[The door opens and Junghyeok steps out with a sword in his hand. It's nothing fancy, a simple and sturdy thing made by a decent smith in town. In the hands of a skilled fighter it had the potential to be extremely dangerous. Even with none of the stat boosts he should have had, there were few who knew how to wield a sword as well as him.
And yet against a constellation the gulf between them would be insurmountable. Junghyeok doesn't care. Even if it meant another death, he had to try.]
I have no intention of listening to you ever again.
[She isn't in any position to fight, sitting on the ground with her back to the wall. Not even looking his way, as it happens, just staring out into the distance.]
I did it all so he would be with us at the end.
[She'd been prepared, when it first started, for this eventuality. If the ending she'd managed to build everything to was one in which Junghyeok hated her but Dokja was with them, that would be worth it a thousand, a million times over. There is no amount of suffering she wouldn't put anyone or anything through to make that happen. Including Junghyeok. Including herself.]
[But so much of what she hadn't told him had been because he wouldn't understand. Couldn't understand without context, without living it. He isn't the Junghyeok she knows. He isn't her Junghyeok.]
[Funny. For both him and Dokja, she had to lie and manipulate, because straight out telling the truth wouldn't work. They're too much themselves to listen to it, to believe it, to accept it.]
[Those idiot boys.]
I have another way now. I'll tell you it even if you don't want to work with me, because it's for him. [And Junghyeok. She has no illusions over how tightly bound those two are.] You can be furious at me and hate me, I earned that. But I'll still tell you everything.
[The last time he confronted someone for answers it had been an exercise in frustration and doubt. Junghyeok hadn't reached the point of beating it out of him like the one she remembered, but it had been a close thing. Even now he still didn't have all the answers, there was still so much to cover. He couldn't ask what he had no knowledge of.
This time it's almost anticlimactic with her immediate acquiescence. The moment it unravelled she immediately folded. But then again it's never been about him, Junghyeok exists because Dokja needed him and Suyeong was all too happy to provide.]
You're too late. I've heard enough.
[Junghyeok holds the blade against Suyeong's neck. He doubts this would even leave a scratch.]
[She lifts a finger to put it against the blade, and lifts her head to shoot him a glare that's much more like her.]
I said 'furious and hate me'. I stand by that. But if you're gonna start threatening me then I need you to acknowledge your own role in this. If your reaction to anything you don't like or want to here wasn't either dramatic sulking or murder, people would tell you stuff a lot more, you know. You know one big reason why I was holding back on stuff? Because not long after where you're from, you actually tried to kill me just for trying to get you to listen!
[Sure, he'd claimed that he knew she would survive, but how much credit she gives that is up for debate. As is the question of whether he'd truly cared or not.]
I'm gonna talk, so you listen and stop menacing me. [And rather than give him a chance to debate that, she just starts, a little weight of status unconsciously behind her words.] Back at the start of this all I put half of myself into an Avatar, and that other me ended up in the 1863rd regression. Details if you want them but the point is, she reached the end and got sent back to the past so she could find out who tls123 was and stop TWSA from being written. And as you probably figured, she ended up writing it herself, because she saw Kim Dokja alone in a hospital after trying to kill himself and realized that if not for TWSA, he'd try again and probably succeed.
That's why TWSA was written. That's not why you exist. She could write it because she met you. I wrote it because I knew you. But it's also why all of this happened. To save him.
[He wouldn't understand. He wouldn't know. Even she doesn't entirely understand it; those memories of her other self have a distant quality, a sense that it isn't the her she knows herself to be remembering them. Even so, that scene of an hospital room, empty except for one girl who had no business being there, brings a deeper pain to her heart than almost anything else she could imagine.]
[Even with just that hint of her status it takes everything he has not to buckle under its weight. And yet despite how powerless it left him in comparison to the others he has no regrets about refusing to approach the crystal. With no guarantee he'd get only the abilities he wanted, it was better to play it safe. Of course with his sponsor here and aware of it all, Junghyeok may not have a choice in the matter, but he didn't think Dokja would be stupid enough to give him regression a second time.]
I don't care why you wrote it.
[At least it wasn't a factor in his current reaction. Junghyeok can understand her motivations and accept that there wasn't another way. But whatever bad tempered reaction she expected from him wasn't enough to withhold it from him. It was the similar with Dokja, she had fought with him, insisted she'd go to all lengths for him and in the end still treated him like a powerless character acting out the lines she wrote.]
You still should know. And you still should hear that I couldn't have written it before I met you.
[The nature of the tangled timeline had been laid out plain and simple for her. Maybe he couldn't understand just what that meant. Maybe he did understand, deep inside, that he had to go on his journey for Dokja's sake. Maybe he cared. As much as he can protest that he's a puppet and an actor, the truth is that she doesn't know what he's thinking. What she's come to understand about him has been through personal experience, not lines on a page.]
I think you understand, though. What it's like to be doing your best with what you know and what you have, only to discover that wasn't the way.
[...come on, Suyeong. All that talk about being more open and straightforward means swallowing her pride, again, and saying something that isn't in her nature to say.]
Not trying to excuse it. Just explain it. I'm sorry.
[Junghyeok is a man that's relatively straightforward and doesn't obfuscate his thoughts. However that doesn't mean he finds it easy or even wants to talk about his feelings.]
You should have said something earlier.
[Her apology does mean something when he can acknowledge that this was something she wasn't normally inclined to do. It's a hard won admittance of the impact her actions had.
He lowers his sword. It's not fine, he'll need more than that to let it go, but Junghyeok will offer her that chance.]
That's why I'm here. And that's why I keep offering to tell you stuff. I don't know what matters most to you right now, so I don't want something I know to pop up later as something really important that you wanted to hear, and I didn't tell you because I didn't think it was important.
[Part of the problem from the beginning is just how much happened. Does it matter to him that they needed to go to Oz? That Uriel got in a big fight with Uriel? That --]
[Oh. Oh boy. Without a sword at her neck, she can stand up, slapping her hands on the wall to help push her to her feet.]
Secretive Plotter is another you. A Yu Junghyeok who reached the end of the scenarios but couldn't cross the Last Wall, so he became an Outer God to keep searching for his answers.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Backdated to a little earlier in September!
don't need to hide anything from dokja any more i'll tell you everything
idk what he told you but i know there's some things you need to hear from me even if he said them
no subject
And yet against a constellation the gulf between them would be insurmountable. Junghyeok doesn't care. Even if it meant another death, he had to try.]
I have no intention of listening to you ever again.
no subject
[She isn't in any position to fight, sitting on the ground with her back to the wall. Not even looking his way, as it happens, just staring out into the distance.]
I did it all so he would be with us at the end.
[She'd been prepared, when it first started, for this eventuality. If the ending she'd managed to build everything to was one in which Junghyeok hated her but Dokja was with them, that would be worth it a thousand, a million times over. There is no amount of suffering she wouldn't put anyone or anything through to make that happen. Including Junghyeok. Including herself.]
[But so much of what she hadn't told him had been because he wouldn't understand. Couldn't understand without context, without living it. He isn't the Junghyeok she knows. He isn't her Junghyeok.]
[Funny. For both him and Dokja, she had to lie and manipulate, because straight out telling the truth wouldn't work. They're too much themselves to listen to it, to believe it, to accept it.]
[Those idiot boys.]
I have another way now. I'll tell you it even if you don't want to work with me, because it's for him. [And Junghyeok. She has no illusions over how tightly bound those two are.] You can be furious at me and hate me, I earned that. But I'll still tell you everything.
no subject
This time it's almost anticlimactic with her immediate acquiescence. The moment it unravelled she immediately folded. But then again it's never been about him, Junghyeok exists because Dokja needed him and Suyeong was all too happy to provide.]
You're too late. I've heard enough.
[Junghyeok holds the blade against Suyeong's neck. He doubts this would even leave a scratch.]
tw: talk of suicide
[She lifts a finger to put it against the blade, and lifts her head to shoot him a glare that's much more like her.]
I said 'furious and hate me'. I stand by that. But if you're gonna start threatening me then I need you to acknowledge your own role in this. If your reaction to anything you don't like or want to here wasn't either dramatic sulking or murder, people would tell you stuff a lot more, you know. You know one big reason why I was holding back on stuff? Because not long after where you're from, you actually tried to kill me just for trying to get you to listen!
[Sure, he'd claimed that he knew she would survive, but how much credit she gives that is up for debate. As is the question of whether he'd truly cared or not.]
I'm gonna talk, so you listen and stop menacing me. [And rather than give him a chance to debate that, she just starts, a little weight of status unconsciously behind her words.] Back at the start of this all I put half of myself into an Avatar, and that other me ended up in the 1863rd regression. Details if you want them but the point is, she reached the end and got sent back to the past so she could find out who tls123 was and stop TWSA from being written. And as you probably figured, she ended up writing it herself, because she saw Kim Dokja alone in a hospital after trying to kill himself and realized that if not for TWSA, he'd try again and probably succeed.
That's why TWSA was written. That's not why you exist. She could write it because she met you. I wrote it because I knew you. But it's also why all of this happened. To save him.
[He wouldn't understand. He wouldn't know. Even she doesn't entirely understand it; those memories of her other self have a distant quality, a sense that it isn't the her she knows herself to be remembering them. Even so, that scene of an hospital room, empty except for one girl who had no business being there, brings a deeper pain to her heart than almost anything else she could imagine.]
no subject
I don't care why you wrote it.
[At least it wasn't a factor in his current reaction. Junghyeok can understand her motivations and accept that there wasn't another way. But whatever bad tempered reaction she expected from him wasn't enough to withhold it from him. It was the similar with Dokja, she had fought with him, insisted she'd go to all lengths for him and in the end still treated him like a powerless character acting out the lines she wrote.]
no subject
[The nature of the tangled timeline had been laid out plain and simple for her. Maybe he couldn't understand just what that meant. Maybe he did understand, deep inside, that he had to go on his journey for Dokja's sake. Maybe he cared. As much as he can protest that he's a puppet and an actor, the truth is that she doesn't know what he's thinking. What she's come to understand about him has been through personal experience, not lines on a page.]
I think you understand, though. What it's like to be doing your best with what you know and what you have, only to discover that wasn't the way.
[...come on, Suyeong. All that talk about being more open and straightforward means swallowing her pride, again, and saying something that isn't in her nature to say.]
Not trying to excuse it. Just explain it. I'm sorry.
no subject
You should have said something earlier.
[Her apology does mean something when he can acknowledge that this was something she wasn't normally inclined to do. It's a hard won admittance of the impact her actions had.
He lowers his sword. It's not fine, he'll need more than that to let it go, but Junghyeok will offer her that chance.]
You don't get do-overs.
no subject
[Part of the problem from the beginning is just how much happened. Does it matter to him that they needed to go to Oz? That Uriel got in a big fight with Uriel? That --]
[Oh. Oh boy. Without a sword at her neck, she can stand up, slapping her hands on the wall to help push her to her feet.]
Secretive Plotter is another you. A Yu Junghyeok who reached the end of the scenarios but couldn't cross the Last Wall, so he became an Outer God to keep searching for his answers.