Chapter Text
These days, Kim Dokja was being insistently harassed by the government into getting his Guide Aptitude Test done, for some unknown reason.
And so, here he was, waiting in a testing facility for guides and sentinels, wasting his time.
It’s usually a quick procedure. He’d asked his friends, it was supposed to be done in less than an hour. Minutes, if you got lucky.
But Kim Dokja had been waiting for hours. People who had arrived after him had left a long time ago.
It unnerved him, but he didn’t show anything on his face. He was conscious. He did have a tiny secret to hide, but it wasn’t anything huge.
Hopefully.
The whole testing process had been something Kim Dokja never wanted to go through, because he knew the outcome anyway. He would just get confirmation of being a guide with below average with no significant matches.
Ideally, you'd get tested every six months after you turned sixteen.
Kim Dokja, now twenty-four, had never gotten tested before.
Somehow, after nine years of silence, the system had been notified of his lack of data, and he'd been politely reprimanded by a government official. Just as politely, he’d been threatened into coming here.
"When was the last time you got tested? How many tests have you had so far?" Asked the lab assistant who would be getting samples to test his aptitude.
‘Never’, he’d wanted to say. He had nine years of tests pending. Eighteen missed tests.
"I don't really remember." He said.
"Do you have documents from the last time you got tested?"
Kim Dokja tried smiling. "No."
The lab assistant leveled him with a look, which probably meant she was judging him for being irresponsible, but didn't know that he'd committed a crime that could be tried in court.
" Any documents from any of the tests you've done?"
"I moved, and I lost them all," he replied, which wasn't fully a lie.
The lab assistant waved it off like she couldn't be bothered with asking him more questions.
The test was easy enough, just minor blood samples and letting his Quantum beast manifest.
Every guide and sentinel had a quantum beast, which was a far scarier name for what they essentially were: animals that manifested out of their respective sentinel or guide’s powers. The nature of this manifestation seemed to be completely random, and a total hit amongst genealogists to study, because the likelihood of a weak guide getting the most lethal looking animal as a Quantum beast and an incredibly powerful sentinel could get a hand sized kitten were the same, the last time he checked.
Kim Dokja’s Quantum beast was a white fox.
The entire thing always felt a bit strange, because of how the strength of a bond between sentinels and guide affected the manifestation of Quantum beasts. An Unbonded guides’ beast was usually half transparent.
Kim Dokja had no such bond. Thus, the manifestation should’ve been hard, the Quantum beast looking like a barely visible blur, yet, Kim Dokja’s fox was anything but.
It never ceased to surprise people. Their eyes would widen, and they’d look at Kim Dokja’s fox, and then Kim Dokja. Now, too, he could feel people around him turn to stare at how realistic his fox looked for an unbonded guide. Not unheard of, but denoting power of a level that wasn’t something you’d see in such a random facility.
Kim Dokja’s fox truly wasn’t like its master. Tiny, playful and without any inhibitions, it attracted and demanded immediate attention as soon as it appeared. It was a delight to watch it play around. People often just stared at his fox existing for a few minutes, before they snapped out of it and would smile apologetically.
As expected, even the lab assistant couldn’t help but look over at his animal a few times more than necessary, the tiny white fox who was usually too mischievous to be left to his own devices now standing still, soaking in all the attention.
After some time, the fox, inquisitive in nature, jumped right on top of the table with all the fancy equipment and started pawing at the machinery that was far too expensive to be replaced by any of Kim Dokja’s paychecks.
Kim Dokja felt his face flush in embarrassment and worry, “get down! Don’t run around!”
The fox in question ignored Kim Dokja in favour of prancing around the room, tail up in the air and head up high, because the fox, unlike the person it manifested from, did not shy away or try to minimize his presence. The people present coo-ed at its adorable-at-face-value antics.
Kim Dokja apologized to the people present for the trouble when his fox jumped on their stations and saw his fox move something from his periphery. He quickly walked over and picked it up from the scruff of his neck. The fox whined, but stayed put, preferring to curl itself over Kim Dokja’s neck after being reprimanded.
Kim Dokja sighed, and motioned for the lab assistant to continue with the procedure, hand coming up to pet his fox once in a while.
As troublesome as the tiny thing in his arms was, he felt him relaxing, like a high-strung rope being unraveled, whenever he felt the fur of his fox brush by his fingertips.
The fox whined, looking at him with sadness once more, wanting to explore the new place it had been brought into. Kim Dokja knew of its antics enough to know that the fox was being dramatic and hoping that he was soft hearted enough to let him have its way.
Unfortunately for the tiny thing, the test was over, and although Kim Dokja had full control over his fox’s appearance in the real world, he still coaxed it to return to his own mind. After fifteen minutes of one-sided conversation and promises of many treats, the fox did.
And then, Kim Dokja waited to get his test results back, hoping they wouldn’t notice.
And he heard nothing from anybody for the next few hours. The wait kept extending, and he felt that the time he was being made to wait turned from worrisome to unnatural.
It wasn’t until two hours of waiting later when Kim Dokja thought he might have to interact with people once again to get out of here faster.
He ignored his discomfort he felt growing in his stomach at the weird looks people were starting to give him and approached a receptionists’ desk. "Uh, I've been waiting for more than two hours?" He asked.
She looked at him, distrust evident in her eyes, probably used to people exaggerating how long they had been waiting for their results. "Your name?"
"Kim Dokja."
She tapped on her device, and looked up at him again. This time, curious. Made some calls. "Room number 23," she said, looking him over once more.
Kim Dokja felt another bout of anxiety hit him as he walked towards that room. It looked like it was meant for someone important. He knocked, then entered.
“Hello,” said a man, who looked as important as Kim Dokja had expected. “The lab assistant that was assigned to you tells me that you don’t remember the last time you got tested?”
Kim Dokja knew the person in front of him was suspicious of him, but in a weird moment of courage, Kim Dokja replied with a steady voice, “No, I don’t.”
The man paused and turned to look at his computer’s screen. “Interesting.”
Kim Dokja waited to get addressed again. The man looked at Kim Dokja, who was still standing near the door of his office. “Have a seat.”
“What’s your employment status?”
Kim Dokja realized that these questions definitely were not normal. “Logistics department, junior data analyst for planet B-156.”
The man looked at his screen for longer, contemplating.
Then, he sighed. “Unfortunately, you do not have a match in our current unbonded sentinel database. I wish you luck for the next testing period.”
Kim Dokja thought people looked at you with pity when they delivered bad news like this. This man looked apprehensive instead.
He didn’t sit around to wonder what the man in front of him was feeling. Kim Dokja was feeling heat build in the back of his throat.
“Thank you,” he said, getting up to leave immediately after.
While walking through the labs he’d made to wait in for far longer than he’d expected, with the setting sun in the background, he felt relieved. He’d gotten it over with, after nine years.
Yet, with the sun caressing his face, he was accompanied by a sense of loss, for the thing he was scared of had been confirmed. A bit of embarrassment. Shame too, maybe.
Behind a door that Kim Dokja had closed after stepping out, the head of the department he’d met with continued to look at his screen.
MATCH: 71%
GUIDE: KIM DOKJA, 24, M
SENTINEL: ◾️◾️◾️ ◾️◾️◾️◾️◾️◾️◾️◾️◾️*, 25, M
(*In case of [Redacted] , follow procedure under Section D Subsection 5., i.e, send the samples immediately to a [Redacted] testing facility. Failure to comply or errors in calculation can be met with persecution.)
—
It wasn’t actually Kim Dokja’s plan to dodge the government for a good decade.
Even more shocking was how no one really caught up.
In a world where you could see Mechas flying by, a world that has the power of a computer on your wrist that you could use as communication devices, the security measures in place seemed too lax for a guide: a person who was supposedly rare or cherished.
Perhaps they didn’t want to make a fragile population feel cornered, even though they kind of were.
Guides weren’t really cherished for their own ability, but they were rare being who could help the strongest of the nation. So the government fawned over them, making legislature that only further isolated them from the ones who didn’t have any power, and yet, pushed them further into the hands of the powerful sentinels.
Which is why most guides got paired up pretty early in their lives.
The thing with guides who didn’t immediately find their matches at a young age or show signs of being a genius; the world seemed to turn them away from guiding in general.
If a commodity too rare to pass up had been left behind, something must be wrong with it, right?
Kim Dokja’s story, however, wasn’t one of rebellion, or trickery. His story of eluding the government was far too simple for a feat so unachievable in the world of constant monitoring: at sixteen he was too jaded to get tested, at seventeen the testing period came during his end of year exams, at eighteen he had to switch classes during his final year, at nineteen he was too busy with his graduation and looking for a job due to his scholarship falling out.
At twenty, it felt too late to go for it, fear of being judged overpowering the fear of legal persecution.
He’d expected it; having no sentinel who had a high match rate with him. He’d hoped for it.
Having a great match hadn’t saved his mother. He didn’t want any part in the entire Sentinel/Guide bonding dynamic.
What was surprising was that he didn’t even have a below average match rate with a random sentinel with an already existing guide. Almost everyone he knew had at least one match, at least one near 50%. That was too low for bonding, and it didn’t always end well.
But it existed.
There was nothing like that for Kim Dokja.
In the back of his mind, during days when everything at work seemed to go wrong, when he could forget his own parents and the fear that came with thinking of the only bonded pair he knew about, Kim Dokja wondered what being a bonded sentinel-guide pair felt like.
One certain aspect of bonding was something that tugged at everyone's heartstrings, including Kim Dokja’s. Bonded pairs could not only be great at battle, but also feel the other person’s emotions. It was like a mind link, a mark on your soul, emotions connected through a string. If the bonded pair were close enough, they could even communicate telepathically, using full sentences and words.
It was a romantic’s dream come true, and secretly, Kim Dokja loved the idea of love as much as the next person.
So yes, when days were rough, when his superior was a bit too harsh, Kim Dokja wondered what it would be like to share a bond like that with someone. If a bond would make him feel better when his own brain couldn’t, if he could feel happiness via his bond and feel better.
An imaginary red string of fate that tied you to someone, an existence that was created for you to love and to be loved by, always supporting you, even if you weren’t always there.
That’s why, even though he’d expected for the worst, expected that he wouldn’t ever have that connection with someone, the worst still hurt.
But such alarming mediocrity had been a part of Kim Dokja’s life for far too long for him to be phased. Nothing a few harrowing nights spent in silence and darkness couldn’t solve.
But here’s the thing:
When a man has accepted such a mediocre fate, disrupting it without warning is cruel.
So when a group of men in military uniform knocked on his door at seven in the evening on the same day that his test results informed him that he could never form a connection with a sentinel, what the disruption felt like wasn’t just terrifying, but also aggravating.
“…What?” He’s said, not knowing the etiquette on how you welcome men who look like they’re in the high ranks of the military into your humble apartment, whose heads nearly touch the ceiling of your apartment corridor.
The men seem more uncomfortable than Kim Dokja to be here, which makes no sense. “Are you Kim Dokja?” Asked the man who stood in the front, who diverted his eyes when Kim Dokja looked at him.
Kim Dokja did not think that delaying getting tested for something that didn’t even have any results would have consequences that warranted an entire squad of soldiers to stand outside his door and ask for him.
With false bravado that would make gods doubt themselves, Kim Dokja answered: “Yes. Would you like to come in?”
The men looked like they wanted to run. “The helicopter to escort will arrive at the helipad at building 107 at 13:xx, please be on time, lest we let the Admiral wait.”
Kim Dokja blinked at the man.
Then, he took a step back from the doorway, and shut the door on their faces.
Kim Dokja then proceeded to run to his room, let his fox out, clung to it and locked all doors using remote access on his nightstand. He could hear the people outside his apartment calling for him, and heard reprimands when someone's voice got too loud.
At the back of Kim Dokja’s mind, he wondered if they didn’t just break his door down to get him. After all, he was a fugitive. Still, he absolutely did not reply. He didn’t think he had the capacity to move, for how fast his heart was beating.
Kim Dokja picked up his phone and called the only person who could help.
“Han Sooyoung,” He said, not stopping to breathe, “the Admiral of our nation wants to jail me or personally kill me because I didn’t take the stupid matching test for the past ten years.”
For once in her life, Han Sooyoung seemed too shocked to reply.
“What the fuck?”
After calming down and almost rubbing his foxes’ fur away (and getting bitten due to his constant haggling), Dokja finally explained what had transpired so far in his usually boring life.
Sooyoung was silent for a while.
"Did you…." She said, hesitating in disbelief, "Ask them why you were summoned?"
"Of course not, what if I had implicated myself?"
A static interrupted Sooyoung's voice from the other line.
"Dokja," she said, like a warning, "there's news that they've found a matching guide for the admiral."
Dokja went very, very still. His fox looked up, as if sensing his quickening heartbeat.
The strongest sentinel of their nation, one of strongest sentinels ever known , Admiral Yoo, had been famously without any guides with a matching rate of more than 30% for the past decade.
Now, they’d found one for him. On the same day that-
"Is it…” Continued Sooyoung, not really waiting for his answer, “is it you? But you just said that there wasn’t any match-”
Kim Dokja thinks of the wait time. The way the receptionist had looked at him when he asked why he’d been waiting for so long. The strange expression on that man’s face, when he’d informed him he had no matches.
“Fuck,” Dokja swore. “Fuck!”