Chapter Text
It’s not a sudden thing, rather it slowly happens over the years Kim Dokja has spent reading TWSA. Like a frog placed in a pot that is slowly brought to boil. He doesn’t give the blooming buds much thought until it is too late.
Whenever his chest bubbles with excitement at one of Yoo Joonghyuk’s many victories, his throat burns with an unfamiliar itch. An itch that he chalks up as nothing more than a sore throat that is ready to form. One that he washes down with a cup of hot water hoping it will warm up his cold body since the heater in his shitty apartment decided to break down yet again.
Whenever he feels tears prick his starry eyes at another failed regression, he can also feel an odd burning ache that can only be calmed after a small coughing fit. He feels like he is way too old to be crying over the death of a fictional character, but it never fails to make his heart ache and his throat burn. It’s just an annoying little quirk that he must put a stop to before it becomes a habit.
Still, he doesn’t put two and two together as he reads chapter after chapter. As he memorizes every little thing his dear protagonist does, as he writes down which habits belong to which of Yoo Joonghyuk’s turn, as he writes down paragraph after paragraph detailing each regression’s downfall, as he sees the pretty white petals fluttering down onto his notes once his current coughing fit lasts a moment too long.
It takes a moment for him to realize what’s going on and the reader can’t help but laugh. His soft bubbly laughter turned hysterical. After all he was a fool who fell in love with someone who doesn’t even exist. Someone who was just words on a page to a story where he was the only reader. A story where he’d leave comment after comment on every chapter hoping that its writer didn’t grow tired of it one day just to leave it unfinished.
And what will he do when the petals would eventually become bloody, and he would choke on the flower buds that just itched to come out? He’d just think about how pathetic his life was. After all, maybe a happy ending wasn’t something he deserved.