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One day, Kim Dokja comes across a scrap of paper folded under Yoo Joonghuk’s pillow.
It’s one of his streaming days, so Kim Dokja has the leisure of stretching out on their bed after work whilst Yoo Joonghyuk taps away in his gaming room. Bored, he thinks about watching the stream just to see what has Yoo Joonghyuk sighing so loud he can hear it through the walls. It’s as he’s fumbling around blindly for his phone that his hand ends up wedged under the pillow, and scrapes against paper.
He pulls whatever it is out and squints down at it. There’s a few random words in Yoo Joonghyuk’s slanted handwriting, seemingly with no correlation: ‘scenario’, swords, dumplings, dokkaebi?
Sounds like the kind of things you’d find in one of those mass produced, regressor apocalypse novels. For some reason, Kim Dokja feels uneasy, so he slides it back under the pillow and opens up the stream instead.
“Have you been having any weird dreams lately?” he asks when Yoo Joonghyuk comes back into the room, still smug after winning three consecutive rounds of his latest battle royale obsession.
Standing there at the door, Yoo Joonghyuk falters.
His smirk flattens. “...you too?” he asks, uncharacteristically hesitant.
Under Kim Dokja’s curious gaze, Yoo Joonghyuk quickly regains himself and walks into the room, kneeling on the mattress. He looks weirdly anxious when he tilts Kim Dokja’s face up to him, with something strange glinting in his eyes. It almost looks like hope.
“No, but I found your list,” Kim Dokja admits.
Instantly, Yoo Joonghyuk’s face loses its tension. He sighs minutely, and then shakes his head, almost to himself.
“They’re just dreams,” he says, fully settling onto his side of the bed. “But I keep getting them, so I thought I should note them down.”
Kim Dokja turns over to watch him, still feeling on edge. He doesn’t know what to make of the strangely frenzied look on Yoo Joonghyuk’s face when he’d asked, you too? nor of the instinct that had arisen within him to say, yes, me too. Kim Dokja hasn’t had any memorable dreams recently. Why did it feel like a lie to say no?
“You didn’t tell me about this,” Kim Dokja murmurs. He stretches a hand to find Yoo Joonghyuk’s chest, glances up at him through his lashes with warm, faux irritation.
“I didn’t think it was important.” Yoo Joonghyuk lifts Kim Dokja’s hand up to his face, sighs into the palm of his hand.
“Why do you keep sighing like an old man?” he laughs, and the topic of the dreams flees from them as Yoo Joonghyuk rolls his eyes.
That night, Kim Dokja bolts upright in the middle of the night, and finds Yoo Joonghyuk staring back at him in the darkness, both of them gasping for air.
“What’s—hah, what?” he breathes out roughly.
“...I had a nightmare,” Yoo Joonghyuk tells him. He’s quick to regain his calm, already back to normal and reaching out to soothe Kim Dokja with a warm hand on his arm. It’s as if he’s had a lot of practice with this kind of thing, and knows how to get over it quickly.
Still with the icy chill of fear in his veins, Kim Dokja stares at him with wide eyes. He thinks about his own, quickly fleeing dream, the flashes that he can remember. Swords clashing, some strange monsters straight out of an action movie, people shouting his name desperately. He’s never even seen a sword before. Why does it feel like he can still feel the weight of it in his palm, the surprising heft of the blade, the bruising ache in his wrist from holding it, the natural fit of the hilt in his grip? Why does he feel so sad to hear those voices, even when he doesn’t recognize most of them?
Yoo Joonghyuk doesn’t have to ask this time. “Me too,” Kim Dokja says, breathlessly. “Oh, Joonghyuk-ah, me too.”
It becomes a thing. Every other night, he and Yoo Joonghyuk wake up in fits of panic from yet another dream, in ruined versions of familiar landscapes, by the sides of strangers. He never sees Yoo Joonghyuk in those scenes, but is keenly aware of his presence—as though, somewhere close, sometime soon, they will meet again.
Yoo Joonghyuk does not report back with the same feeling. Instead, he briefly talks about the unease of not seeing Kim Dokja close by, and then refuses to say more after he gets teased ruthlessly for it.
“Ahjussi!” some child yells happily. Another one waves frantically, arm moving so quickly it’s a blur.
His heart aches. He thinks he misses those children when he’s awake, their small hands and eager eyes. When Kim Dokja walks by the park on his way to the subway station, he sees that little girl in every child that laughs on the slide, and that young boy in those fumbling around on their own, glancing around furtively as they cradle some newfound treasure to their chest. Children aren't something he’s ever wanted for himself, though he likes them well enough. He still holds them tightly whenever he can in those dreams, hoping to leave a soreness in his muscles that he’ll feel when awake.
Some nights, it’s the same scene, just without the other. Once, Yoo Joonghyuk knocked into something. Kim Dokja saw a chair move without being touched. It’s a weird thing. Some dreams are idle, but most are nightmares of grotesque otherworldly beings straight out of a Lovecraftian horror.
It gets to them, just slightly. Yoo Joonghyuk abandons his PVP titles and starts obsessing over a new apocalyptic, story-based game. Kim Dokja develops a taste for the dystopian action genre. They both sleep later than before, dreading the next vision of themselves fighting tirelessly against another mythical foe. It doesn't matter if they win—the fight itself is terrifying enough.
They start wearing less clothes in the house, just so that they can feel their skin being pressed together. This, of course, leads to them tumbling around the place almost always, sometimes multiple times in one day.
It feels like Kim Dokja has been held and fucked more times recently than over their whole relationship. At some point, he expects it every time Yoo Joonghyuk even looks at him.
Kim Dokja is surprised to want it this badly, to not get tired of sex, but he gets the same thrill of excitement every time Yoo Joonghyuk’s hand lands on his thigh; very quickly, he becomes easy. All Yoo Joonghyuk does is lean over him for something and Kim Dokja is pulling him closer by his belt loops. One morning, Yoo Joonghyuk simply walks into the bathroom shirtless, exhausted from yet another strange nightmare, and Kim Dokja is immediately all over him. It may be a problem, but it’s one they thoroughly enjoy.
Even outside of bed, they both get clingier. When they go grocery shopping, Yoo Joonghyuk constantly surveys their surroundings like he’s expecting one of those fluffy white dokkaebi to show up at any moment. At home, Kim Dokja lays on Yoo Joonghyuk’s bare chest at any given moment, ear against his heartbeat, and traps one of his legs between his own bare two.
At the very least, “We’re there together,” Yoo Joonghyuk tells him, gripping his shirt like he wants proof of it. “No matter what, you and I must be there together.”
A little amused, mostly worried, Kim Dokja strokes the side of his face, watches as his expression stays tense. “Is everything alright?”
Instead of answering, Yoo Joonghyuk turns his face into Kim Dokja’s hand, and flicks dark eyes up to meet his. It draws Kim Dokja's attention away from their dreams, and instead to a quickly rising heat.
When Yoo Joonghyuk kisses his palm, his skin tingles. Kim Dokja inhales shakily as he draws him closer with that hand. Closes his eyes. Breathes out.
Yoo Joonghyuk lays him down over the bed, slow and certain, and has him. Their lifting flesh casts shadows in the weak moonlight. There’s a calm in his every movement, an assurance in something they’ve done so many times before. As if the weight of this intimacy can push away whatever doubts have arisen from these dreams.
Kim Dokja turns his head to the side, where he can look out at the night sky through the window, and listens to the rhythm of bodies coming together and apart. His eyes flutter shut, the distant stars studded behind his closed lids.
Yoo Joonghyuk always fucks like a lover, turning sex into an act of the whole body, until they melt together and Kim Dokja is crying and crying into his neck, loved, loved, loved. If he wants to, he can have Kim Dokja screaming until the sun comes up, legs thrown over his shoulders and shaking, but it’s something his inexperience and frailty can’t withstand too often, so Yoo Joonghyuk keeps it toned down. He seems to prefer it like this, anyway. Slow and careful. Never gentle—he’s not that kind to Kim Dokja’s hips. There’s no being gentle with a dick that big anyway. It’s going to hurt a little no matter what.
As Yoo Joonghyuk reintroduces that ache into his body, a small part of Kim Dokja’s mind drifts, lulled by the familiar, warm sensation. He wonders if their dream selves, invisible to each other, but still close, have ever known this kind of pleasure. If they have ever fumbled around each other’s bodies, blind but desperate, and discovered lips, necks, shoulders, hips, and learned sex again and again. If that Yoo Joonghyuk has ever had that Kim Dokja. Bent him over and fucked him until his knees bled and his palms were scratched up against the rubble; slow and loving with their hands pressed together on a shared bed roll, unseen faces kissing and kissing.
He hopes so. He hopes that, at the very least, they know how to love each other, even if they’ve never once seen the other’s face.
Suddenly, Yoo Joonghyuk’s teeth scrape against his ear, shocking Kim Dokja back into his body.
“Falling asleep?” he says, a little annoyed.
“Just thinking.”
He rises up, and stays silent for a moment. Though sullen, he maintains the smooth movement of his hips, rocking into, and into, and into, and into Kim Dokja, who moans through it, pleasure buzzing under his skin, bringing him back to life. They’ve done this so many times, but it still feels as good as the first.
Then Yoo Joonghyuk, now satisfied, asks, “About?”
He ducks down and Kim Dokja’s mouth falls open around his bottom lip, testing its firmness, sucking on it. To be so full, and yet seek more. Yoo Joonghyuk has made him so damn greedy.
It must be some mixture of how deep Yoo Joonghyuk is inside of him, or maybe the low rumble of his voice, the beauty of his eyes, the taste of his kiss, that makes Kim Dokja say it.
“I hope that—” he lets out a noise somewhere between a sob and a sigh, “—that we’re together in every world.”
Yoo Joonghyuk smiles at him, just slightly. We’re there together. No matter what, you and I must be there together. So beautiful, this man. How good he is, in that warm heart.
Kim Dokja can’t help smiling back up at him through teary eyes. In every world, you and me. It has to be us.