The problem with being a writer was that, sometimes, you couldn’t stop writing.
Han Sooyoung now knew that she’d spent a decade of her life doing nothing but writing, including writing when she was supposed to be asleep, and that might be the source of her habitual scribbling of notes on surfaces that stayed still for long enough.
(Her phone, mostly. The notes app was full of documents that varied between plans for the future, notes about dumb shit everyone did, wistful thoughts about writing stories instead of living in them, and—very occasionally—memories of her life before the scenarios she was afraid of forgetting.)
During the scenarios, those notes were half-assed and mostly descriptive phrases Han Sooyoung thought she might want to use in a novel if she fucking survived this bullshit. She had been, unsurprisingly, too busy surviving that bullshit to care about writing stories other than the one Kim Dokja’s Company was creating for the purpose of breaking the stars. That was a kind of writing, too, even though it used people instead of paragraphs to lay out the plot.
(Sometimes, her notes were lines that people said that were just too ridiculous not to be commemorated. Han Sooyoung hoarded those lines, precious sparks of joy that she looked back upon and cackled over in the nights when despair tried to set in or it seemed like the world was nothing but doom and gloom, to remind herself that even in the doomsday scenarios they could still eke out something good, if only for a moment.
At one point, she made a document entitled “FUCKING MARTYR” chronicling every single way Kim Dokja told him to kill him and/or let him die. She’d read it out loud to him in his avatar’s hospital room one day, crying and refusing to admit she was crying, because she didn’t have any other way to explain to either him or herself how tired she was of seeing his lifeless—or barely-living—body lying on the ground.)
After, in the fucking Epilogue that Kim Dokja dreamed up that only included a half-assed him, Han Sooyoung had started writing more seriously again, because, well, what else was she going to do? Anna Croft and Selena Kim and everyone else they’d left behind on their Save The Squid mission had gotten the world up and running, and Han Sooyoung had never been good at anything other than writing and nagging the others in the idiot company to do shit, so—
Writing it was, because that hurt less.
(A coping mechanism, Lee Sookyung said, with the authority of someone who had gone to prison-enforced therapy and also wrote a fucking essay about killing her husband.
Han Sooyoung didn’t talk to Lee Sookyung for a month after that.)
The point was, Han Sooyoung kept writing stories. And—even though she didn’t tell any of her literature students this—she posted them online, too.
Nothing long. She couldn’t—
She’d promised her next book to Kim Dokja, and she wasn’t going to write a novel he wasn’t there to read.
But short stories, yeah, she could do that. Little things, quiet stories about people living ordinary lives in ordinary times. Han Sooyoung posted them pseudonymously, and didn’t even think about the idea of paywalls, or of making a name for herself; she was just tired, and writing helped a little.
It was inevitable, she supposed, that she’d make a name for herself anyway. She was a good writer, after all, and people always needed stories.
The comments came in, first a trickle and then a wholly unexpected flood. A combination of survivors who praised her for remembering what The Old Days were like and the new generation being confused why anyone would write about a time before the Star Stream. Han Sooyoung watched, and didn’t respond to either set of comments, only engaging with people who wanted to talk about the stories themselves and not just the surface-level contents.
(She did not think about how she was looking for a reader who loved her work as much as Kim Dokja had loved Ways of Survival.
She did not think about how that would be impossible to find.)
Han Sooyoung didn’t tell anyone that she was writing. Selfish, maybe, but she had always been like that. And besides, most of the Company didn’t read that much. No point in telling them what she was up to, especially as they all scattered across the world.
So it was unexpected, when she saw a too-familiar name in the comments section of her newest story.
“An Interlude by the River” was about two friends—both women—meeting again after years apart, and telling increasingly fictional tales to each other of what their lives had been like. Most of the comments Han Sooyoung got were people saying they wanted to read more about things like “Choi Dahee meeting fairies and singing her way back to Earth!” or “Gwon Sangmi descending to the unknown depths of the ocean!”, and Han Sooyoung rolled her eyes at them. If they wanted to read about that, they’d missed the point of the story.
Which meant that the comment reading “Author-nim, thank you for writing a story about stories, and how people communicate truths about themselves even when they appear to be fabricating it from scratch. I hope that Dahee and Sangmi can continue growing closer through the stories they share.” caught her eye even before Han Sooyoung saw the username attached. She’d already started thinking up a response when she went to look at how to address the reader and her brain screeched to a halt.
On the one hand, Moonlight Girl was a name people could come up with all on their own, and—even without the time dilation of crossing the world-lines that meant a whole generation had grown up while they’d been off doing dumb protagonist bullshit—it had been years since Yoo Sangah had been called by that name.
On the other hand, titles were condensed stories in their own right, and the actual content of the comment hit a little too close to home.
Han Sooyoung looked at the comment again, groaned, and turned her computer off. She was not interested in dealing with this today.
(She didn’t know whether she hoped it was Yoo Sangah or not. She didn’t know whether she wanted Moonlight Girl to read the rest of her work or not. She didn’t know whether, if it was Yoo Sangah and she did read the rest of Han Sooyoung’s work, she wanted Yoo Sangah to realise she was the author.
Han Sooyoung stared up at the darkened ceiling for a long time, caught in the cycle of her own thoughts, before finally falling asleep.)
The comments kept coming.
They were always analytic and on-point and cut to the heart of what Han Sooyoung wrote, and Han Sooyoung mostly tried to put aside whether this was Yoo Sangah or not and just write what she wanted to write.
Unfortunately, as she well knew, it was very easy to write for readers who attentively followed your work, and to think about them and hope that they’d like the story you were writing, so not thinking about Moonlight Girl and Yoo Sangah didn’t work.
Han Sooyoung wrote stories about stories, and stories about reconnection, and stories about death and dying, and Moonlight Girl commented on them all. It wasn’t always immediate; sometimes days went by before Moonlight Girl’s name popped up in her email and some unacknowledged knot in Han Sooyoung’s heart eased.
(Somewhere in there, Han Sooyoung started writing about Kim Dokja’s life too. Half of her had always been writing for Kim Dokja; it was impossible for her to start devoting herself to words again without also devoting herself to him, no matter how much she might complain.)
They met up, and neither of them talked about it.
Han Sooyoung almost did, but instead pivoted to showing everyone the story of Kim Dokja, the story that her most persistent wish-fulfilling author-self thought might be able to call his narrative back to life. He’d always lived on stories; what was one more?
(She hadn’t thought everyone else would agree.
She hadn’t thought she’d devote yet more years to writing Kim Dokja’s life.
She especially hadn’t thought it would actually work.)
Han Sooyoung didn’t write other stories, once she devoted herself to writing Kim Dokja’s. There wasn’t time. She had to write him back to life, and once she started looking into his world there wasn’t room for all the other things.
(Which was how it had always been, if she thought about it. Bitterness became her, sometimes, but right now Han Sooyoung wasn’t bitter. She ate lemon candy and poured Kim Dokja’s soul onto the page a second time: If Yoo Jonghyuk had been the ideal he’d dreamed of, his soul’s source of life, let this show that the Kim Dokja they’d known had been no less remarkable, and was loved just as dearly, and they dreamed of him too.
But she would die before she said that aloud. The words would speak for her, as they always had.)
After Kim Dokja had woken up, after he’d left the hospital, after Han Sooyoung had closed the document she’d dedicated her life to writing—
After, she opened a new blank page, and wrote another short story.
“Migration (Long Winter’s End)” was the least subtle story she’d ever written. Maybe it was because Kim Dokja’s story had been a sledgehammer of “Come home” and she’d lost the trick of subtlety. Maybe it was because she was tired of hiding. Either way, Han Sooyoung couldn’t be bothered to hide the way she threw her feelings about Yoo Jonghyuk coming back and Kim Dokja’s revitalization into the text.
Moonlight Girl commented on it within an hour, saying, “I’m glad you’re still writing,” and Han Sooyoung’s heart gasped open inside her chest.
(She did not cry. She did not want to cry, and so she did not. She did tell Moonlight Girl how happy she was to have such a loyal reader, though, and that was admission enough.)
A month later, Yoo Sangah showed up at her door and said, “Come to the river with me, Sooyoung-ssi.”
“Fuck, why should I do that,” Han Sooyoung said, even as she was already grabbing her coat. “It’s cold out.”
Yoo Sangah laughed. “Where better to tell stories and drink hot chocolate?”
“Fuck you,” Han Sooyoung said, but her heart wasn’t in it.
“I even stole dumplings from Dokja-ssi’s fridge,” Yoo Sangah said, waving a bag in front of Han Sooyoung’s face. “We can warm them up and they’ll be good as new.”
Han Sooyoung stared at her for a moment, then stormed past her into the chilly late-winter day. “You could just say you like my stories and be done with it,” she snapped, as soon as she’d passed by.
“I did,” Yoo Sangah said, very softly, and Han Sooyoung froze. “Did you think I lied?”
No, how could you lie? was the first thought in Han Sooyoung’s head, and she obviously couldn’t say that. Instead she just announced, “This is the worst thing you’ve ever done to me,” and started walking again like she’d never stopped. Like her heart wasn’t pounding in her chest, faster than it had since everything finally reached an epilogue she could live with.
The thing about stories, whispered a voice that sounded entirely too much like her own but a step to the left, is that the ending of one story might be the beginning of another.
Yoo Sangah followed her, footsteps crisp on the sidewalk’s concrete. “How is telling you I like your writing a bad thing?”
“You could have told me it was you.”
“I believed in your intellectual abilities, Sooyoung-ssi.” Yoo Sangah caught up with her, because she was taller and sometimes used that to her advantage. “Obviously I was right to do so, since you figured it out.”
“I hate you,” Han Sooyoung declared, as if it would have any more effect than when Kim Dokja said he had to face something alone.
Predictably, Yoo Sangah nodded, and there was even a smile on her face. “You hate me so much that you’re going to walk to the river with me and eat stolen dumplings and laugh about how Yoo Jonghyuk won’t let Kim Dokja out of his sight anymore. If that’s hate, Sooyoung-ssi, then I hate you too.”
Han Sooyoung blinked rapidly for a moment, because something had gotten in her eyes. They stung, and her chest was too tight, and she had written descriptions of this feeling a hundred times without ever quite understanding what it would feel like.
All those feelings condensed into a heartfelt, “Fuck you,” that Han Sooyoung barely managed to get out of her mouth.
Yoo Sangah bumped against her, and—once Han Sooyoung was glaring at her because of it—very cheerfully said, “Sure, but not until we’ve been on a few dates so that I know you mean it.”
Han Sooyoung choked, and tripped over her own feet, and was very glad she was her own constellation and the media wasn’t following her around because she could very easily imagine the Abyssal Black Flame Dragon’s commentary on this whole situation and that just made it worse.
A hand grabbed her elbow and steadied her, and Han Sooyoung looked up. Yoo Sangah’s face was blush-red, and she stammered out, “Ah, I mean— That is— If you want to—”
Han Sooyoung finally started laughing, and maybe tears came out of her eyes a little at that point, but she was clinging to Yoo Sangah to keep her balance as she said, “You— It’s all a pretense, isn’t it? Oh, fuck me, you’re just as fucked up about this as I am, aren’t you?”
“You’ve been writing stories about us for years,” Yoo Sangah said, subdued even without the contrast of Han Sooyoung’s hysterical laughter. “I thought you knew that.”
Just as abruptly as it started, Han Sooyoung’s laughter stopped.
She thought back through all the stories she’d written, cataloguing them in her head. It wasn’t an obvious trend, because she’d written about all the members of the Company somehow, but—
“Fucking readers,” she sighed, because now that it had been pointed out to her it really was obvious. Once Moonlight Girl had started commenting on her work, she’d written about love, and connection, and yearning, and it had almost always been between women. Han Sooyoung rubbed at her eyes and said, “Would you believe me if I said I didn’t know what I was writing?”
Yoo Sangah drew her in for a hug. “A story can only be completed by its reader,” she said, very gently, as Han Sooyoung tried not to think about how pathetic she felt right now. “But I don’t think this needs to be a story.”
“All lives are stories,” Han Sooyoung said automatically. But then, as she finally relaxed into Yoo Sangah’s arms, she admitted, “But maybe we don’t need to think about our lives that way.”
“There you go,” Yoo Sangah said. “Now, come eat dumplings with me.”
“Yeah,” Han Sooyoung said, smiling even before she realised she was. “It’s a date?”
Yoo Sangah smiled, and said, “Yes. It is.”
It was an ordinary story, Han Sooyoung thought as she tentatively took Yoo Sangah’s hand, but those were sometimes the most important stories in the world.
And, best of all, this one was just beginning.