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It begins with the lack of a living room.
Or rather, with the lack of an entire world.
A familiar hand grabs at Han Sooyoung’s wrist a second before her punch could connect, and in an instant the house they all lived in disappears. As though everything had been erased, what replaces it is a vast and endless expanse of snow-white letters that blurs into the horizon.
She takes it all in.
Her feet sinking into the ground like sand.
The absence of wind.
“…What the hell?”
The snow dampens even the sound of her voice.
Han Sooyoung snaps after a second of stunned disbelief. She whirls at the culprit and shouts at him accusingly. “Kim Dokja!”
Kim Dokja stares at her. His eyes are trembling.
This time, in the days well within their epilogue, the tells come to her faster. There’s something off about the person in front of her, but before she could parse together why, her lips begin to move.
“You. You’re not the Kim Dokja I know.”
“…”
Han Sooyoung lets out a long breath. She rubs at her temple in annoyance.
“I’m sick and tired of your dumb Avatar stunts. If this is how you think you’re getting away with breaking my laptop, I’m going to break your neck.”
This Kim Dokja continues to look at her, lips pressing tight. His eyes choke the air out of her lungs in a way that he should no longer be able to.
It‘s then that Han Sooyoung realizes: this man is not an avatar.
This ability, to take them to this snowfield, and the naive eyes with a gaze heavier than gravity…
The familiar status is something she’d felt only once before. The status that belonged to this universe’s original god.
“…The Oldest Dream?”
At that, the man before her seems to regain some composure, starry eyes blinking.
“I haven’t been called that in a long time,” the Oldest Dream says softly. “Kim Dokja is just fine.”
The ‘Oldest Dream’ standing before her isn’t a kid.
Time passes differently in each worldline. Maybe, just like it had been for Yoo Junghyuk, he had experienced years outside the story of the Star Stream while it had hardly been a few days since her own Kim Dokja woke up.
The Oldest Dream is now the spitting image of Kim Dokja at 28.
And this nearly identical Kim Dokja is using the remnants of his power to cut her apart from her companions.
“What do you want?” she demands, eyes narrowing.
The Oldest Dream hesitates before making his wish.
“…Can we talk?”
“We’re talking right now.”
The barest hint of a smile tugs at the Oldest Dream’s lips. It doesn’t suit his face at all, Han Sooyoung thinks, not with those eyes and not with that expression directed at her. Like he’s looking at a star he can’t reach.
“Is it alright if I tell you a few stories?” the Oldest Dream asks.
Han Sooyoung considers this, arms crossed.
“Do I have to listen?”
The Oldest Dream outright chuckles.
“Since when do you listen to ‘Kim Dokja’?”
“As long as you understand,” Han Sooyoung says, and plops down unceremoniously onto the snow. A cloud of near transparent letters flurry around her, dusting her clothes in a thin sheet of white.
She motions across from her, and the Oldest Dream follows suit, mirroring her. He’s a little too close, but he doesn’t seem hostile so she decides to let it be.
They sit in silence.
Han Sooyoung stares at him.
The man in front of her isn’t thin or frail, but he’s still lanky in the way Kim Dokja used to be in the early scenarios. Before he felled the stars and slayed the gods. Gone are the bruises that once littered his arms; his skin is without blemish, no scars or wounds. The only thing that’s left its impression on him is the sun.
The Oldest Dream studies her with equal intent, eyes searching.
“Well?” Han Sooyoung asks, impatient.
“In the capture the flag scenario…”
Han Sooyoung resists the urge to sock the crap out of him, irritation fresh from dealing with her own Kim Dokja, and tosses her slipper at him instead. It slaps him comically at his stupid face.
“Every version of you won’t shut up about that damn novel!” Han Sooyoung exclaims.
The Oldest Dream smiles wryly, an eye twitching in annoyance. He waves the slipper right at her.
“Why don’t you shut up. I’m the storyteller here.”
“You agreed that I don’t have to listen.”
“I didn’t agree to get hit.”
Han Sooyoung gets lost in the banter, the all too familiar tit for tat, and almost calls him ‘Kim Dokja’.
It seems that the Oldest Dream had fallen into it as well. He bursts out laughing. An innocent laugh, ringing clear and free like bells, one so wide that he can’t help but hold a hand up to hide. The sight mesmerizes her.
They succeeded, then.
The story that Secretive Plotter and the rest of the [999] group raised him through must’ve been a wonderful one, because this ‘Kim Dokja’ smiles so easily.
“You always did say I wasn’t any good with words.”
“What do you mean by…?”
The Oldest Dream looks far away into the snow.
“I wonder… could I...?”
As if to respond to his will, the letters shift. Snow gathers to a singular point, whirling into a shining mass, until it forms a fable that settles into his palm.
[Fable, ‘Capture the Flag’, is telling its story.]
Han Sooyoung knows this well. It‘s a scene written by her hands in the manuscript she wrote.
Even so, the Oldest Dream accompanies its storytelling.
“I kept calling you ugly, but when I saw you for the first time, I thought you were beautiful. And I kept calling you a plagiarist even though I was amazed at how you created your own original developments every time. …Sorry for lying for so long.”
“While I completely agree… what nonsense are you spewing?”
“You don’t have to listen to my nonsense,” the Oldest Dream points out.
Han Sooyoung gives him an incredulous look that he ignores. Another fable forms and plays.
[Fable, ‘The 95th Scenario of the false 1863rd Turn’, is telling its story.]
Han Sooyoung nods.
“Yeah, your other self already told me all this.”
“I did get embarrassed whenever you put your hands in the pockets of my interdimensional coat.”
The odd choice of words finally forces her to ask.
“Did you also experience that yourself?”
She swallows the questions she truly wants to say: Are you also the Kim Dokja that went through the scenarios with us? Did the twisted and cyclical nature of the Star Stream make it so that I would always lose you in a way?
“I felt it all like it was a dream,” the Oldest Dream replies, uncertain. As though he doesn’t know the truth himself.
“So that’s why I can say that I… that we were both fond of the coat that your other self gave me, and how you continued to act as though it was still yours in a different life.”
He tilts his head in amusement before continuing on.
“By the way, that wasn’t exactly subtle flirting. My mother saw it once and wouldn’t live it down.”
Han Sooyoung couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“Bullshit. Kim Dokja is an idiot who wouldn’t know flirting even if it slapped him across the face.”
“He knows more than he lets on,” the Oldest Dream hints as he smiles, unluckily. “Kim Dokja is like that. Knowing too much and never willing to talk until it’s too late.”
Han Sooyoung wants to say something to that. About the unusual self-awareness. About the underlying regret.
But the Oldest Dream doesn’t wait for a response.
“Then, when I stepped into a new story all those years ago, you were there.”
“I was?”
He nods.
“I met the Han Sooyoung of that world. By then, I had already known so much about the you from the scenarios that I kept misunderstanding you when I first met you. You see, you weren’t a writer in my universe.”
Somehow, Han Sooyoung isn’t surprised to know she wasn’t a writer in a world where ‘Kim Dokja’ grew up happy.
It was a talent honed only to save one person.
In a world where Kim Dokja didn’t need to be ‘saved’, Han Sooyoung didn’t need to become a writer. It was because of him that she was special.
Then, Han Sooyoung thinks, who was she without everything that made her exceptional?
“You were very different without your talents.”
As if to respond to her thoughts, the Oldest Dream continues.
“You were much more reserved. You were right that the part of you that liked being in the spotlight was the ‘you’ as a writer. Without that, you seemed… lonelier. You never gained recognition as a prodigy and so the world never allowed you the independence that came with it.
“But you still kept your sharp tongue,” the Oldest Dream adds, with intent. “I could barely keep up when I first met you that I started questioning how the hell my other self did. I was fifteen—no, you were already in high school when we became friends, so I must have been…”
Han Sooyoung listens for as long as she has the patience for. She knows ‘Kim Dokja’ well enough to know he could ramble forever if she lets him.
“Why are you telling me all this?” Han Sooyoung cuts in. She waves a hand dismissively. “I mean, what’s the point?”
The Oldest Dream trails to silence.
She half expects one of his foolish grins when he lies about something but instead he looks away.
“Well,” the Oldest Dream begins, voice small. “You could say I’m leaving a comment behind for all the chapters of the story you gave me.”
The Oldest Dream takes a shaking breath in.
“You said—“ his voice breaks, and it’s Kim Dokja’s voice breaking. “You once said you survived through my words.”
Han Sooyoung lets out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding.
“…Oldest Dream, I’m not your Han Sooyoung.”
The words hang in the air like a fog of ice, frigid and still, as though they were an intangible wall.
“…I know.”
The admission comes slowly.
“But you still have the same heart. This is the world of your writing and… and every time I read of this world, I can find you in it.”
He reaches up, fingers tracing across her cheek with a sentimental reverence best reserved for looking at an old photograph or a well loved book.
Han Sooyoung lets him.
“What happened to her?”
The Oldest Dream’s lips stay sealed, and Han Sooyoung decides to find out for herself.
[Fable, ‘Predictive Plagiarsm’, is continuing its storytelling!]
The fable pieces together the information she gathered, contextualizing and recontextualizing, filling in the blanks as she deduces his past.
The Oldest Dream was raised by the Outer Gods and lived a proper childhood.
An alternate universe that was boring and utterly ordinary, Han Sooyoung considers. If everything was just a story, what tropes would suit Kim Dokja’s time travel fix it? College? ‘And then they were roomates’? The girl next door?
Something clicks in that train of thought, and an outline of a universe begins to form in her head.
An epilogue ‘Kim Dokja’ would want.
An affluent neighbourhood with houses big enough to live together with the outer gods, and a girl who lived in an equally lavish home alone.
She thinks of a teenager leaning back against the cold concrete, a cigarette between her lips and a guard watching her from the corner of his eye.
A cigarette offered as a joke.
As always, her fable shows her fragments of a future that could be.
Laughter. A familiar fool descending into hacking coughs.
An outer god catching a glimpse of the two, and an invitation to join them for dinner.
The fable fragments trickle slowly at first, then seem to skip months, then years—monotonous days of passing by the same row of houses on the way home. Of running into the same girl who lived across the street.
Her hand on a tie, pulling him to the dance floor. Awkward feet.
“If you were this weak, why the hell did you carry my drunk ass home?”
An unlucky smile. Starry eyes that seemed to know too much about her.
Snow piling up.
A prank pulled on a mutual friend.
Two sets of hands parsing through bookshelves.
The fable fragments flash through her mind with increasing speed, letters stumbling over themselves in their desperation to be told—
Hot chocolate served to the man by the hearth. A bookmark.
Gratitude.
Voices, loud, a hand slamming down on papers.
A rejected thesis. A comforting presence wrapped around her.
Their first night.
Wind rushing through her hair. Laughter. A long ride around Jeju Island.
The same lemon iced tea shared.
Love letters. A ridiculous amount of cussing in them.
His arms as he’s finally home from military service.
“If you didn’t keep writing to me, I would’ve died.”
A teasing whistle. “At least you finally bulked up.”
A ring.
A white dress. Getting hungry and having convenience store kimbap with him in a full suit.
A food fight in a parking lot. Trashed wedding attire. Laughter.
So much laughter.
A desk. The clacking of keystrokes at midnight. Arms wrapping from behind her, and a nibble at her ear.
“Again? I still have so many papers to grade—”
An unfinished sentence. Bodies tangled in messy sheets.
Adoption papers. ‘Lee Gilyoung’.
“Nervous?”
“Neither of us had good role models for parents.”
Three sets of shoes lined up by the door.
Fresh laundry.
Parent-teacher interviews, and graduation caps.
Books. A field of butterflies. A picnic for three.
A retired actress. An ex-convict. Two mothers showing up unexpectedly in their lives, and the storm that followed.
A long embrace.
Sunshine.
Photographs lining the walls. Wide smiles.
“I thought you were just being a chunni, but I’m starting to believe your friends really don’t age.”
There was something about getting older that made time speed up. Story fragments blur together, indiscernable, until finally—
The face of an old Kim Dokja, wearing time so well with his grey hairs. He is holding her withered hand with that same ring adorning her finger and the needle from an IV drip pressed into her wrist.
“I hope you have good dreams,” Kim Dokja says.
The tears in his eyes that he never admits to.
Then, the heavy weight and loneliness that accompanies the end of a well loved story.
[Fable, ‘Predictive Plagiarsm’, has plagiarized your other self’s memories!]
A beat passes.
“H-hey,” Han Sooyoung stammers out.
The story that ended so differently from theirs. In that epilogue, ‘Kim Dokja’ was not the one in the hospital bed.
“How long has it really been…?”
When Han Sooyoung looks at the Oldest Dream again, he’s no longer twenty-eight. Laugh lines are imprinted permanently on his features, eyes gleaming sharp from a lifetime of witty exchanges and mischief.
Han Sooyoung could see a life lived to the fullest by reading the lines on his sun-kissed skin. He’s become the story in the only way she would accept.
When he finally opens his mouth to speak, it was Kim Dokja’s voice, rough with age.
“It truly was a wonderful story, wasn’t it?” the Oldest Dream asks.
Han Sooyoung doesn’t trust her voice. She nods, biting her lip.
“Even if you weren’t a writer,” the Oldest Dream assures her. “In every life, you’d still have been my best friend.”
Even in a life without talent, Han Sooyoung was still made special in his eyes.
“I wanted to let you know, one more time,” the Oldest Dream says softly. “That I only made it this far because of the story you gave me. That I loved you more than anyone in the world.”
Han Sooyoung could only listen.
The Oldest Dream had reached the natural end of his long life. His wife had departed earlier—and in his loneliness he found himself in the world of her stories once again.
She knows these words weren’t meant for her. She couldn’t accept them on anyone else’s behalf. So she offers the only thing she can: her bleeding heart and the tears streaming down her face.
The Oldest Dream catches them.
“You are so much like your writing,” the Oldest Dream, now an old man, tells her. “Sad and beautiful. An existence like a lovingly crafted letter.”
The Oldest Dream imagines a lemon candy for her, and she takes it. Remembers it. In another life, she had given him such a thing to quell his tears, but the Oldest Dream’s story was a mirror image of hers.
“I kept telling you to quit smoking.”
Han Sooyoung swallows before responding back.
“And I kept telling you I needed it to work.”
The Oldest Dream’s breath hitched.
“Can you say my name again?”
“Kim Dokja. Dokja.”
The older Kim Dokja smiles, relieved. The expression fits perfectly in the creases of his skin.
Han Sooyoung knows in her memories how many times her other self has seen this sight.
“Sooyoung-ah,” Kim Dokja holds the name in his voice carefully, and Han Sooyoung’s heart aches with the longing in it.
“I once had… a very long dream… that you and I lived together in the world you made just for me. If I had to sleep forever…”
Kim Dokja mumbles with half lidded eyes, that gaze of his still heavy even when burdened with sleep. She feels herself being burned into his memory.
“And if…”
He whispers with effort.
Han Sooyoung holds him tightly even as his head dips.
“If I dream again…”
Han Sooyoung doesn’t hear the rest.
When she blinks, she finds herself back in the dream, back by the big house where Kim Dokja is without a doubt, eternally young and struggling to repair a laptop with the meager skills he retained from his life pre-scenarios.
It was the ordinary life of the two constellations of the nebula, forever 26 and 28.
She looks down at her palms, the silver light, the pale white letters that could be mistaken as snow.
She knows somehow—what these letters were trying to convey. A wish that perpetuated the existence of this world.
I hope I can dream of a world where I continue to exist together with you.
