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1.
Yoo Joonghyuk sits on the roof during lunch. Inside, there’s too many people he has to be stuck with for the entirety of the day. They’re loud, inquisitive, and seek something out of him constantly.
It’s draining.
Joonghyuk’s familiar with prying eyes that watch his pedestal as one of their school’s top achievers. It’s hard to be good at anything without the layer of expectations falling on one’s back like a brand.
It’s even worse when that greedy surveillance moves past a detached sense of admiration and they begin seeing him as something they can use.
“Yoo Joonghyuk, will you meet me after school today…?”
“Hey! Yoo Joonghyuk, would you offer tutoring to a classmate of yours? We’ve been in the same class since middle school!”
“Let me copy for notes for today, Yoo Joonghyuk, please!”
He’s tired of walking down the hallway and forcing himself to nod along to favors that all blend together. After a while, he stops paying attention but it doesn’t seem to stop them.
Joonghyuk’s resorted to finding corners of the school to hide away since nobody seems to get the memo that he’d rather be left alone. Like constantly pestering him during one of his rare breaks will earn his favor. Please.
It’s easier to find solace up here with the afternoon sheen of warmth swaddling the light breeze like a playful greeting instead of the noise of a cafeteria that leaves him praying to get beamed up by aliens on the spot.
It’s peaceful, with only Joonghyuk and his silence, above the stoud figures of Korea’s skyscrapers. They glitter with a promise of a future.
Yoo Mia calls them glass castles.
While the description was endearingly childish, he’s inclined to agree with the assessment. They make him feel small, but in a good way. Like he’s allowed to be less than the figure everyone’s made the amazing Yoo Joonghyuk out to be.
When the universe feels too big, he wouldn’t trade this feeling for anything in the world.
So Joonghyuk sits alone, content, with nothing but his own solitary presence.
That is, until a boy with stars settled deep in his eyes and a big, black bookbag shows up.
The first thing he notices is the surprise on the boy’s pale face. The second is that he’s not wearing any shoes.
What an idiot.
“Ah,” the stupid star boy patters closer and grins. The smile looks fragile underneath a playful exterior as he tilts his head respectfully.
Joonghyuk tries to think of why that was. He dismisses the thought with a wave of irritation as the boy sits down right next to him.
His uniform mirrored Joonghyuk’s, minus the blazer which he had wrapped around his waist. His shirt seemed a size too big, rumpled as if it had been used for a couple weeks without rest, and his pants were for the wrong season.
His skin was almost translucent, causing the bandages wrapped against his face, arms, and legs to almost blend in. Those dark eyes and jet black hair contrasted sharply against his softer features that seemed sapped of color.
Unhealthily so, Joonghyuk notes.
“I didn’t think there would be anybody on the roof today. What are you up here for?” He says, voice a little too high for a believable act of casualty.
His bangs fall over his eyes. “I don’t think a person like you should be here.”
Joonghyuk preferred it when he could see the boy’s whole face. The contrast of his pale skin and the bandages wrapping over his cheekbone was stark when his hair fell like a curtain, driving home the idea of sickness.
“I’m avoiding imbeciles,” Joonghyuk answers pointedly and scoots back a step. “Don’t tell me what I should or shouldn’t do.”
The boy blinks and the smile that shows afterward is far brighter than before. It feels like a flash bomb, like relief.
(There’s a dead look that darts through his eyes that Joonghyuk almost misses, like he was dissapointed somehow. His finger twitches against the rooftop railing.)
“Ah! I’ll join you for our break then!” He claps his hands together cheerfully. “My name is Kim Dokja, I already know yours.”
Joonghyuk’s eye twitches. “I don’t care. Get away from me.”
He refuses to talk to the oddball who had somehow found his hideaway.
It doesn’t stop him from listening to the rhythm of Kim Dokja’s voice as he prattles on about some story he had been reading.
It’s oddly soothing.
2.
Yoo Joonghyuk demands, “Where’s your lunch?”
“Eh?”
“Your lunch,” Joonghyuk repeats slowly. He rattles his black thermos as an example. “Like, the one you bring to school to consume.”
“I don’t…” Dokja trails off, staring down at the floor instead. He flicks a couple pebbles of gravel and watches them bounce a few feet away.
Joonghyuk had escaped the lunchroom to evade fools.
Yet Kim Dokja was easily the biggest one.
He still packed a third meal the next day (bulgogi, fried egg, and rice), wrapped just as carefully as Mia’s, and stuck it in his backpack the next day.
It’s a white lunchbox, blank and spotless.
Kim Dokja seemed just as surprised the next day when Joonghyuk appeared.
“It’s unseemly if you have nothing to eat while I do,” Joonghyuk reasons stiltedly. He chews quietly and motions expectantly when Kim Dokja hesitates.
Neither of them mention that there’s nobody around, making it impossible to be “unseemly” to public knowledge.
Kim Dokja gives him a smile, a suspiciously glassy sheen falling over his starlight eyes as he takes the offering with a quiet thanks.
Joonghyuk has the strange urge to brush those tears away when they catch in Kim Dokja’s eyelashes.
“Remember, I’m not your personal chef,” Joonghyuk warns. “You’ll eat whatever I cook without complaint, alright?”
“Gladly, if it’s as good as this!” Dokja’s cheeks puff like a squirrel.
He flicks his classmate’s nose. “Don’t talk with your mouth full, fool.”
(Joonghyuk’s ears turn red as he looks away.)
3.
“You remind me of my favorite protagonist,” Dokja says casually, voice muffled. He shoves the bento rice into his face at a horrifying speed and Joonghyuk resists the urge to warn him of the choking hazard.
(Still, a warm satisfaction rises as he watches Dokja enjoy the meal so eagerly.
It was probably his pride. Of course Joonghyuk was the best cook, it just improved his title when others other than his kid sister, mentor and her dog, and the middle school girl he was tutoring agreed with the sentiment.)
Joonghyuk doesn’t answer, but Dokja continues to prattle on. “His name is just like yours! Ah, Yoo Joonghyuk, isn’t that peculiar?”
Joonghyuk scowls.
He lets the other continue the one-sided conversation until his thoughts got too insistent of making their way into the conversation.
“You like me better though, right?”
Dokja blinks, “What?”
“Yoo Joonghyuk,” he clarifies begrudgingly, “You like me better than that copy, yes?”
Disdain seeps into his face, the corner of his mouth dipping in disapproval.
It wasn’t for any reason in particular. It would’ve been embarassing to lose favor to a man sharing his name made out of simple words that wasn’t real, is all.
Dokja’s eyes narrow and he grins, toothy and delighted.
“Of course, Hyuk-ie,” he promises, saccharine and endlessly amused. “But you do know that one of you are real while the other is made of words, right? No need to be jealous.”
Despite the obvious tease, the response was almost immediate like there was no question about it. He had spoken without hesitation other than his breath catching for a moment in surprise.
Joonghyuk promised that he would make sure it would stay that way.
It was a matter of pride.
(Not because of the way his stomach churned hearing his name spoken so reverently by Kim Dokja and knowing that it was not him it was directed towards.
It wasn’t because knowing that made him go crazy. That was ridiculous).
“Hey, Joonghyuk-ie?”
Joonghyuk shoves a spoonful of galbi into his mouth petulantly. “Don’t call me that.”
“You didn’t seem to have a problem with it before.” Kim Dokja waves him off. “Do you know how to make dumplings?”
He hands the white lunchbox back to Joonghyuk, who gives him a judgemental look in return.
“I don’t take requests, Kim Dokja.”
Over the next few days, Kim Dokja brings a couple stickers up to the roof to decorate the lunchbox after Joonghyuk mentions briefly that Yoo Mia had gotten into a decorating phase where anything plain seemed to offend her.
(While Yoo Joonghyuk loved his kid sister, he didn’t want rainbow ponies on everything he owned, which were mostly in various concrete shades of black.)
A cartoon squid makes it’s way onto the cover as well as a couple themed ones from the webnovel he enjoyed so much.
Joonghyuk drew the line at the sticker of that damned protagonist’s face. There’s no way that he was having that thing there.
Two less offensive stickers depicting a black sword and a pocket watch that Kim Dokja had given him was now tucked away in his room.
Joonghyuk was unsure of what the two objects means in terms of storytelling, but they had been gifted to him by Dokja, bewilderingly genuine.
He’s not sure where to use something so precious.
4.
“What are you doing?!”
Joonghyuk drops his bag with a clatter and shoves Kim Dokja to the ground, pulse resounding like a drum in the base of his throat.
His hands shake.
What the hell?
This idiot. Yoo Joonghyuk had only been five minutes late and he arrives to find him sitting on the railing like it was a park bench, a strange look glittering in his eyes like the ground was a beckoning siren.
Kim Dokja stares with wide eyes from underneath him.
“Kim Dokja! Don’t stand so close to the edge,” Yoo Joonghyuk snaps, voice sharper than he had thought it would be. “You could fall.”
Dokja wavers, eyes darting from Joonghyuk’s panicked face then away. He balls up the hem of his shirt in his fist.
“O- Okay, Joonghyuk.”
He smacks Kim Dokja over the head for his troubles. It knocks Dokja out of his shell-shocked state as he begins to noisily complain.
Joonghyuk’s muscles loosen at the familiar sound, adrenaline still pumping something fierce through his body.
Yoo Joonghyuks lugs his bag over and demands for them to sit next to the door rather than their usual spot near the railing.
They lapse into a companionable silence.
It had been around two months since Kim Dokja had stumbled across Joonghyuk’s sliver of the world and pushed himself into the fabric of his daily routine. He’s never felt so normal around another person that wasn’t his sister or mentor.
Joonghyuk looks over at the sound of rustling paper.
“…What is that?”
Kim Dokja looks up, tongue flicking out in concentration as he creates a delicate deliberate fold against a square of paper.
“Origami.”
He creases it in half, fingernail sliding across the end to flatten it before propping it up on its side.
“You should eat first,” Joonghyuk tells him, tapping the container against Dokja’s head before placing it on his left side (the right side of Kim Dokja was his only at lunch and he didn’t wish to share it or have a lunchbox seperating them).
Kim Dokja continues the unconcious construction of small paper birds.
“Worried?” Dokja teases.
What a strange question, considering Joonghyuk had obviously almost gotten a premature heart attack just minutes before.
“About you?” Always. “Never.”
Kim Dokja chuckles. He tucks a thin triangle twice, creating some kind of beak. He props it up on Joonghyuk’s water bottle proudly.
Another crane, light blue and just as sharply folded as the first, joins the little army that had begun to accumulate.
“You know,” he says casually, “there’s a Japanese custom that I learned about when I was little—“
“You are little.”
Kim Dokja flings it at him and snickers at Joonghyuk’s dead stare.
“Shush, Joonghyuk-ah,” the nickname renders Joonghyuk quiet rather than the demand itself. “It’s called Senbazuru, the tradition of folding a thousand paper cranes to get a wish.”
“How many have you made?”
“Not too many,” Dokja admits. He tilts his head up and leans against the wall.
Kim Dokja’s eyes close and Joonghyuk studies the way his eyelashes fall against his face.
“Why?” He inquires after a long moment.
Kim Dokja opens one eye as he cranes his head to look over at him, half-lidded and swirling with a secret Joonghyuk burned to unearth.
“I stopped trying.” Kim Dokja looks away to tuck into the rice.
There’s a depth that lies below a such a surface explanation, some kind of context Dokja was keeping close to his chest.
Joonghyuk frowns.
“Why?”
“Inquisitive today, aren’t you?” His smile is a little pained, bitter, but Joonghyuk is stubborn.
“And you should answer. I’m not intrigued very often,” he replies steadily.
Kim Dokja heaves a small sigh. “There are some people who don’t deserve wishes, Yoo Joonghyuk.”
“Perhaps,” Joonghyuk admitted cooly, “but you’re not one of them.”
This time, Yoo Joonghyuk is the one who refuses to meet his gaze, though he can feel Dokja’s eyes on him.
Another crane, sleek black. Dokja places it carefully in Joonghyuk’s lap.
Yoo Joonghyuk picks it up, tracing a finger against the elegant curve of its neck and the indents folded into the thin wings by Dokja’s clean, deliberate creases.
“Teach me how,” he demands.
Joonghyuk goes through roughly fifteen papers, almost a third of Kim Dokja’s stack. Most came out lopsided, to his ire and Dokja’s absolute delight.
Despite how smug he was when analyzing Joonghyuk’s sorry mess, Kim Dokja’s eyes light up on his first attempt that was recognizable as a bird.
“Amazing, Joonghyuk-ah!”
Joonghyuk offers a hesitant, stilted smile that feels awkward directed at anyone who wasn’t Yoo Mia (yet the reaction had come so naturally to his face at Kim Dokja’s approval).
Dokja gasps and pretends to faint on him. Joonghyuk threatens to never bring him a packed meal as he cackles gleefully.
Still, the crane as white as the moon that Joonghyuk had painstakenly crafted ends up hidden in the pocket of Kim Dokja’s backpack.
Maybe it would get him a little closer to his wish.
5.
Kim Dokja was quieter today.
“Did the talk with your mom go alright?” Joonghyuk asks.
He had mentioned plans of meeting up with her that weekend on Friday. Joonghyuk doesn’t know much about Dokja’s family or life outside of the stories he enjoys reading so much.
(Joonghyuk assumes that his mother lives farther away or something with how Dokja talked about her, like he was more accustomed to seeing her walk away than anything else.)
“Yes.” His voice is colder.
Joonghyuk blinks in surprise. He tries again. “Aren’t you hungry?”
The answer is just as dull as before. “No.”
If it were anyone else, Yoo Joonghyuk wouldn’t have cared. It wouldn’t have been his problem.
“You should bring a jacket next time. It’s getting colder,” he persists.
“Okay.”
Joonghyuk’s not sure when Kim Dokja had migrated into a section that wasn’t a part of “anyone else”. It must have occured naturally before he could notice, between rounds of webnovel ramblings, orignami cranes, and lunchbox offerings.
People that Joonghyuk truly cared about were scarce and precious. Kim Dokja had unfortunately become one of them.
“What would you like for lunch tomorrow?”
I’ll make anything you want.
“It’s alright, Joonghyuk-ah.” Kim Dokja slides the box, only halfway finished, back to Joonghyuk.
He looks at peace.
He looks tired.
“Are you sleepy? Did you not rest last night? You should stop reading those novels so late,” Joonghyuk critiques, offput by Dokja’s blatant emptiness. “You look half dead, Kim Dokja.”
“Hm.”
Joonghyuk’s heart skips a beat and lodges itself in his throat. There’s something terrible about listening to Kim Dokja’s voice reduced to a hollow whisper.
It scared him for some reason.
“Goodbye, Yoo Joonghyuk.” Kim Dokja smiles, resting his head against his palm. His other hand brushes against Joonghyuk’s like it was remembering what it felt like for the last time.
“Thank you,” he adds, softly.
Why would he say it like that?
“Kim Dokja,” dread poked hot and angry in Joonghyuk’s chest. “I’ll… see you tomorrow, right?”
Something felt off.
“Of course.” Kim Dokja’s gaze turns distant, fractured, as he stands up. “I have to go.”
The wind blows meekly through his hair as if it was daring a last-ditch attempt to keep him tethered.
Don’t let him leave.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Joonghyuk repeats uselessly. “You’ll be here tomorrow.”
He’s not sure why the need for reassurance is seeping through his body like a poison.
Kim Dokja doesn’t answer.
His skin crawls. A voice trapped inside screams for Joonghyuk to stop him, to reach out and enclose his fingers over Dokja’s wiry wrist and pull him close.
Don’t let him leave.
“Kim Dokja?” Panic creeps into his voice like a silent killer.
The feeling grows as he watched his classmate’s fingers drag against the metal railing, slow and almost longingly. He doesn’t look back at Joonghyuk as he opens the door and dissapears.
Don’t let him leave.
Yoo Joonghyuk lets him go.
Yoo Joonghyuk lies awake as the moon crawls across its ascent of the heavens to hang wistfully in the sky.
It’s been hours since he had put Mia to bed, but his mind hadn’t stopped thinking about Kim Dokja.
It was foolish to lose sleep over that idiot. He would be back tomorrow again after all, with a renewed, lively vigor after doomscrolling webnovels all night.
Kim Dokja would ramble all about it and tease Yoo Joonghyuk about pouting when the conversation wraps back around to his fictional doppelgänger.
Joonghyuk would be able to smack the back of his head for worrying him and complain about his moodiness at lunch the next day.
He closes his eyes and tries to dream.
+1
Yoo Joonghyuk waits on the school rooftop the day after, a pristinely wrapped lunch sat beside him.
He had made Kim Dokja’s favorite.
But the boy never arrives. He doesn’t show up the next day either.
A near hysterical anticipation finds its way into his bloodstream somehow. Kim Dokja really wasn’t good for his heart.
Yoo Joonghyuk waits again anyway with a new lunch. It had been the first time in years where Joonghyuk had cooked the same lunch more than twice in a row.
(Mia had noticed, but hadn’t said anything when she saw the distant look in her brother’s eyes as he watched the water slowly rise to a boil.)
He hates to waste food as well, but looking at the completely untouched interior of the white box, decorated with memories and silly peeling stickers, he couldn’t attempt to eat it himself.
(Joonghyuk had thought about placing it in the fridge and repackaging it, but it seemed rude to hand Kim Dokja second day food. Even if he had left Joonghyuk waiting.
How strange, Kim Dokja seemed to have reprogrammed Joonghyuk completely into a hopeless fool of his former self.
How strange that his life feels wrong without him.)
The lunchbox remains full.
“Where did you go?” Joonghyuk whispered to himself, standing in front of the spot that a small, dark-haired boy who had too many thoughts running around in his head to keep stable had once been. “What did you do, Kim Dokja?”
He looks across the street to the glass castles. They don’t seem so beautiful now, even as they reflected the glimmer of sunlight in their pearly reflections.
Joonghyuk missed the sight of Kim Dokja’s starbound eyes and the smile that put their shining exteriors to shame. He would trade this city scene for any location with Kim Dokja’s voice if he had the chance without hesitation.
“What did you do?”
Joonghyuk only learns, around a week later of agonizing thoughts over Kim Dokja’s whereabouts, that his classmate had visited the rooftop after school one day instead of planning to meet him for lunch.
Life seems to stop after that.
The truth of Dokja’s absence breaks something in him, desperate yet defeated. Entirely contradicting, but when had anything about Kim Dokja made sense?
It takes him much too long to find out what hospital it was. Nobody seemed to even recognize the name Kim Dokja.
(Or they pretended that they didn’t.)
The teachers didn’t meet his demanding glare. The students shifted uncomfortably or shrugged with obvious apathy.
(One boy had the sheer idiocy to run his mouth about Dokja’s past like it was something he should be ashamed of.
His blood had boiled with palpable rage. Joonghyuk doesn’t wait for him to stop talking before punching him in the throat so hard he choked on his stupid voice.)
He finally found out from the nurse, who kept the same brand of bandaids that Kim Dokja wore daily like a second skin and had shook her head at him with such a pitying look.
Starstream Central.
Despite a near-perfect attendance, Yoo Joonghyuk bolts out of the school building without a second thought.
He starts bringing lunchboxes to the hospital instead.
Yoo Joonghyuk doesn’t say anything when Kim Dokja’s eyes fill with tears at the sight of a warm thermos and a couple small packages of junk food sweets that Joonghyuk would have never bought for himself.
Yoo Joonghyuk does notice though, eyes soft as he drops a hand on his shoulder before shoving Kim Dokja over to the side of the bed so he could take over the right half.
The fact that unshed tears were welling in his eyes as well was nobody’s business but his own.
They eat in silence, the quiet only interrupted by the occasional sniffle and the sound of a spoon scraping against plastic.
“I’ll be back,” Joonghyuk promised, decisively swiping the corner of a tissue against the corner of Dokja’s mouth before he could overthink it, “and you will still be here, Kim Dokja.”
“Yeah,” Kim Dokja rasps, voice hoarse and shaky. “I will.”
Joonghyuk arrives the next day, then the next. On weekdays, he runs from the school building to drop off a meal (complaining that his cooking was far superior to hospital lunch).
One Saturday, he brings a little girl with pigtails in tow. She doesn’t speak much in the beginning, clinging to Joonghyuk’s blazer, until Dokja off-handedly mentions a TV show she likes and then he learns all about her favorite characters.
He gets so wrapped up in talking with Yoo Mia, Joonghyuk resorts to feeding Dokja himself so that he wouldn’t forget to eat.
Kim Dokja’s young neighbors somehow get wind of the fact Yoo Joonghyuk found out where their beloved hyung had went and chased him down every day after school until he agreed to bring them to visit.
Lee Gilyoung almost busts down the hospital door and Shin Yoosung cradles the cast around his broken arm like it’s something precious.
He says that he tripped on the stairs and fell when they ask what had happened.
Gilyoung seems skeptical, chocolate brown eyes darting between each cast and bruise that decored Kim Dokja’s body, and Yoo Joonghyuk’s knuckles turn white from where he was standing at the back of the room.
“It’s okay, Ahjussi,” Yoosung says, earnest in such a childlike way that it makes Dokja’s breath hitch. “You just have to hold my hand all the time now so you don’t trip, okay?”
“What?” Gilyoung presses himself closer to the bed, arms wrapping carefully around Dokja’s waist.
(It amazes him how concious Lee Gilyoung was with his touch, though it was no surprise knowing his fondness for handling delicate bugs.)
“No, I’ll protect hyung! You’re still scared of jumping off the curb because you’re so short!
“It means I’m more careful! I’m a better choice! You’d probably trip with him!”
“Nuh-uh!”
To Kim Dokja’s surprise, Joonghyuk starts putting his piece in, listing his own reasons why Kim Dokja should hold his hand, before he can settle the argument between the two elementary schoolers.
He can’t help but snicker as he watches Joonhyuk debate two children, who didn’t even come up to his waist, with nothing but seriousness.
All three whip their heads around to demand which of them he’d rather walk with.
Dokja almost starts sobbing at the reminder that people truly do care about him. The argument is quickly tabled (for now).
Company alongside him or not, Joonghyuk arrives just before twelve with two wrapped lunchboxes in his backpack and a promise to come back the next day.
He always does.
And when Kim Dokja’s healthy enough to be released? Joonhyuk makes a habit of escorting him everywhere.
They start eating lunch together in the library instead.