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“Gnfh—!”
Kim Dokja makes an undignified sound when he collides with the ground. His clumsily flapping wings send dust flying up into his eyes, blinding him for the split second it would’ve taken to right himself.
Maybe it’s because he’d just been an eight-tentacled squid, but his limbs feel a bit slow and jelly-like, like they don’t quite belong to him just yet. But even at full strength, running from Yoo Joonghyuk would be a futile effort.
Yoo Joonghyuk’s hand snaps out to seize his ankle, whipping Kim Dokja down from the sky. It’s with such a force that when his hands fly out to brace himself, his wrists seem to crumple against their collision with the dirt.
Kim Dokja cries out sharply, teeth gritted as pain lances up his arms. With a hiss, he twists awkwardly onto his side, glaring up incredulously at Yoo Joonghyuk who’s yet to let go of his ankle.
“Ow,” he says pointedly, just for the sake of throwing a fit. He laughs uncertainly, wavering slightly under the other’s shadowed expression. “Seriously, what’s gotten into you? I told you to let go!”
With no response, Kim Dokja pushes himself onto his elbows and kicks out, catching Yoo Joonghyuk across the chin.
The hand tightens, painfully so.
“Ow,” he winces, for real this time. “Is this about me disappearing so suddenly? I already apologized, so..!”
He looks up to bargain, but the look on his companion’s face makes him go quiet. A look he’s never seen on this person before, but it distantly reminds him of a certain scenery buried deep in his memories.
The scarred hand does nothing but tighten.
“Hey, say something,” says Kim Dokja, voice rising. “You’re starting to creep me out, Joonghyuk-ah!”
It’s hard to make out Yoo Joonghyuk’s expression, silhouetted as it is against the dim solidness of the clouds.
He laughs again, slightly manic, feeling oddly fragile in this helpless state. “I’m really just talking to myself here? C’mon, it’s embarrassing.”
Yoo Joonghyuk’s bangs lift slightly against the muted winds, drawing back the veil that shadowed his eyes.
Kim Dokja shivers slightly.
“Yoo Joonghyuk, this isn’t funny,” he snaps, patience wearing thin.
Predictably met with more silence, Kim Dokja sighs.
“You’re always so difficult,” he grumbles. He steels himself, and unsheathes his sword in a flash of movement.
It doesn’t connect. Yoo Joonghyuk, the bastard, seems to move quicker than his eyes can follow. Maybe drawing his sword was the wrong thing to do, because he hears the crunch of his own bones before he feels it.
Unbreakable Faith clatters out of reach, but the sound is drowned by the startled shriek wrenched from his chest, wings spasming against the ground.
“What the fuck is wrong with you,” he gasps out, scrabbling at his lifted thigh. He grits his teeth and squeezes his eyes shut against the springing tears. If it weren’t for the Fourth Wall, he wouldn’t be able to speak at all. “Say something, you bastard! What the fuck!”
Yoo Joonghyuk drags him closer, kneeling slowly into the dirt like a hunter reeling in caught prey. Kim Dokja chokes back a whimper, jolting violently at the racks of pain that spears his fractured ankle.
“Let go,” says Kim Dokja again, with a wobbly grin. “You’re hurting me.”
Something like that has never once made Yoo Joonghyuk falter, but he doesn’t know what else to say.
Yoo Joonghyuk’s movements are mechanical when he twists Kim Dokja onto his stomach, pressing a knee into the small of his back to lock him in place. His heart thuds frantically, smothered against the dirt.
“It has to be this way.” Yoo Joonghyuk rumbles low enough to make the ground shake.
“Be what way,” cries Kim Dokja in frustration. “You’re not making any damn sense!”
He feels a tug on one of his wings. Careful, but strong enough to vaguely hurt. His wing spasms slightly, smacking against his companion’s shoulder.
“The wings? I’m not putting them away,” Kim Dokja says stubbornly. “Not until you let me go.”
It’s petty and probably useless, but it’s just about the only leverage he has in this situation.
“You won’t,” says Yoo Joonghyuk, but Kim Dokja can’t tell if it’s meant in affirmation or accusation.
“Th-that’s right,” Kim Dokja huffs. “If you care to explain what the hell you’re doing, then maybe—”
He cuts off when a large hand presses flat between the base of his wings, locking him in place. The other, warm and rough, circles around the base of one. It’s a strange feeling, and he shivers against such a firm touch at that sensitive place.
“Yoo—Yoo Joonghyuk?” He laughs nervously, high and scared. “What are you doing, Joonghyuk-ah?”
“Kim Dokja,” is all Yoo Joonghyuk says.
It’s a low sound that seems to echo distantly in an awful and haunted hollowness that he’s only ever heard being shaped around his own name by one other person before.
Mother.
“...Yoo…?”
His voice is small, uncertain, staring back at his companion who suddenly feels like anything but.
“You don’t need these anymore,” says Yoo Joonghyuk, and rips it away.
Kim Dokja screams. The Fourth Wall isn’t enough to unblind him.
He feels the bones being wrenched from their sockets, dragging out strings of gore that cling to snapping cartilage, skin tearing around blooms of red until the feathers have nothing more to fade into.
His untouched wing beats madly against the ground, nearly lifting them both with its violent thrashing. A hand clawing frantically at the dirt, the other spasming uselessly as the pain seeps from his back to the tips of his fingers.
The world shifts. Kim Dokja feels strangely light for a moment, and he distantly hopes he’s about to pass out or die. Instead, that hope is cut off by the heavy thump of something large hitting the ground. His blinded eyes flicker upwards.
His wing, several feet from where he lays, a feathered heap of black and red. The dust settles as he stares shakily.
“Ah…”
Kim Dokja chokes around his own whimper, staring dazedly at the trembling scenery before him.
Why? Why? he wants to say, but it’s crushed instantly when he feels a pull at his other wing.
“Yoo—! Yoo Joongh—ghk—!”
His frantic pleas are ignored, crumbling into these unfamiliar sounds that feel foreign to his convulsing throat. The Fourth Wall shakes and splinters beyond repair.
Knowing what’s happening the second time makes it worse—this time he knows that the pull beneath his skin is the tendons clinging desperately to his insides, splitting apart as they’re dragged inside-out. That the popping in his skull is the sound of bone being pulled in directions they shouldn’t, writhing from their sockets and splintering when they can’t.
Maybe it’s the blood slicking his feathers, or the faintest falter of the silent regressor, that his spasming wing slips free from Yoo Joonghyuk’s hold, slapping wetly against the ground and ripping a startled shriek from Kim Dokja.
Kim Dokja doesn’t think when he looks back at the sudden lightness of Yoo Joonghyuk staggering backwards, too light-headed to even feel regret for looking back. And in a fit of delirious terror, he snaps around to face forward and begins to crawl with broken hands.
His wing is dead weight, severed from its nerves with nothing but splinters of bone attaching it to what remains of his scapula, the cartilage twisted oddly from where it clings precariously to the mess of gore rising from his back, wrenched backwards like a lever pulled too far. Each inch desperately crawled, each full-body tremor sends heat from his core to the rest of him in pulses so agonizing it stops registering as ‘pain’ and simply a desperate need for everything to stop.
(What if he regressed, and there was no Kim Dokja?
Sitting alone in the apocalyptic wasteland, Yoo Joonghyuk had thought of this.)
It’s unknown to either how long Kim Dokja crawls for, but it mustn’t have passed a few seconds of Yoo Joonghyuk standing there, watching his life and death companion in this pathetic, whimpering state, eyes shaking and lips parted with an expression you could only dedicate to the world’s most pitiful god.
“Kim Dokja,” Yoo Joonghyuk feels himself breathe, feels himself shuddering with the way his reader flinches violently at the sound.
The regressor kneels like he would before an altar, eyelids fluttering at the soft, drawn-out siren cry Kim Dokja makes when he presses a hand against that bloodied back, unblemished white clashed hauntingly with the pillars of black-red gore that rise from ruptured flesh.
“Nooooo,” wails Kim Dokja, broken by these pathetic hiccups that fall apart into wordless babbles of terror as Yoo Joonghyuk circles a blood-stained hand around what remains of the lifeless wing.
Yoo Joonghyuk falters. He never knew someone like Kim Dokja could make such a sound.
With no blade and two hands, Yoo Joonghyuk pulls the bleeding appendage with the same care of unpotting a rising plant with cupped hands. The joints creak and snap as he unhinges the scapula from its resting place, unearths the wing from its roots.
Instead, Yoo Joonghyuk will sow his own, strong and winding things that will latch this undying demon to the conquest of mortality, fragile in ways the undying could never be, with the threat to shatter as soon as he thinks to writhe.
By the time Yoo Joonghyuk frees him of his second wing, Kim Dokja is reduced to a formless, voiceless thing, and only then does Yoo Joonghyuk step back from his shaking canvas.
Twin, pink-stained bones rise with Kim Dokja’s feeble gasps, pulled askew from where they rested and standing tall as if they’d skewered the constellation themselves and pinned him to the earth—pillars rising from crimson pits that bubble with each rattling breath Kim Dokja takes, his jagged breaths laced with the softest of whines.
Hearing this, seeing this, Yoo Joonghyuk feels strange. Overwhelmed. His hands tremble, and his eyes blur faintly.
He knows it, and takes a moment longer to recognize it.
Excitement.
A pure, hot thing. The Kim Dokja at his feet is a foreign creature, small and sorry against that larger-than-life persona, and Yoo Joonghyuk has no one to lie to and say he hates it.
“Why,” croaks Kim Dokja, a wretched sound that makes his heartbeat stutter and rattle wildly within its cage.
Yoo Joonghyuk is not a good person. He knew this when he chose to pluck these wings instead of tie them down. To refuse to him the mercy of a blade that would be cleaner, quicker, just to feel the heat of life beneath his palms.
And if Yoo Joonghyuk had used a sword instead of his hands, then Kim Dokja would not be in such a state. Pliant beneath him, with shaking eyes that won’t look away from Yoo Joonghyuk.
He wishes he could say that it pains him to do this, how he wishes so. This inkling of guilt fizzling away in his chest is all he can cling to, as if that little candle burning his palm is enough to remind him he’s human. But for someone who lives like Yoo Joonghyuk, a thing as small as this is bound to be snuffed in time.
It’s all because of Kim Dokja, thinks Yoo Joonghyuk. If he weren’t the fool he is, with his arrogant smiles and sad eyes, then he wouldn’t have to do something like this. If he never became something untethered, out of reach.
“It has to be this way,” Yoo Joonghyuk murmurs as he stoops low to gather Kim Dokja in his arms.
He’s careful not to touch that mangled back—the want for such needless cruelty has seeped away. Yoo Joonghyuk is angry and holds vile thoughts, but now, he just wants this one thing.
A forearm braced under the constellation’s thighs, a calloused hand sheltering the back of his neck. He holds Kim Dokja like this, chest to chest, feeling each flinch that accompanies every step he takes as if it’s his own. The still-weeping blood coats his front, melding the two into one.
Even still, in this delirious state, Kim Dokja’s arms come up to curl limply around Yoo Joonghyuk’s shoulders like he’s scared he’ll fall without his wings. Yoo Joonghyuk shakes.
There is screen after screen of their companions demanding a response, begging to hear from the two who disappeared without a trace.
From Han Sooyoung— Where the hell are you two? Hey, you bastards! Hey!
From Lee Hyunsung— Please, Joonghyuk-ssi, we want to protect him too.
From Jung Heewon— Don’t do anything stupid, Yoo Joonghyuk!
From Lee Jihye— Master, why aren’t you replying? Where’s Ahjussi? Master?
From Yoo Sangah— Joonghyuk-ssi, I know you’re feeling complicated things, but please don’t act rashly. Just tell us where you and Dokja-ssi are, I’m sure we can work out something together if—
Yoo Joonghyuk dismisses them, and tells Kim Dokja that he’ll rip out his legs too if he responds. Kim Dokja, shaking and drooling, manages little more than a gurgled whine.
“You don’t need them,” he whispers, relishing in the way his companion shivers with the breath against his ear. “You don’t need them. Kim Dokja.”
He has always hated Fate for everything it is. If it’s Kim Dokja’s fate to be a lonely pillar of salvation, then it’s Yoo Joonghyuk’s to tear down whichever stars it is that say so.
[The exclusive skill ‘Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint Lvl. 2’ has concluded.]
Listening to these thoughts, Kim Dokja breathes out shakily and the words fade away.
Hah, thinks Kim Dokja distantly as he shakes and shakes. The bastard really did it.
Yoo Joonghyuk doesn’t need to know about the warmth that’s settled in this unfeathered body, permeating in ripples with each thump-thump of Yoo Joonghyuk’s heart against his, almost hotter than the molten fire that coats his back.
“Kim Dokja,” Yoo Joonghyuk rumbles. “Kim Dokja.”
A soft call, without inquiry. Yoo Joonghyuk says his name, just because he can.
“Kim Dokja.”
And Kim Dokja cries with pitiful sounds, wobbling with each dip of the regressor’s steps. His tears slide between their touching skin. He shakes and shakes and shakes.
“Kim Dokja.”
Kim Dokja’s eyes slide shut in euphoria.
He’s never felt safer in his life.