Work Text:
The snowfield should scare him.
Lee Hakhyun is pretty sure of this. He passed out in the real world, in the middle of an apocalyptic scenario, and was jerked out of whatever was passing for reality these days only to wake up in a field of untouched white snow.
He should be terrified.
But lying here, in the cold, with the snow seeping into his clothes—he’s never felt more relaxed.
The sky is as white as the ground he lies on. There is nothing to see. Nothing to see, no matter what direction he looks in.
Lee Hakhyun’s heart settles for the first time in too long.
He doesn’t know how long he lies there, letting the cold numb him. Numbness, he has learned, feels close enough to warmth. The way that emptiness feels close enough to happiness.
Maybe he lies there for hours. For days. For years.
Until soft footsteps interrupt him.
He tilts his head to look in their direction—and he finds him. The man that everyone has been searching for.
Kim Dokja stands in the field of snow, a smile on his face as he holds a hand up in greeting.
His white coat makes him a part of the snow. A part of all of the nothing around them.
“Aren’t you cold?” Kim Dokja asks, amused.
Lee Hakhyun leans deeper into the snow.
“No.”
“You look happy.”
“I am, I think.”
“It makes sense that you would be.”
“Does it?”
“This is your home, isn’t it?”
He says it with such confidence. As if this is a fact.
“My home?”
“Isn’t it?” Kim Dokja says again. “You’re a writer. And this is the blank space where you create.”
Lee Hakhyun looks closer at the emptiness, eyes wide.
Is that what the snowfield is? The empty, unwritten pages?
Is that—what his home is?
He reaches a hand up into the sky, catching snowflakes on his fingertips.
They dissolve into nothing in his hands.
It feels like hope.
It feels like a world that Lee Hakhyun can actually change.
/
In the emptiness of the snow, everything else ceases to exist.
Lee Hakhyun is no longer the man possessing Cheon Inho. He no longer has the fate of the world in his hands. He no longer has a duty to protect all his readers and find an ending for this never ending story that hopefully won’t end in total annihilation.
Here, he is a man knee deep in the snow, fingers clutching at the cold as he tries to shape it into something.
“Is that a snowman?” Kim Dokja asks curiously.
He’s crouched in front of him, absently shifting his hands through the snow, but not daring to build anything with it at all.
“It might be,” Lee Hakhyun says. “Let’s find out.”
Kim Dokja holds a fistful of snow in his hands, and lets it melt through his fingers.
“Have you ever built a snowman?” Lee Hakhyun prompts.
Kim Dokja shakes his head.
All these days, years, centuries in the snowfield, and Kim Dokja hasn’t done the simplest of things.
“It’s easy,” Lee Hakhyun says. “Want to help?”
Kim Dokja shakes his head. “This is your home,” he repeats again. “It isn’t my place.”
“What do you mean?”
“You write,” Kim Dokja says. “I just live.”
Lee Hakhyun frowns. “That’s not you at all.”
That has never been Kim Dokja. He’d fought tooth and nail to write the story that he wanted, shaping the ending with his own blood. He has never just lived.
Kim Dokja loved stories, and they loved him, and it left him trapped in a cycle of creation and destruction.
Kim Dokja smiles. It looks sad.
“You must be thinking of my other half,” he says. “The one who buried himself in the story. But Hakhyun-ah, I really do just live.”
It hits him then, who this Kim Dokja is.
Not a figment of his imagination. Not some illusion of heaven.
This is the Kim Dokja who wasn’t enough.
49%.
/
It strikes him then, that they are reflections of the same emptiness.
Kim Dokja, with all his missing memories, and nothing to take their place.
Lee Hakhyun, with stories filled in his heart to make up for the fact that he doesn’t know who he truly is.
Fingers buried in the snow, trying to shape it into a person that he wants to be.
There’s an idea in the literature world that the best writers are the tortured artists. The ones who have lived such miserable lives, who have felt every horrifying emotion on the spectrum, and who pour all that misery into their craft.
Lee Hakhyun isn’t a tortured artist.
He’s felt like three emotions in his life.
He doesn’t write because he has too much to say about the world. He doesn’t write because he doesn’t know what else to do with all the terrible things inside of him.
He writes because—there’s nothing inside of him at all.
Who said you can’t make something out of emptiness? It’s how they’ve all lived this long.
/
His first novel wasn’t anything popular.
The Origin of Memory. A novel he doesn’t like to talk about, because of how bad the reception was, but the novel that is closest to his heart.
He wasn’t a great writer back then, he’ll admit. His prose was boring, his characters were either too identical to each other or so desperate to be different that they ended up being caricatures. He was young when he wrote that novel, and more than a little stupid, and the final published product was less of the literary masterpiece that he’d envisioned and more of a desperate, too-long disaster that was trying to say—
Does it matter what’s real and what isn’t, if you can’t remember any of it?
The protagonist of The Origin of Memory had no memories of his reality. All the happy memories in his heart had been memories he’d hoped to have.
And yet—he’d been happy.
Lee Hakhyun doesn’t know who he really is. He doesn’t know if he’s lived the life that he thinks he’s lived, or if the fragment of Kim Dokja in his chest is a sign of something else.
Something more frightening.
He doesn’t know, but it doesn’t change anything.
He’s lived a happy life.
It doesn’t need to be real.
And the Kim Dokja in front of him, with no memories to fill the emptiness that his other half had left behind—
“You can make it up,” Lee Hakhyun says.
“Make what up?”
“The past. To fill in the parts that you don’t remember.”
When nothing exists, it means that anything can exist.
If he isn’t someone, he can be anyone.
Pages that are blank can be filled with anything at all. Anything that you want there to be.
Lee Hakhyun is a writer. It’s who he is. A creator, a conman, a liar, a delusionist.
Lee Hakhyun is a writer.
“Like this,” he says, turning back to shaping the snow. “For a start.”
Kim Dokja looks hesitant, but he reaches out to help him.
His unsteady fingers alongside Lee Hakhyun’s stable ones.
They work in silence, trying to build a passable snowman. The snowman ends up looking a little grumpy, a little lopsided, and very much like he doesn’t want to be alive at all.
“This snowman looks like Yoo Joonghyuk,” Kim Dokja muses.
Lee Hakhyun laughs.
He buries his fingers back into the snow, ready to build another.
/