all.
“Hey, Yoo Joonghyuk,” she calls. The man looks down at her. “Have you heard from any constellations?”
He grunts and then shakes his head.
“Is this scenario hidden from even the constellations?” she wonders. “But then what’s the point?”
“Does it matter?” Yoo Joonghyuk says through gritted teeth.
“It’s weird, that’s all,” Sooyoung snaps. “Some of us like to actually think about our problems instead of just swinging a sword at them and dying if it doesn’t go well.”
He turns away without responding and Sooyoung feels a small flare of triumph despite the situation they’re in.
She leans back on her hands, the asphalt pressing into her palms, and looks up at the sky. It doesn’t really tell her anything, but she traces the path of a cloud across the sky as she thinks.
There are no constellations here. No sign of any dokkaebi either, so far. The scenario name is censored. Sooyoung groans. This is probably the kind of obscure TWSA detail they could use to beat the scenario that Kim Dokja would know about, if he were here and not jumping out of a window. Sooyoung hates that idiot. She wishes he were here.
By the time she gives up on figuring out how to beat the scenario and stands up, Yoo Joonghyuk has left. Perhaps to try again, perhaps to find more information – though she’d be surprised if it were the second. Sooyoung doesn’t worry too much, because Yoo Joonghyuk is annoying and she’ll be seeing him here at sunrise anyway.
She spends a few hours at the internet café, looking for information. She doesn’t find much more than last time, but she does eventually find the address of his aunt and uncle’s house, who he’s apparently living with right now. It was leaked to seemingly every other newspaper when Kim Dokja’s mother published The Underground Killer, and Sooyoung finds it buried in one of the many articles about the book. The article itself is terrible – it talks about Kim Dokja like he is nothing more than a tagline. Sooyoung hates it.
The house itself is a little closer to the internet café than the school is, so Sooyoung walks there. When she isn’t careening through the streets to fail to save a dead boy walking, Seoul is a little nostalgic. Every so often, she recognises a street sign, or an empty space where a food stand will be in a few years’ time. Other times, she recognises places by the scenarios that have taken place there. She walks a little faster past those places.
Eventually she reaches the house. It’s grey, and the grass is a pathetic excuse for a shade of green. She can’t even be sure that it’s alive. All the blinds are pulled, and there’s a sign on the lawn that loudly exclaims that reporters are not permitted. There’s a bench across the street, and she sits there and watches the house. In the evening, a couple enters the house, arguing – Sooyoung hears one of them say, “At least we’re finally rid of those reporters. And think of the money we’ll save.”
Sooyoung closes her eyes and thinks that she refuses to let Kim Dokja die in a world where the only people to acknowledge his death do so purely because they see it as the removal of a burden. Kim Dokja is an idiot, and Sooyoung hates idiots. She hates Kim Dokja, sometimes. But she will drag him into a new day if it takes her one loop, or twenty, or one thousand.
She opens her eyes again. The world ripples, and then the sun is rising over Seoul.
---
They keep trying.
More often than not, both of them head to the school to try and reach Kim Dokja just before he falls. Some loops, Han Sooyoung has to slap some sense into Yoo Joonghyuk as he pulls out his sword. She always wishes for Kim Dokja a little more in those loops – he knows a little more of Yoo Joonghyuk and his regression depression than she does.
Less often, Yoo Joonghyuk stalks off in the general direction of the school while Sooyoung stays sprawled on the ground where they open their eyes, staring at the sky as time shifts from morning to afternoon to evening. She wonders what kind of scenario this is, and she wonders whether their Kim Dokja is here somewhere, and if he is, is he experiencing this scenario the same as they are? At some point, Yoo Joonghyuk will appear with a blank but defeated expression, and Sooyoung will sit up and fiercely reject the news that he brings, and then she will open her eyes in Seoul at sunrise.
Sooyoung is sick of this. She is sick of not understanding what this stupid scenario is supposed to be for, she’s sick of seeing Kim Dokja on the ground, and she’s sick of rushing into the classroom mere seconds too late to even catch a glimpse of his face. Sometimes she thinks that’s a mercy, though. Yoo Joonghyuk always gets there before her, and he always has a strange kind of grief on his face by the time she comes through the door – the kind of grief when you look at someone who was already dead long before their heart stopped beating. Sooyoung has, at least, been spared that sight. She still feels envious sometimes.
Every loop, something holds them back. An idol is holding a fansign on the street, or the subway breaks down, or the road they decide to take is a construction site. Every loop, they are too late.
Sooyoung refuses to call it quits. They keep trying.
---
It takes far too many loops for Sooyoung to open her eyes and immediately grab Yoo Joonghyuk’s coat. He turns to glare at her.
“I know how to save him,” Sooyoung says, and his glare shifts into something that almost dares to be hopeful.
“How?” he asks. She lets go of his coat.
“There are no constellations here, and there are no dokkaebi,” she says. Yoo Joonghyuk frowns, but before he can question the relevance of this statement she continues. “The loops don’t reset until we reject the ending. I think we’re controlling the scenario.”
“There is no reason that Kim Dokja should die in the first place, then,” says Yoo Joonghyuk. “If we control it.”
“That’s what I thought,” Sooyoung agrees. “But I realised that the scenario window says we need to save the incarnation ‘Kim Dokja’. Which must mean Kim Dokja is here too, so it would make sense for him to be controlling the scenario too. And that guy is... Right now, what he wants is to – die, I guess.”
Yoo Joonghyuk looks thoughtful.
“I think we also subconsciously believe he’ll fall. After so many loops, it’s impossible not to, right? So our belief that Kim Dokja will fall combined with Kim Dokja wanting to fall is making the scenario go that way. But once he dies, only we’re controlling the scenario. And we reject the outcome strongly enough that the scenario resets.”
Yoo Joonghyuk grunts, but his expression is considering. “So to reach Kim Dokja...”
“All we have to do is shape the scenario to our will,” she confirms. “Our will to reach him needs to be stronger than his will to...” She clears her throat. “And then we should convince him to hang around for a while.”
“I see.” Yoo Joonghyuk is silent for a moment.
“Personally, I refuse to believe that guy has so much more influence over this scenario than I do,” Sooyoung says. “I’m an author. I write the stories.” She looks at Yoo Joonghyuk. “And aren’t you a regressor? Don’t you create the ending you want?”
He nods. “And Kim Dokja is a reader.”
“We’ll create a good story for him,” Sooyoung promises. “And we will reach him in time.”
She thinks the world ripples again, but she can’t tell for sure.
“Let’s go save that idiot,” she sighs, stepping forward. “And this better be the last time.”