"Once this was over, I would ask Aileen to make me a watch. If he had something like this, he might become more attached to this world. Maybe the regression depression would get better..."
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.
If you think about it approximately 5 times a day like I do, this pocket watch thing is so beautiful and also so very sad. Just like them.
