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The thing that no one tells you about being woken from an eternity of dreaming is that you will, in fact, still have a ridiculous sleep deficit to catch up on. Kim Dokja would take it up with a higher authority, but it seems he’s thoroughly played himself on that front.
What this means is that today, the strident sound of Han Sooyoung’s complaining—usually an eagerly-awaited treat at the end of another blandly monotonous day in the hospital—slides into his ears with all the grace and goodwill of a bone saw. Luckily, he isn’t required to respond to her tirades, just nod along at the right places, and even after all this time, he hasn’t lost the ability to pretend he’s listening attentively to her prattling.
“Oi, asshole, don’t fake like you’re paying attention to me when you aren’t. I don’t give a shit that we’re in a hospital, you know I’ll fuck you up anyway.” Han Sooyoung’s growl makes him jolt, and his vision refocuses to catch the unfortunately familiar sight of her baring her teeth at him.
Ah. Or perhaps not. “Han Sooyoung,” Kim Dokja says pleasantly, smiling the toothless smile he knows she hates, “has anyone ever told you what a nice voice you have? I could drift off to sleep listening to your sweet words.”
“I’ll kill you,” she replies, nostrils flaring like she just might. Kim Dokja suppresses a sigh and an unwise comment about how that would at least get him out of tomorrow’s physical therapy. He wouldn’t be a fan of his rehabilitative exercises even if it weren’t for the echoing familiarity they evoke, and though he loves his kids, it doesn’t help that their very lively visits are scheduled to coincide with the tail ends of his sessions.
“I’d like to see you try,” he shoots back brightly, which is paltry by his standards but also one of the safer paths this conversation can take between them. Han Sooyoung does not seem impressed.
“Well, far be it from me to keep Mr. Sleeping Beauty over here up past his bedtime,” she grumbles. “I was just about to go, anyway, I can pack up if you’re going to disrespect me like this.” He makes a face at her, but instead of returning it, her face goes still and intent. Abruptly, awkwardly, she asks, “Do you want me to stay here till you fall asleep or something?” Her eyes are black holes behind her glasses.
Kim Dokja blinks. “No thanks.” Han Sooyoung glares at him like she’s offended by this. “I’ll be okay,” he tries. Her nose scrunches dubiously almost before he finishes the sentence, which is a bit insulting. “Really, Sooyoung-ah, there’s no need,” he sighs. “You have work tomorrow, and you’re in desperate need of beauty sleep as it is.”
It takes Han Sooyoung a mere 20 minutes to get from her university to the hospital. It takes her another 45 to travel between the hospital and her apartment. If he doesn’t let her go now, she’ll stay here for the hours it could take for the throbbing of his head and trembling of his limbs to subside. Then she’ll get home and stay up for another two hours scorching her eyes on essays and SNS, and she’ll go in to work tomorrow morning with eyebags only barely concealed by her foundation. Again.
Kim Dokja could tell, right when they first met, that Han Sooyoung was a woman who pulled late nights with burning eyes and gritted teeth, just like him. Like recognizes like, as some say. So when she barged into his room today, twenty minutes later than usual and perhaps twenty percent shriller than usual as well, he’d instantly recognized the particular sheen in her slightly bloodshot eyes, the smudge-soft blur of tiredness to her dark irises. Han Sooyoung just might be the strongest person he knows, but he really doesn’t want to give her the chance to pull two all-nighters in a row just because he’s grumpy today.
“Fuck you too, Kim Dokja,” Han Sooyoung scowls, though she sounds strangely happy to say it. “I’ll stay however long I want, and I’ll lull you to sleep with my sweet words while I’m at it. Asshole.”
Kim Dokja doesn’t actually want to sleep, is the thing. He’s simply tired, miserably so, to the point where he’d very much like to sublimate all his petty mortal needs and get straight to the part where being human again stops hurting so much. But something about her words makes something pull at his ribs, a hook catching just over his heart to pry them open. There are few things in the world Kim Dokja is less familiar with than falling asleep alone. And yet here he sits, wanting the way a man in the desert wants for ice cream.
(Han Sooyoung is a live wire and a force of nature, is lemon zest and cinnamon right in your nose, and she is more stunningly capable and magnificently human than Kim Dokja could ever even pretend to be. She won’t be brought down by one measly all-nighter. But Han Sooyoung nearly tore the universe apart in her quest to give Kim Dokja a happy ending. The very least he can do in return is make sure she gets eight hours of sleep after all that.)
He’s been silent for too long, it seems—Han Sooyoung is cutting him a look so keen that it makes him wonder if she was perhaps a medieval European torturer in a past life, the kind which practiced flaying people alive. “You really want me to leave?” she asks.
“Oh, never,” Kim Dokja grins, making sure to shape it sharp and careless so the truth in his voice isn’t quite so loud. “This is for your students’ sake. Goodness knows these literary types are sensitive souls; I would hate for one to take the brunt of your sleep-deprived scowl and burst into flames.”
“Idiot, look who’s talking,” Han Sooyoung says, rolling her eyes, but she does an uncharacteristically poor job of hiding the fondness in it. By the time she stands to leave, that scratchy, unsettled feeling buzzing through Kim Dokja’s veins has softened, and he thinks maybe it won’t take that long to fall asleep once Han Sooyoung has left after all. Only, when she moves to pull open the door—
“Han Sooyoung?” Kim Dokja calls out. She turns to him immediately, pausing in the doorway, and he almost curses himself out loud. What did he do that for?
“… Yeah?” Han Sooyoung prompts. The hospital lighting does her complexion no favors, but she’s still eye-catching in her distinctive way, all sharp angles and pink lips and bright eyes. Kim Dokja wastes another second staring, mind thoroughly blanked.
Stay the night, he almost says, except that’s stupid and would earn the further ire of his nurses besides. He clears his throat of nothing and tries again. “Hey.” Kim Dokja is bad at honesty and worse at sincerity, but the words come out weighty anyway. Han Sooyoung’s eyebrows cock, curious. “Sleep well, okay?”
Han Sooyoung rolls her eyes, likely because she understood exactly what he was clumsily trying to convey. Or because she understood half of it and simply assumed she understood it all. Another way that they’re very alike, that. “I’ll be here tomorrow, loser. Don’t keel over and die while I’m gone.”
He knows it still cuts her chest to shards to say such things. But she says them anyway, and he loves her for doing so, for being the only one of their company brave enough to do so. That’s his writer: always carving herself up so Kim Dokja doesn’t bleed.
Kim Dokja is bad at sincerity. But he grins at Han Sooyoung like the sun’s come down to rest in the creases at his eyes, and he promises, “I won’t.”
Kim Dokja’s new room is… too big.
“This is too big,” he says, staring with disbelief at his freshly unveiled bedroom, which in this moment feels big enough to put the entirety of his pre-scenarios apartment to shame. Every member of Kimcom stares back at him with varying levels of visible glee on their face. Even with so many people inside it, the room doesn’t feel crowded at all. Once again, it is too big.
“Don’t be stupid, ahjussi,” Lee Jihye scoffs from behind her upheld cellphone. Why is she even recording this? Why does his company hate him?
“You won’t be saying that when the bookshelves come in,” Yoo Sangah adds placidly. Kim Dokja tries to process this. He doesn’t succeed.
“No, I think I will,” he says, and waves a hand a little frantically at his terrifyingly massive bed. “Forget everything else, isn’t this bed alone much too huge?” He is not a big man! Everyone derives great satisfaction from reminding him of this! Why would he need such a bed!
For some reason, this sets off a round of tittering. He resents very greatly that everyone filed into the room before he did—the better to watch his face for the grand reveal—as it means that he has absolutely nowhere to direct his glare that won’t land on an extremely smug, extremely unrepentant party member.
“I imagine you’ll be getting plenty of use out of it,” Jung Heewon says sagely, testing the mattress with a finger. He goggles at her and wonders if her past vocation of laying down divine judgement has translated in their new world to plain old sadism.
“Han Sooyoung, save me from this madness,” he begs. She’s the only person he can’t see, having taken it upon herself to stand behind him like he can’t push his own wheelchair. Distantly, he wonders why—clearly everyone else is having a great time laughing at his expense.
“Oh nooo,” she drones, voice coming from startlingly close to his ear. He poorly stops himself from jumping. “Poor Kim Dokja, left to his kingly bedroom full of furniture suited exactly to his pedestrian taste that everyone spent weeks picking out. What a sad life he lives, with his ginormous bed and personal bathroom. However will he cope.”
Kim Dokja’s mouth flaps open and shut without a single sound escaping in the interim. He can hear Lee Hyunsung giggling. Lee Hyunsung!
“You all are the worst,” he moans, burying his face in his hands. “You are terrible to me. Go away. Let me vent my sorrows on my—” He shifts his fingers to catch another glimpse of his bed. The comforter is patterned with squids. “— On my ginormous bed.” A pause. “Alone.”
A chorus of complaints sweeps through the room, but Yoo Joonghyuk makes some low, gruff assertion that cuts it off instantaneously. It seems unfair that even in Kim Dokja’s room, Yoo Joonghyuk gets to be the one with all the authority.
“This fool is still recovering,” he says. “And this was the last part of the housewarming tour. We can prepare for dinner while he…” The ghost of a grin flickers over his lips. “Settles in. Lee Jihye, set the table.”
“Master!” she protests, but she’s already bounding for the door, phone finally tucked away. There’s a final wave of giggling and exclaimed protests as people begin to file out, including two tackle-hugs from Shin Yoosung and Lee Gilyoung that earn them a scolding from Yoo Sangah and a knuckle sandwich from Jung Heewon that makes him shriek for mercy.
Han Sooyoung is the last to leave, with a deliberateness to her lingering that makes Kim Dokja raise an eyebrow. She says nothing, though, just flounces out of his room with a flick to his forehead and a final enigmatic smile. He huffs. Maybe, given ten years and another set of miracles, he’ll finally come to understand Han Sooyoung’s strange ways.
And so, Kim Dokja is left alone in his new, too-big bedroom. He surveys walls which bear the marks of being enthusiastically painted by hand and takes in corners that he can now tell have been set aside as space for bookshelves. The lights are a pleasantly warm tone, a far cry from the glare of hospital lights, and the tall windows promise sunlight aplenty in the daytime. There’s even a sunfish night-light, clearly chosen by someone with a questionable sense of humor. Every inch of it makes his chest ache.
He doesn’t hate his bed. Far from it. Nor does he hate his bedroom, so evidently designed with affection and care. It’s just that when Kim Dokja looks at his new bed—thoughtfully accessorized with a grab bar, wider and undoubtedly more comfortable than anything he’s ever even had a chance to sleep on before—and imagines himself laying in it, he can see every past version of himself that’s ever been awake and alone at 2 a.m. with a phone illuminating the bruised shadows under his eyes. They all look exactly like he does now.
The chatter of everyone in the kitchen is audible from here, with the door cracked open as it is. He thinks he’ll like that a lot, once he gets used to mornings here. Right now, it’s making him feel like his skin doesn’t fit him, like his heart is trying to escape from his chest. Kim Dokja, with awe and with terror, thinks, This is the rest of my life.
It fills him like the ocean, crashes through his chest like revelation. This is the rest of his life. This, here and now, this life Kim Dokja has—this is meant to be a happy ending. His companions fought and bled so he could sit here and watch the sun set over Seoul’s new skyline with them. But Kim Dokja doesn’t know if he knows how to be happy. He doesn’t know if he’ll fit in the mold of these comfortable days; he isn’t sure he knows how to contort himself to fit.
He had once loathed the concept of happily ever after with all the resentment and fear an abused child and maladjusted adult could muster. Now, with contentment fluttering at his ribs and the promise of home all but smothering him, Kim Dokja can only pray that he won’t fumble and shatter this one with his clumsy hands and clumsier heart.
He leaves his room eventually, of course. He enters the kitchen to cheers and chocolate-covered popcorn tossed at his face, and he and his family feast on Yoo Joonghyuk’s cooking at their very sizeable dinner table until people remember it’s a weekday and, despite vocal reluctance, begin to take their leave. Each person does so with fond words and warm touches and promises to see him again as soon as they can to see how he’s settling in. Kim Dokja appreciates it. He appreciates it all so much that it feels like an undoing, or maybe like being lashed to earth with chains of lead and gold.
And so people begin to filter out, some leaving for other homes and others for rooms of the compound that have already been broken in. Notable among the latter category are the kids, who are only sent to their rooms after much heated debate (read: surprisingly well-thought-out haggling on the kids’ end and absolutely no tolerance for it from any of the adults), and Yoo Joonghyuk, who is almost the last to leave even though Kim Dokja knows that the man prefers an earlier bedtime.
Han Sooyoung should be in the former category, but though Kim Dokja’s been informed that she only stays in the compound on weekends, she waits by the door until even Yoo Joonghyuk has left. Her faux-casual expression is creased by a brittle, just-held-back impatience, and Kim Dokja approaches her with raised eyebrows, curious and a little apprehensive. But when he stops in front of her, Han Sooyoung only blinks at him. The silence stretches, punctuated by the clatter and chatter of people just outside the door.
“Yes?” he prompts wryly. She makes a face at him, which he does not return because he is an adult.
Han Sooyoung makes a worse face at his failure to engage and grumbles, “So?” Her voice is a little rough, he notes with amusement. Probably from all the shouting across the table.
Kim Dokja’s eyebrows hang, suspended. “So…?”
She clears her throat, looking supremely aggrieved with him. “So, what do you think?”
Kim Dokja stares. This is what she’d stayed behind for? He’d rather thought it was obvious, given that there had been moments where he’d feared the radiance of his joy and exhilaration was not only visible through his chest but bright enough to see from space. That, and the fact that he’d almost cried upwards of three times at dinner alone. But Han Sooyoung just stares back, face alight with a sudden intensity, and he has no choice but to capitulate and say, voice softer than he’d intended it to be, “It’s wonderful. I—I love it all.”
Han Sooyoung nods, briskly, like she alone was responsible for raising the walls around them. Kim Dokja does his best to bite back a smile. “Good,” she says firmly. “So what are you gonna do after this?” Perhaps Kim Dokja doesn’t conceal his horror at the question all too well, because she hastily clarifies, “I mean after we leave, stupid.”
Oh thank god. Kim Dokja opens his mouth, unsure of the answer but trusting himself to come up with something suitably vague and well-adjusted-sounding, only for Han Sooyoung to continue. Even with the steely gaze she suddenly levels upon him, her tone is so aggressively light that her next words take a minute to process. “Because I have to assume that after we all leave, you’re going to go straight to your lovely new bedroom to sleep, right? In the first proper bed you’ve had access to in forever? Instead of wasting our efforts by staying up like you aren’t some chronically fatigued moron? Right?”
“Ah,” Kim Dokja says, feeling a chill pass over him. Han Sooyoung, he reflects, is a truly terrifying woman. “Well, I’d thought maybe I could inaugurate my new room with old traditions, you know, just spend some time, um…” He trails off weakly. Han Sooyoung looks wholly, deeply unimpressed.
“Kim Dokja?” she says, all the more threatening for how sweetly it comes out.
Kim Dokja hesitates for a long, long moment. He thinks of the rattling of subway cars and the cool expanse of empty bedsheets. Then the image of the sunfish night-light flits across his mind, and suddenly he finds himself needing to fight off a smile. “Yes, Sooyoung-ah,” he sighs, exaggeratedly slow. “I’ll go to sleep right away, and you can make me regret waking up tomorrow when you come over to harass me as soon as classes let out.” He waves his hands in obnoxious dismissal and succumbs to that grin. “Now shoo. If you keep me up with your inane questions, Yoo Joonghyuk will have both our heads.”
Han Sooyoung scoffs, looking distinctly pleased with herself, and sticks her tongue out at him. This time, Kim Dokja returns the favor.
The glow in his chest has faded to a quiet hum by the time he’s finished brushing his teeth. That’s fine, Kim Dokja thinks as he climbs into his ridiculous bed, which is somehow even more comfortable than it looks. This is more than enough. And then he looks up and laughs out loud with surprised, honest delight, feeling that radiance flare back to life, because:
Someone has stuck glow-in-the-dark stars to his ceiling.
It’s three in the morning, and Kim Dokja is going to the kitchen in search of tea. He’d been expecting to fumble through empty darkness using only the light from his phone screen. Instead, he enters to find the lights already on and Han Sooyoung heating milk at the stove. They stare at each other, frozen, until Han Sooyoung wordlessly points at a sachet of cocoa powder and Kim Dokja, equally silent, uses his phone to point to the cupboard they store tea in. They nod coolly at each other and turn back to the pursuits of their respective beverages.
Kim Dokja winces at the hissing of the electric kettle, but Han Sooyoung doesn’t twitch while dumping her cocoa powder into her pot. (He can’t for the life of him understand why she wouldn’t simply use the microwave if she’s only going to use a mix, but to each their own, he supposes.) The quiet bustle of their movements around the kitchen ends at about the same time, Han Sooyoung successfully pouring her hot chocolate into a mug without spilling anything just as Kim Dokja’s tea finishes steeping.
The two of them sit across from each other silently, the scene narrowed by the stark simplicity all late-night-early-mornings share—the understanding that the world you inhabit when you’re the only one awake is less real than the one that exists after daybreak. There’s a strange peace to knowing that neither or them are going to do as stupid as ask the other why they’re awake at such an hour.
“Don’t you have a lecture tomorrow?” Kim Dokja asks. “I didn’t even know you were here, I thought you’d left hours ago.” Hey, no one said subtle criticism of the other’s life choices was off the table.
Han Sooyoung scoffs into her mug. “Don’t you have another full day of having absolutely fuck-all lined up tomorrow?” Kim Dokja nods at this in gracious defeat.
“Fine,” he laughs. “I shouldn’t be up, this really is just the result of my bad decisions.” He demonstratively wiggles his phone in the air, making Han Sooyoung snort.
“Mm.” She smirks at him, then nods, a little listless in the dip of her chin. “Same.”
Oh, you liar, Kim Dokja thinks with a jolt of both fondness and worry. It’s only Wednesday. Han Sooyoung flits in and out of the compound like an ornery street cat, which isn’t ideal to begin with, but her not only staying over but staying up on a weekday is… concerning, to say the least.
He tries to make it casual, but he knows that Han Sooyoung’s sharp eyes instantly catch the way he sets his phone upside down on the table. “So why the hot chocolate?” he tries lamely. “Not your usual pick of poison.”
“Eh,” Han Sooyoung shrugs, looking at something past his ear. “You’d be surprised.” She seems perfectly nonchalant; she doesn’t even sound tired. Still, concern scrapes through Kim Dokja’s chest. Her sweet tooth is news to nobody, but paired with the set of her mouth, he can’t peg the hot chocolate as anything but an attempt at a comfort drink.
The kitchen lights had been set to half-intensity when Kim Dokja walked in, which he had initially appreciated after emerging from the black-and-white world of his bedroom as lit by his phone. Now, studying Han Sooyoung’s drawn face, he can’t help but think it might have been better if the lights had been off after all. Looking at the exaggerated shadows under her eyes is making something vast and clawing rise up in his chest. It’s the kind of feeling he’d only discovered himself capable of within the scenarios, when he found companions who wanted him well-rested and well-kept and he realized he wanted the same for them. It’s a love that aches like desperation, or a desperation that aches like love.
Kim Dokja doesn’t want Han Sooyoung to find herself miserable and alone in the bowels of the night ever again. Not when he’s there, for the first time, to hold her hand through the darkness.
And when put like that, it’s the simplest puzzle he’s ever found himself poised to solve. He is constantly, constantly learning to take in love rather than only reflect it back. But if it isn’t a crime for him, Kim Dokja, to rest easy in a room filled with proof that he is loved, then it should be child’s play to secure a good night’s sleep for Han Sooyoung.
Kim Dokja will never be a writer. But he doesn’t think he’ll ever stop being a dreamer, either. And this might be a way for him to write both Han Sooyoung and himself a happy ending.
“Stay the night,” he blurts out. Han Sooyoung stares at him, obviously about to say What the hell does it look like I’m doing? Kim Dokja barrels on before she can. “Sleep with me.” His heart is in his throat, but its beat is slow and unhurried. There’s nothing to be afraid of in this room, with its brightly colored dish towels on their hooks and its potted herbs on the windowsill. He just wants.
Han Sooyoung is frozen for a long moment before she finally opens her mouth. “If you wanted to get in my pants so badly—” Her smirk is painted crooked over her chapped lips, vicious and undeniable and beautiful. Her eyes are trembling.
“Shut up,” Kim Dokja says. He doesn’t even begin to try to hide the affection oozing out from his chest into his voice, helpless and dripping. Han Sooyoung nearly flinches.
She doesn’t say anything more, hands clenched around her mug and lips clamped together, so he continues, reluctantly. “You don’t have to,” Kim Dokja says, though it comes out half-hearted even to his ears. He has wanted for uncountable years to dream sweet beside someone that loves him. Someone that he loves. Now that possibility is so close he could touch it, and he wants her to want it too. “You can go back to your room and forget about this, if you want. But I think it’d be nice.”
Nice, he watches her mouth, apparently struck silent by disbelief. The quiet sound of their breathing layers itself over the comfortable dimness, satin-lined velvet against his fingertips. The surreality of the previous scene has tipped into a new genre, something as sweet and fragile as the newborn dawn. Kim Dokja waits patiently for her response. They have all the time in the world, he thinks.
“Don’t you think this is too out-of-character?” Han Sooyoung finally grumbles. Kim Dokja laughs, the sound bursting from him like sea spray against rocks, and she startles again.
“Don’t we know each other better than that, Han Sooyoung?” He couldn’t repress his grin if he tried. She stares at him with something like wonder, then lets out a snort.
“Ah, you’ve got me there,” she sighs. “Biggest saps this side of eternity, we are.” She doesn’t look all too upset about it.
Kim Dokja’s bed is still too big for him. It’s too big for them both. But somehow, with Han Sooyoung curled against his chest, it feels infinitely warmer.
The quiet that ensues after the requisite shuffling of sheets and limbs could and should be awkward, but Kim Dokja is too busy reveling in his own cleverness to care. So, of course, Han Sooyoung begins yapping away after barely a minute of it. “You know that it’s a morning lecture tomorrow, right? My alarm’s gonna ring in, like, three hours, and you’re a stupidly light sleeper so you’re gonna wake up too and complain about it, and—”
“Han Sooyoung,” Kim Dokja interrupts. His heart beat, beat, beats with love for her, an insistent clamor of fondness. “Go to sleep already. We’ll both be here in the morning. Deal with it.” Han Sooyoung goes still and struck against him. He thinks she’s holding her breath. Before a swell of dark emotion can steal upon him, Kim Dokja closes his eyes and adds, “And you need your beauty sleep.”
“Fuck you,” Han Sooyoung grumbles. “Asshole. I cannot believe this is how you got me into bed with you.”
“You only have yourself to blame for bad taste, no?” he asks mildly, lips twitching. This is followed by a wheeze when Han Sooyoung kicks him right in the knees. “Hey!” Han Sooyoung snickers, but the silence they lapse into this time is apparently less objectionable, because she says nothing more. “Good night, Sooyoung-ah,” Kim Dokja whispers. “Sleep well.”
“Night, loser,” she murmurs. She’s so warm against his chest. “Sweet dreams.”
The sunfish night-light glows happily at them from the corner. The stars stuck to the ceiling feel like old friends. Kim Dokja’s last thought as he drifts off to sleep, hair smelling of watermelon tickling at his nose, is that maybe a happily ever after is just another name for a beginning after all. He’d like to wake up tomorrow morning and find out.