Chapter Text
Kim Dokja doesn’t look like his mother.
They have the same eye colour, sure, but the resemblance stops there. His face is the splitting image of his father (if he could even still be called that; Kim Dokja doesn’t like it, the fact that they share the same blood, the fact that he looks like the one man his mother will never not hate). His hair is the same colour, too, and it’s a frustrating thing. It’s a tiring thing. He hates it.
Kim Dokja is not his mother’s child.
Not in a literal sense—she’s his biological mother and she’d raised him, however brief a period it might’ve been, but they don’t share anything. Their faces are different, their temperaments; nothing of his resembles her. He is not his mother’s child.
But when he looks down at his hands or stares off over the shoulder of a stranger and takes a peek at what they’re reading—a newspaper, something on their phone—he is reminded of her. Bitterly, stomach slowly sinking, he remembers reporters crowding all around him, his house, his school. Then: his aunt, his leaving, his forced independence at an age too young.
And then he forces himself to look away and brings his hands to his face. And then he wipes his hands down his face and inhales, and exhales, and inhales and exhales over and over again.
The train is full to the brim. The stranger standing in front of him is frowning, looking at him as if he’s insane. Kim Dokja tries to breathe quieter. He screws his eyes shut and thinks: Fuck.
Fuck, because flashes of the spine of a specific book appear in his mind and he wants to cry, and today is a terrible day. Today is a terrible day he should’ve spent with a cake and some party poppers and gifts. Today is horrible. It’s terrifying.
If he was any other person—someone better, someone with more worth, someone who was their mother’s child—he would’ve spent a few hours of his day smiling and receiving gifts. He would’ve been blowing out birthday candles.
He thinks: he would’ve been with his mother.
(Lee Sookyung looks haggardly. This is the freshest memory of her in Kim Dokja’s mind.
He’d stopped visiting her for years now, ever since the release of her book had done nothing but haunt him. When he meets her for the last time, Kim Dokja doesn’t tell her the fact that he’d bought the book when it first came out, way before reporters caught wind of it and stormed into his school and filled his childhood.
He doesn’t tell her he carries it like a personal reminder instead of a lucky charm. He doesn’t tell her how the book’s pages have been left unread but stained with tears, or how he curls up into a ball every time a day gets too hard and he realizes he doesn’t have anyone by his side.
He doesn’t tell her he’s only read the first and last pages of her book. He doesn’t tell her how he’s only read the last lines she wrote on those two pages, acknowledgments—My lovely Dokja. My sweet boy. My son—and he’ll never tell her, he thinks.
The last time they’d met, he was just about to turn 16. The glass separating them is foggy; there’s a bandage pulled taut over Kim Dokja’s cheek. His mother’s eyes are lifeless. She doesn’t ask how or why he’s got a bandage there.
Then Kim Dokja feels a heat building up behind his eyelids and thinks he is weak. He is a crybaby. He is everything no parent would ever want.
He leaves the prison wanting to cry and thinking, reminding himself, over and over again, that he will never tell his mother that he loves her. He promises himself this, tells himself that he doesn’t deserve to do that no matter what he does.
He doesn’t realize that he’s so much like his mother in this way.
The second Kim Dokja leaves, Lee Sookyung looks down at her trembling hands and regrets ever publishing her book. She hates the glass separating them and thrashes and wails hysterically—like she’s insane! Like she’s lost her mind! as the guards would so eloquently put it—after her son leaves.
My son, she thinks, grieving—and maybe she really has lost her mind, because who grieves for someone who is alive? Someone who’s been physically there in front of them so many times? Still, she mourns: My son, my son, my son.
Before she knows it, she’s crying until her eyes are red; she fears her hair will fall out from regret rather than stress. The guards are escorting her back to her prison cell. Some of them are scowling. Some of them pity her. Lee Sookyung feels as if she’s aged 50 years.
She wishes she could’ve published something a little different. She thinks that maybe she’d have a chance, someday, to publish some sort of sequel, an apology.
I’m sorry, she imagines the first line would be: I’m sorry, Dokja. I’m so sorry.
Then she doubles over and holds her face in her hands, sitting on the prison bed. It’s cold. She knows she’ll never get to tell Kim Dokja any of this. She knows this like she’s known this her whole life.
She hates it.
Kim Dokja is his mother’s child like this.)
Kim Dokja exhales against his palms.
A white puff of breath rises from his mouth. His knuckles are red. There’s the hint of cigarettes in the air; he hears his coworkers’ distant murmuring from the smoking area right behind him, to the right.
He’s 25 now, not that it really matters. He spent this year’s birthday like all the others: no cake, no candles, no gifts, nothing. The day passes like a normal day. He doesn’t mind it at all.
Months later and the season has already started to shift into winter. It shouldn’t be a special day. When Kim Dokja was a child it was his favorite day, but years later, it isn’t—it shouldn’t be.
But when he gets home from work and sees the bakery near his apartment building—its lights are warm-tinted, inviting, and he feels a sudden rush of nostalgia—his feet are taking him there before he knows it, and the door opens with the chime of a bell.
“Welcome!” a youthful employee greets him cheerily, clasping her hands together and shooting him a perfect customer service smile, “Are you looking for anything specific? How can I help you?”
Kim Dokja should be at home.
He blinks, reminds himself that there isn’t a reason for him to be here today. It isn’t his birthday, and even if it was, he wasn’t one to celebrate.
There’s a short silence. Kim Dokja shouldn’t be here.
He inhales sharply.
“A cake,” Kim Dokja says, eventually. He turns his gaze away to the floor. His ears are red, not from the chill, not from the winter air. It’s embarrassing, as an adult, to do something like this, but maybe that’s just him. “A birthday cake, no specifics. Just— the cheapest that can be made. A candle or two, if you have any. And, ah, some writing in icing, if that’s okay.”
“Oh,” the employee smiles at him softer. “What would you like me to write, ahjussi?”
A million things go through his head.
He hasn’t paid for the water or the electricity. He needs to save up for some convenience store lunches. He has to take the train every morning for work. He goes home the same way.
The cake is too much; he hasn’t nearly saved enough money from the previous months. He would need to cut back on a few things to afford this. It isn’t worth it.
“It’s for my mother,” he tells the employee, despite everything.
“Ah. So, would a simple ‘Happy Birthday, Mom!’ do?”
Kim Dokja would need to cut back on his food expenses. He wouldn’t be able to afford heating for a while, either. The forecast channel reported how the next few days will be some of the coldest of the month.
Kim Dokja musters up a smile. “Yes,” he says. All of a sudden, he feels like a child again—a boy, excited, fresh out of school, planning to surprise his mother by buying a cake for her for her birthday all on his own. “Yes, that’ll do.”
He leaves the bakery with the smallest cake he’s ever seen, one candle, and an emptier wallet.
When he reaches his apartment and stumbles inside like a drunken man (and this is a sick realization, a sick comparison; it’s too much like someone he knew, someone he wishes never existed in his and his mother’s life), his shoes are left near the door, and he slips his socks off as he makes his way to his small kitchen with wobbly legs.
Kim Dokja turns off the lights and takes a lighter from one of the kitchen drawers.
He doesn’t sing, doesn’t clap to the tune of any birthday song. He doesn’t prepare any seaweed soup. He hasn’t visited his mother in more than 9 years.
He blows out the candle, puts the cake in the refrigerator, tucks himself into bed, and falls asleep shivering.
At some point, everything starts blurring together.
He remembers a few things—like the subway and his companions, and his insistence to sacrifice himself once, twice, thrice, again and again, to protect them (and this is so uncannily similar to his mother’s way of protecting him. He is his mother’s child this way, too; he doesn’t know how to feel about this). He remembers the fourth wall, remembers Persephone, Hades, Biyoo, his precious kids.
He remembers meeting his mother again at twenty-eight. It’d been so long, then. She sounded the same. He’d wondered then if she’d ever loved him. She must’ve wondered the same, too. And despite the fact that he’s lived his entire life haunted by something she created, despite the fact he claims to hate her, despite the fact he hasn’t visited her in years, he doesn’t not love her.
That’s impossible, he thinks, because the thing about children, about adults who were children, and adults who are their mother’s child, is that they will never not love their mother. It’s inevitable. It’s something set in stone.
But it’s not like he doesn’t hate her. Foolishly he blames his mother for most of his childhood. Foolishly he believes that something would’ve changed if his mother actually said something during his visits. And maybe nothing about this is foolish; maybe he’s right about everything. Maybe she should’ve been there for him, maybe he should’ve been there for her, but the past is the past, and neither he nor his mother can do anything about it now.
Time flies like this. He doesn’t have to buy anymore ridiculously small birthday cakes in winter since the apocalypse had started. His companions don’t know his birthday until after some time passes. Han Sooyoung asks him to give his mother a chance to redeem herself.
He enters a hospital room and sees his mother on a hospital bed. He hears her heartbeat through the beeping sounds of the monitor. It smells like antiseptic. She’s sleeping. It’s peaceful. Kim Dokja almost forgets that they’re living in an apocalyptic world now.
He steps back out of the room.
Kim Dokja doesn’t tell his mother he loves her. His mother doesn’t tell him she loves him.
Like mother, like son.
(There’s a forever-echo he’s pushed to the back of his mind. It’s at times like this that it’s at its loudest. The echo rings in his ears. He wants to cry. He’s hiding from the rest of the company. He doesn’t have his mother’s book with him, but:
My lovely Dokja. My sweet boy. My son.
Deafening, deafening, desperate. Kim Dokja tucks his knees under his chin and clasps his hands over his ears and fuck, his eyes feel hot.
My lovely Dokja, the echo says. My lovely Dokja. My sweet boy. My son. And Kim Dokja mourns and grieves and cries to himself in secret. He ignores the constellations and hides and hides and hides, and then he thinks, and wishes, and wants to ask his mother why she’s never told him she loves him. Why she’s never called him any of those words she’d written on the first and last pages of her book even after years.
In a dream that night Kim Dokja sees Lee Sookyung standing in front of him with open arms. Her smile is warm, and she’s in a dress he vaguely remembers as her favorite since he was a child. She tells him that she loves him, that she will never not love him, and it’s something he knows, and it’s something he’s always doubted.
He is a child in that dream—a boy no older than 15. All of a sudden the scene shifts: he’s in his middle school uniform, staring at the skyline right outside his classroom’s window. His mother is here and she’s hugging him and he’s hugging her. There are no reporters. There is no Song Minwoo.
Lee Sookyung hushes him like a mother would to her child when he starts crying, but Kim Dokja only cries harder, louder. She tells him how she’s sorry for everything and Kim Dokja cries and cries and cries and hugs her even tighter.
Then he opens his mouth and says, tears rolling to his lips, mixing with his snot: I love you.
I love you, I love you, I love you. I wish you knew how to help me.
Kim Dokja doesn’t remember the rest of the dream, but he wakes up with dried tears around his eyes.
He leaves a single flower at his mother’s bedside table when he wakes far past midnight; at that moment he doesn’t notice how she’s only pretending to be asleep. At that moment, Lee Sookyung realizes how she isn’t fit to be called his mother.
Lee Sookyung doesn’t realize that even with Persephone and Hades now in his life, Kim Dokja has only ever wanted her as his mother.)
(Thousands of different worldlines whizz past Kim Dokja. His eyes feel heavy and he wants to rest but he can’t.
He can’t remember a lot of things from his original worldline, but he remembers he has a mother. He remembers he loves her. He knows she loves him. He still wants her to tell him that herself even then.
He is his mother’s child. Even with all their strained conversations and loud arguments, even with all the shouting, even with the fact that she hasn’t been the best mother to him, he’d have it no other way.
Briefly he spots a crying child clinging to his mother after the first scenario ends. This worldline’s Yoo Joonghyuk is staring at them thoughtfully, and Kim Dokja follows.
…
A few seconds pass.
My lovely Dokja. My sweet boy. My son.
Eventually, the child gets tired, and even though his mother is exhausted out of her mind, her clothes bloodied and in tatters at its ends, she’s picked him up and is rocking him in her arms.
I’m here for you, the mother whispers to her child. She’s on the verge of crying, too, Kim Dokja belatedly notices. She kisses her son’s head. I’m here for you. There’s not a day where I won’t be.
Promise? the child drawls, sleepy.
Promise, his mother says, giving him a soft smile even though the world is ending all around them, right at this moment.
Then, this worldline’s Yoo Joonghyuk finally looks away and Kim Dokja feels like crying.)
And then he wakes up to blinding hospital lights and rhythmic beeps from a heartrate monitor. There’s the smell of antiseptic and bouquets of flowers stacked all around him.
He sees and meets Han Sooyoung first, who throws her arms over him immediately, forgetting how weak a body he has now, crying her eyes out. Yoo Joonghyuk is next, and the infamous supreme king looks on the verge of tears. Kim Dokja can’t help but think how hilarious it is.
Then the rest of the company floods his hospital room, then his favorite constellations. The company tells him how his current body is broken, how they’re still trying to fix it, how it’d shrunken to his body from when he was 15-16 years old when they’d travelled to a different worldline to redo the scenarios in a desperate attempt to save him and oh. Oh, he’s missed so much, hasn’t he?
Yoo Joonghyuk has finally been allowed to age. He has gray hairs, he has wrinkles. Han Sooyoung is a professor. She’s living with Yoo Sangah. Something happened between Jung Heewon and Lee Hyunsung. Biyoo can talk, and Lee Gilyoung and Shin Yoosung are so much bigger now.
Tears spill from Kim Dokja’s eyes before he can stop them. The whole company fusses about him, asks him what’s wrong, but Kim Dokja says nothing. Instead, he reaches out to his kids, his lovely kids, and hugs them however tightly he can in his current state.
Lee Gilyoung and Shin Yoosung are evidently confused, but Kim Dokja is crying far too much to offer any sort of explanation, so they just hug him back—so gentle, so careful, oh, they’ve grown up so well—and try to crack a few jokes to lighten up the mood. It feels like the hug will last forever. Kim Dokja doesn’t stop crying even after hours.
Though when he does stop crying, his kids tell him how they’ve missed him and Kim Dokja feels like crying again, but he can’t, so he just hugs them again instead and hopes this can convey everything he wants to say to them. I love you, for example, and then: I’m sorry for everything. You don’t have to forgive me, but I want to be there for you. I’m so proud of you. You grew up so well. I love you, I love you, I love you, never doubt that I do.
It’s then that Kim Dokja finally understands Lee Sookyung.
When everyone’s said their goodbyes for the day, they leave one by one. Han Sooyoung and Yoo Joonghyuk linger for a while. Yoo Joonghyuk leaves first, Han Sooyoung sticks around for a while in silence, before opening her mouth.
“Your mother,” Han Sooyoung says. She clears her throat, looks at a suddenly very interesting-looking white wall. “She’s living with me and Sangah. She doesn’t know you’ve woken up.”
Kim Dokja frowns.
“I’ll tell her about you when I leave,” Han Sooyoung says.
A thousand possible scenarios flash through Kim Dokja’s mind in an instant. Dread crawls up his skin.
He rushes to say, “Then don’t—”
“—leave?” Han Sooyoung snickers. “She loves you, you know.”
She’s never told Dokja that.
Han Sooyoung catches the brief look of doubt on Kim Dokja’s face in the corner of her eye and swivels around to look at him fully.
“Look,” she begins, hands in her coat pockets. The sun is still setting. “I don’t know the shit you’ve been through even though I wrote about, like, 99% of your life to bring you back, funnily enough, and I won’t say I don’t care because I do, but I know about mothers who hate their children and children who hate their mothers. You two aren’t like that.”
Then when Kim Dokja remains silent, she sighs.
“You don’t have to forgive her,” she tells him, picking up a familiar flower at his bedside. There’s a short pause before she gives it to him and continues, saying, “You don’t have to do anything if you want to.”
Kim Dokja feels his mouth dry. “But she’s my mother,” he says.
“I know,” Han Sooyoung grins. “You’re exactly like each other. It’s plain as day.”
“Oh,” Kim Dokja says.
And then Han Sooyoung opens one of the drawers near his hospital bed, shoving away a crowd of flowers in the process, and fishes out a book.
At first, Kim Dokja is confused; he doesn’t understand what Han Sooyoung’s trying to do, but then he sees the cover and his eyes widen.
“Had to fight tooth and nail to get this,” Han Sooyoung mutters, places the book in Kim Dokja’s hands, “No one’s publishing this sort of shit right after a whole apocalypse, so Sangah and I banded together and begged some old-timey book hoarder for their copy, and here we are.”
Kim Dokja opens the first page and is greeted by too-familiar words.
My lovely Dokja. My sweet boy. My son.
“Give it a read, Kim Dokja,” Han Sooyoung says. “Your mother really loves you, you know?”
Kim Dokja has always known that.
His lips press into a thin line.
“I know,” Kim Dokja whispers, then inhales sharply. “I’ll read it, Han Sooyoung. Thank you.”
Han Sooyoung huffs, embarrassed by his gratitude, mumbles out a small whatever and turns on her heels and leaves.
Kim Dokja misses his mother.