(Yoo Joonghyuk’s POV)
At first, Yoo Joonghyuk believed it was exhaustion.
After everything they had survived, memory itself felt worn thin. The world had finally become quiet, and perhaps silence simply made old thoughts harder to hear.
That was all.
Nothing more.
But then Han Sooyoung stopped mid-sentence one evening.
They had been eating together under the warm lights of a small apartment. Outside, rain pressed softly against the windows. Someone laughed at something Lee Hyunsung said. Shin Yoosung complained about the food. Ordinary sounds. Ordinary peace.
The kind Kim Dokja would have stared at silently, pretending not to enjoy.
Han Sooyoung frowned suddenly.
“There used to be someone else here, right?”
The room went still.
Not because anyone remembered.
But because nobody did.
Lee Jihye tilted her head. “Someone else?”
“I don’t know.” Han Sooyoung rubbed her temple. “It feels… weird.”
Like a dream slipping apart after waking.
Yoo Joonghyuk said nothing.
But that night, for the first time in years, he could not sleep.
After that, it began happening everywhere.
An extra cup placed unconsciously on the table before someone quietly removed it.
A name lingering at the edge of conversations before dissolving into static.
The feeling of grief without an owner.
People forgot in pieces.
Like the world itself was carefully peeling Kim Dokja away layer by layer.
Yoo Joonghyuk fought it.
At first, stubbornly.
Then desperately.
He wrote the name Kim Dokja across notebooks until his hands cramped. He repeated it before sleeping. Before eating. Before breathing.
Kim Dokja.
Kim Dokja.
Kim Dokja.
As if saying it enough times could anchor someone against oblivion.
But memories became slippery things.
One morning he woke up staring at the words written across his wall and felt cold terror crawl into his chest.
Because for one horrible second—
he couldn’t remember the face attached to the name.
Regression had never frightened him.
Pain had never frightened him.
Even death had become familiar.
But this—
this helpless fading—
was unbearable.
Because how do you fight an enemy that lives inside memory itself?
How do you save someone who already sacrificed their existence to save everyone else?
Yoo Joonghyuk searched anyway.
He searched through abandoned scenario records. Through broken subway stations where the stars once watched them suffer. Through fragments of worlds left drifting beyond probability.
He searched like a madman.
Like if he stopped moving for even a moment, Kim Dokja would disappear completely.
Sometimes, late at night, fragments returned.
A laugh.
A pair of tired eyes behind cheap glasses.
A voice saying:
“You regress too much.”
Small things.
Painfully small.
But Yoo Joonghyuk clung to them like a dying man holding onto the last pieces of warmth in winter.
The others forgot faster.
That was the cruel part.
Han Sooyoung still felt angry sometimes without understanding why. She would stare at unfinished manuscripts with tears burning behind her eyes and not know who she was mourning.
Shin Yoosung occasionally turned around in crowded streets as if expecting someone to call her name.
Lee Hyunsung often cooked too much food.
Nobody understood the emptiness following them.
Nobody except Yoo Joonghyuk.
And even he was losing.
Years passed.
The world kept moving.
People fell in love.
Children grew up.
Seasons changed.
Humanity survived exactly as Kim Dokja had wanted.
A peaceful world.
A happy ending.
Yet Yoo Joonghyuk hated it.
Because happiness built on sacrifice still tasted bitter.
Because somewhere beyond reality, Kim Dokja remained utterly alone while the people he loved slowly forgot he had ever existed.
The universe had accepted his offering.
And then erased the evidence.
One winter evening, Yoo Joonghyuk found an old coat in the back of a closet.
Plain. Black. Worn at the sleeves.
The moment his fingers touched it, something shattered inside him.
Not a complete memory.
Something worse.
Emotion.
A tidal wave of it.
Warmth during cold subway rides. Quiet conversations beneath collapsing skies. The unbearable relief of seeing someone survive one more impossible day.
And underneath all of it—
loneliness.
So much loneliness that Yoo Joonghyuk suddenly could not breathe.
He sank to the floor clutching the coat with shaking hands.
“Kim… Dokja…”
The name sounded unfamiliar now.
Like a language the world no longer spoke.
But Yoo Joonghyuk forced himself to say it anyway.
Again.
Again.
Again.
As if repeating it could resurrect a person from nothing.
Far beyond the boundaries of the universe, beyond stories and constellations and endings, Kim Dokja continued dreaming.
He dreamed endlessly.
Of companions laughing around dinner tables.
Of arguments that meant everyone was still alive.
Of a man with dark eyes and a ruined soul who kept reaching toward him across impossible distances.
Sometimes, within the dream, Kim Dokja heard his name.
Faint.
Breaking apart.
Like an echo drowning underwater.
Still—
he smiled.
Because Yoo Joonghyuk remembered.
Even now.
Even barely.
Even painfully.
He remembered.
And perhaps that was crueler than forgetting.
The final memory disappeared on a quiet spring morning.
Yoo Joonghyuk woke with tears on his face and no understanding of why.
The grief remained.
But the person at its center was gone.
There was only emptiness now.
A hollow space in the shape of someone loved too deeply.
He stood before the sunrise feeling as though he had lost something irreplaceable.
Something that had once been his entire world.
But he could not remember what.
Far away, in a darkness older than stars, Kim Dokja sat alone.
Still dreaming.
Still protecting them.
Even after becoming nothing more than a fading feeling in the hearts of people who once swore never to let him go.
And in the endless silence surrounding the Oldest Dream—
there was no one left alive
who could call him by his name.
