Jelly

In my heart of hearts, I just know that Simon Riley flirts like he’s never talked to another human being in his entire life.

He’s surprisingly willing to converse with the boys, having worked with them for years, but even then, it took ages and a monumental effort to get him to come out of his shell.

But if they’re at the bar, and god forbid a pretty girl even looks in his direction, he goes dead silent. Nervously twirling his glass of bourbon on the table (a tick that not even his closest friends notice), resisting the urge to bounce his knee, mind an incomprehensible buzz of pure static.

He’s not as subtle as he thinks he is. Why?

Because he just stares at you. Unspeaking and incessantly. For damn near twenty minutes straight. Like an utter creep.

And that…well, it’s kind of impossible not to notice.

Just when you’re contemplating telling the bartender that there’s a masked serial killer sitting in the corner, your friends pull you back into their unstoppable shenanigans.

It’s only later that night when all your friends have gone home and you’re struggling to hail a taxi in the pouring rain that it all comes to a head.

One minute, you’re whistling meekly into the rainstorm, like Rose off the edge of the titanic. And the next, the rain has stopped altogether.

When you turn to see who’s holding the umbrella above your head, you literally flinch when you see the giant masked figure from back at the bar.

He doesn’t notice your awkward expression.

“Hello,” he says—stupidly—still staring like an idiot.

“Um—hi,” you reply weakly, trying to gauge whether or not you could sprint in these heels without breaking a leg.

Yoo Joonghyuk, as a regressor, has a fundamentally broken relationship with time.

For normal people, time is linear. Finite. You get one shot. Hours matter, days matter, the clock ticking forward means something because you can't go back and redo. But for YJH time is a resource. It's a tool. Something to optimize, speedrun, or trash when a run goes bad. He's lived through hundreds of years across dozens of regressions. What's one more hour? One more day? One more companion dying (...)? He's seen it all before. Time just stops holding weight when you have infinite resets.

And KDJ gave him a pocket watch not because YJH needed to tell time, but because he needed to care about it again. Because he wanted YJH to care about it again. The watch is a physical object that serves a purpose other than just a courting gift. This moment matters. This second passing is not something you get back. Live like it.

It's KDJ trying to reintroduce scarcity into YJH's perception of time, to make him feel the weight of a single life again. To remind him that even if he has infinite chances, the people around him don't. The world around him doesn't. This regression isn't just another draft to be thrown away—it's the one where things are, and will be, different. And that difference includes him learning to value the ticking clock.

But it's also deeply ironic, because KDJ is such a fucking hypocrite about it (anyone's surprised? no? me neither). He gives YJH a watch to teach him that time matters. Meanwhile, KDJ is busy quietly burning through his own lifespan and sacrificing years of his own existence for YJH's (and everyone else's) happy ending. He's trying to make YJH feel the weight of time, while simultaneously treating his own time as fucking expendable. It's not malicious. It's just. Kim Dokja. He wants for YJH what he can't give himself. That's how he's always been.

And after KDJ is gone—after he's scattered himself across worldlines, after he's become the Oldest Dream again, after he's just asleep on that damn subway train with no way to wake up—YJH still has it. KDJ gave him a pocket watch to ground him in time. And in the end, it's the thing that keeps YJH grounded in him.

I'm so fucking tired. It wasn't about that. YJH choosing to accept the regression stigma was not for KDJ. It was for himself. Please bffr. The primary motivation was always his own existential curiosity. Wanting to understand who he is, where he came from, why his world exists. Asking about meeting his sponsor again was just an additional question, not the driving force.