Work Text:
(for jar)
somewhere i've never travelled, gladly beyond
Kim Dokja is not, by any means, what one could call an adventurer.
Rather than gusto for the world that surrounds him, survival often primes over wonder, and while he's sure some people would welcome being thrust into a mystical universe of magic and legend, the thought conjured to the front of his mind is how the fuck do I keep my head on my neck?
As it were, this world doesn't differ in what is perhaps the most universal of concepts: capitalism. Trade. The acquisition of goods.
While Kim Dokja has never been particularly keen on luxuries - moreso because of unfortunate upbringing rather than choice, mind - he has always been more drawn to utilitarianism than whimsy.
And, as such, his first order of business is to find himself some loot.
Said loot he found in a farce of a mission that had involved a particularly irate harpy - whom he had purportedly offended by not being the famed and handsome (she had stressed the term handsome with fearsome insistence) hero of Talis, as she had been expecting him for a few years by the time of her encounter with one Kim Dokja. And so, all Kim Dokja was faced with was a scorned woman and an unwelcome and frankly ridiculous amount of arterial spray.
Its results were a beheaded harpy, a badly injured and extremely irritated Kim Dokja, and an exorbitant debt with a local healer and her con-woman of a wife whom Kim Dokja still very much suspects had actually been a witch.
"What am I to do with this then?" He'd asked, shaking the bag with the harpy's head within. "Can't you just keep it as payment?"
The healer, Yoo Sangah, smiled kindly.
"I'm sorry, but we take only coin." She’d paused, then. "But, you know. I hear the town's swordsmith might have use for the eyes and tongue. How about you take this to him and see if it fetches you something?"
"Yeah," said Han Sooyoung. "So you can finally pay us."
Kim Dokja blanched. "You didn't do anything."
Han Sooyoung had waved him off and, scowling, off Kim Dokja had gone.
—
Which brings him here.
Breaking the Sky: Weaponry and Potions
Weary, he approaches the door, and pushes it open with his least-busted shoulder, hearing the bell chime as it announces his arrival.
The place is arranged in typical Murim style décor - ample, with sober dark wood used for furniture, a too-tall counter that reaches the tip of his nose, and an assortment of weapons on display. He'd be impressed if he knew anything about weaponry in the first place, or if he didn't feel so dwarfed by all things surrounding him. The light filters from the windows, painting the shop in a warm, golden luminescence. He can smell incense. It's almost quaint.
"Hello?" He calls, exhaustion claiming parts of his body he hadn't known he had until this very moment. "Is anyone here?"
Beyond the counter heavy, metallic steps can be heard, slowly approaching. Four? Are there two clerks?
A voice deeper than the void in his soul speaks, then, and the chiseled torso of the tallest man he's ever seen appears behind the counter.
He's seen tall men. When he was a child, his father had seemed like a giant to him. But this man is, in reality, actually a giant in comparison. He has to look up to be able to peer into the stranger's face.
"Loud," drawls the stranger, a mild scowl on impossibly handsome features. Kim Dokja wants to die. Again.
He lowers his eyes to avert his gaze, only to find -
"Tits - "
The scowl darkens.
"Tis a good evening to you, Sir!" Kim Dokja stammers, and he doesn't know what to do with his hands. He doesn't know what to do with his eyes. Or his voice, which seems to have risen several octaves in a frequency that is surely to beckon every canine in the vicinity to his current location.
The man gives him an unimpressed glare, and his dark, thick eyebrows arch, minimally.
"Who are you." Pause. "State your business."
Kim Dokja would like him to ask questions as if they're actual questions, like someone not a complete bastard, nevermind how mind blowingly beautiful they may be, Kim Dokja thinks. Instead, he says: "I'm Kim Dokja. A traveller. I'm looking for the swordsmith of this town. I have some loot for sale."
The man looks down at him, lips pursed. His elbows rest on the counter as he stares with eyes of obsidian under the half cover of short, dark, wavy locks. Animity has never looked so good.
He grunts. "My name is Yoo Joonghyuk."
Maybe there's a stable at the back of the shop. There’s the distinctive sound of horseshoes, discomfitingly close, and he has half the mind to store the information for later, because he could very much use a horse for his travels. After he pays his debt to the healer.
"I've, huh." He lifts his bag above his head - heart pounding fast, eyes on Yoo Joonghyuk's chest. "Got a harpy for you."
Yoo Joonghyuk looks at him with the kind of disapproving appraisal he’d expect from a particularly anal retentive librarian, and then at the bag being deposited on his previously pristine counter.
There's a very long, very pregnant pause, pregnant with... smaller pauses, before: "Pardon?"
Kim Dokja blinks - once, then twice. Is this gorgeous man daft? Deaf? Figures. Kim Dokja refuses to believe perfect people exist; why should this swordsmith be any different? It's been two minutes of them speaking and he can feel the flames of his initial attraction simmering. Maybe.
Maybe if he gives it another two minutes.
"Harpy,” intones Kim Dokja. “Tongue and eyes?" He tries, again, stressing each word. "I was told you'd find the harpy of interest, so I brought you one."
Yoo Joonghyuk looks as if he were swallowing tar, for a moment, what with the way he openly grimaces, and he can hear something hard kick against the floor behind the counter.
"You..."
"So? Do you want it or not? I need that gold."
"I don't. "
Kim Dokja grits his teeth, dons his best Customer Service Smile, and he refuses to acknowledge the twitch at the left side of his face that betrays how impeccably genial his tone becomes. "Then what would you have?"
There's something definitely not human to the sound Yoo Joonghyuk makes, and the shadows on his face deepen. What even is that?
Finally, he speaks. "A dokkaebi," he says. "Bring me a dokkaebi."
Kim Dokja sputters, indignation visible on the angular planes of his features. " How in Hades' name am I going to find one in the first place?"
"Do you want what you're looking for or not?"
Fine. If that's how it's gonna be, by all means, this bastard will get his dokkaebi even if it kills him.
"You're on," he says. God as his witness, if he hadn't been granted his dignity in his previous life, he's at least going to try to upkeep what little he does have in this one. "I will find one for you. And then you will pay what is due."
If Yoo Joonghyuk were able to emote more than murderous intent, his face would most likely be the picture perfect definition of incredulous surprise right about now. But he doesn't, and he won't, so he glowers down at Kim Dokja, and signals him out of his shop with a surprisingly sharp-nailed, calloused hand.
"Get out. "
And so Kim Dokja, newly invigorated with glorious purpose, does.
—
"Huh," says Han Sooyoung, drinking some ale from her mug. "He's alive."
Kim Dokja stares at her, frowning. "Why wouldn't I be?"
"No reason," chirps Yoo Sangah, cutting in smoothly. "Do you have our coin, Dokja-ssi?"
Kim Dokja scowls. "No."
"Then..." Han Sooyoung opens her hand, gestures around, and then at him. All of him. "You. Here. Why ."
"No need to be rude, Sooyoung-ah," her wife says, tenderly. "But yes, Dokja-ssi, I cannot help but wonder - if you cannot indeed pay, why ," she drinks with a smile that has Kim Dokja squirming in his seat like a particularly oversized worm, and cold sweat gathering at his nape. "Are you here once more?"
Kim Dokja vows to never find himself landed on this woman's bad side.
"I'm here to ask if you know," he clears his throat, "where to find a dokkaebi."
—
His quest takes him to the other side of the country in the company of one Jung Heewon, and several thousand coins further in debt, because fuck him, that's why.
"You could've just," she says, unimpressed, as his reckless, but otherwise flawless plans come to fruition, and leads them across yet another path mined with monsters, "sold the thing and paid up."
"You don't get it," he retorts, righteous indignation in his tone. "It's the principle of the thing."
Jung Heewon huffs as she slices her way through yet another creature. "You're right," she says. "I don't get it. He'd break you in half, anyway."
"Huh?"
She starts, momentarily.
"Nothing," she says. "Nothing at all."
—
The furry fucker had already been dying by the time they'd gotten to the lair. Its dying words had been: “Care for her in my stead,” before summarily unsubscribing from life.
That had left Kim Dokja with an infant dokkaebi in his not quite willing care, whom he'd christened Biyoo, much to Jung Heewon’s mounting confusion and chagrin.
“It’s a bloodthirsty beast that could kill you, and more importantly me, easily by the time it grows up,” she tries to discourage.
“She’s also a cloud the size of my hand,” retorts Kim Dokja. “Look at her? She's so cute?”
"Well, this wasn't what was planned," Jung Heewon says, a little out of her element. "But we could just kill it and bring it over to the swordsmith."
"Are you insane?" Kim Dokja blanches, tiny horned cloud of white fur cradled in his palms, baaht 'ing away with a frankly concerning amount of cheerfulness for something that’s just seen their progenitor expire in most gruesome fashion. "I'm not killing a child."
Jung Heewon stares at him like he's suddenly grown two heads, not for the first time during their trip. "It's a dokkaebi. A demon."
"Her name," he stresses, "is Biyoo."
"So you're just." Helpless silence. Vague gesturing.
"I'm just going to bring her to him just to show him that I could get a dokkaebi, and then force him to buy anything else. We've got the loot."
"You're truly the dumbest smart person I have ever met."
"Thank you?"
She sighs. "I'm charging you double."
“Baaht!”
Honestly, Kim Dokja couldn’t agree more.
—
This is the most amount of exercise Yoo Joonghyuk’s face muscles have seen in what have been, probably, eons, and he can feel them sparking to life after years of disuse. The fact that his features reflect his inner conflict speaks for itself - lips pressed into an impossibly thin line, dark eyebrows pinched together, and what is certainly not his left eye twitching. He looks like he struggles to regain his ability for speech as Kim Dokja presents him with Biyoo, currently entertained by trying to catch Kim Dokja’s slim fingers in its tiny fanged mouth.
“That’s,” Yoo Joonghyuk begins, “a baby dokkaebi.”
“Yes,” says Kim Dokja, chest puffing. Somewhat. As far as Kim Dokja’s chest can puff, anyway. “Her name is Biyoo.”
In the background, Jung Heewon looks like she’s about to have an aneurysm. Yoo Joonghyuk has never felt as much kinship with her as he does in this moment, not in the good two decades they’ve been aware of each other.
“Why,” he growls. “What. You .”
Kim Dokja has the gall to look confused. Yoo Joonghyuk should murder him - courting ritual be damned, he’d be better off with another suitor. Suddenly Nirvana’s crazy is looking a little more tempting.
He’s not ready to adopt a child. He’s barely just gotten Yoo Mia into school.
“I’m not taking a child.”
Kim Dokja frowns. “I’m not giving you the child. I am responsible for Biyoo.”
Yoo Joonghyuk is having a migraine. He can feel his temples pounding - nerves flaring all the way to the inside of his left eye. “She’d be better off here, then.”
Because Yoo Joonghyuk is in it now, you see. Yoo Joonghyuk can't in good conscience condemn a child to be under this idiot's care. It's both his moral responsibility to do something about it, as well The Principle of the Thing.
It's a small hill to die on, but it's the one he chooses. A fluffy, furry white hill roughly the size of his palm.
Strange minds, after all.
“I’m not giving you Biyoo! You wanted me to prove I could get a dokkaebi. Biyoo is a dokkaebi. Me bringing you one for you to keep was not in the equation.”
Yoo Joonghyuk stares at him. Kim Dokja stares back. Biyoo chews on Kim Dokja's coat. Jung Heewon mutters something about wanting to be paid and out of here. Maybe a vacation.
"This was the letter of the law," says Yoo Joonghyuk, more than a little flippant. Kim Dokja is both impressed and insulted. This bastard? "I believe we should consider the spirit of the law before you take her."
Kim Dokja smiles, and very much looks like he wants to throw hands. A glance in Jung Heewon’s direction confirms that it would be a supremely bad idea, so he appears to settle for scowling.
Kim Dokja breathes, instead, and consoles himself with what most certainly are thoughts of socking Yoo Joonghyuk's perfect handsome stupid face.
“I’ve shown you that I could get a dokkaebi. Pay up.”
“I refuse.”
“You can’t refuse payment over something you agreed to.”
“Watch me.”
“I’m not leaving here until you keep to your end of the bargain, you stone faced, self-serving —”
—
“Wow,” says Jung Heewon as she sips on her ale, legs dangling off the edge of the carriage. “I can’t believe you really let him do this to you.”
Kim Dokja stews in his indignation. He says nothing, aggressively chugging down his own drink, before sinking his teeth into one of the dumplings that, in a bout of generosity, Yoo Joonghyuk had made for him to take on his journey.
They’re fucking delicious. Kim Dokja hates them. And Yoo Joonghyuk. And his unreasonably perfect face.
This is all terribly out of character and he wants to go back to dying, which seems like a far more profitable and entirely less painful of an ordeal than whatever the fuck this is, thank you very much.
“You really gonna let him babysit your kid until you get him that shield? You know he’s practically keeping her hostage, right?”
“Jung Heewon.”
“You know you’re letting him win,” she continues. “I’m still gonna charge what I’m gonna charge, I’m not doing charity over here.”
“Jung Heewon.”
“Yes?”
“Please be quiet.”
—
The following month is spent in a maelstrom of questing, sinking further into debt, and trying to get Yoo Joonghyuk to pay for anything on the list of items that he keeps requesting, as well as failing in such endeavor in a spectacular fashion.
“At this point,” drawls Han Sooyoung, pipe hanging lazily from her mouth, “I think he’s just doing it to fuck with you.”
“Just you wait,” Kim Dokja grumbles, wincing when Yoo Sangah dresses his wound. “I’mma get him.”
Yoo Sangah opens her mouth, only to clamp it shut again when her wife glares at her amidst the smoke.
“Nobody tell him,” says Han Sooyoung. “Nobody tell him and that’s the joke.”
“Tell me what?”
“You nevermind Sooyoung-ssi,” Yoo Sangah interrupts with the ease of a hot knife going through butter. She turns to Kim Dokja and beams. “Tell us more about your latest quest.”
—
Someone with a bit more foresight might have seen it coming, but no one could ever accuse Kim Dokja of being perceptive, of all things.
His bag of loot clatters at it falls to the ground.
Yoo Joonghyuk is no longer behind the counter.
Yoo Joonghyuk is cleaning shop.
Yoo Joonghyuk’s improbably proportionate torso and protagonist-like features are attached to what is, by all means and definitions, a horse’s hind legs. His coat shines an impressive inky hue, and all of sudden the last month and a half makes both a lot more sense, and also not.
“Took you long enough,” drawls the centaur, who is now known by Kim Dokja as a centaur, in the most Yoo Joonghyuk way of welcome.
“Why are you,” Kim Dokja stammers, and what he really means is what are you , but even in his befuddled state he realizes how that might come across as a speciesist. He points at his flank, almost accusingly, and Yoo Joonghyuk’s eyes follow the motion all the way to the broom he’s currently holding.
“This is my shop,” says Yoo Joonghyuk. “Why wouldn’t I?”
They’re having two vastly different conversations here.
“I,” says Kim Dokja, desperately, as he attempts to forgo their little tête à tête with reckless abandon. “I brought you the thing.”
Yoo Joonghyuk’s gaze drops to the Medusa Shield on the floor. “So I see,” he murmurs, and Kim Dokja can’t get over his voice. His eyes find Yoo Joonghyuk’s across the room, and there’s the specter of a smile that does things to Kim Dokja that he’s not ready to put a name to quite yet. “You did well.”
Something inside Kim Dokja twists at the warmth, the blatant approval, the thickness of his timbre. Something deep at the pit of his gut does a bit of somersault, and his toes curl on instinct.
“Huh,” he says, like a complete imbecile. “Did I?”
“I accept your offering,” says Yoo Joonghyuk, bending his torso to pick up the shield with both grace and aplomb that must surely be magical in nature, because there’s absolutely no feasible way something so large could possibly be this elegant.
Then Yoo Joonghyuk’s words click.
“Offering?” he parrots dumbly.
Yoo Joonghyuk looks mystified, but only for a second. “That means we may mate, now.”
Kim Dokja doesn’t know what the fuck that means, or how they’ve gotten to this point, or how he’s supposed to mate with what is, by all accounts, a horse man. He doesn’t know what to say, or how to even begin to undo the sudden knot at the low of his throat.
He very much would like to dispute it.
Yoo Joonghyuk is cryptic and rude. He is brash, never lets up and the man can’t accept even the smallest of defeats - not so when they’re verbally engaging with each other, nor when he comes across a perceived challenge. He’s a piece of work , is what he is - bull headed, and blunt, and prone to uncharacteristic bouts of heroism like taking responsibility for an orphaned dokkaebi child the instant he believes she may not be well taken care of.
He’s unpredictable through his stoicism and Kim Dokja, who thrives on the exact opposite end of the spectrum - finds him objectively terrifying.
Kim Dokja wants nothing more than to thrash and protest and escape the premises as fast as his spindly little rat legs can carry him. He wants nothing more than to run - nothing, other than mayhaps Yoo Joonghyuk himself.
It scares him out of his wits. Yoo Joonghyuk curls a calloused hand under Kim Dokja’s pointy chin, and Kim Dokja doesn’t pull away.
For once in his life, Kim Dokja doesn’t, in fact, run, and it occurs to him that he might be in love with Yoo Joonghyuk.
And, well. Ain’t that just a neighmare.
—
“How does one go about… this,” Kim Dokja manages through the lump in his throat. His skin feels fever-hot, like there’s a furnace residing just beneath, scorching through the branches that make for the tree of his nervous system. His heart jumps at the contact of Yoo Joonghyuk’s hands around his neck - gentle, but undeniably present. Solid, like the rest of him. Kim Dokja imagines he can divinate Yoo Joonghyuk’s words before he says them - follow the conversation by the way his tongue feels against the roof of Kim Dokja’s mouth.
Kim Dokja had been half-expecting the counter to be a faux pas when it came to comfort, but it’s genuinely not as bad as he’d initially thought. There’s enough of Yoo Joonghyuk supporting Kim Dokja’s weight - his back to the wooden surface of the shop’s familiar countertop, legs spread.
The ‘we’re closed’ sign hangs at the door, and the very last traces of brightness of the afternoon sun are swallowed by the yawning maw of night. It settles, silent like a mouse, over their little town, and Kim Dokja’s heart has never been louder than in this stillness.
“Tricky,” Yoo Joonghyuk says, voice rough with arousal, a subtle quirk to those perfectly-shaped eyebrows. Kim Dokja wants to rub a palm along his face - press into the zenith of those sculpted cheekbones, feel the firmness of his tanned skin against his’. He wants to map the contours of Yoo Joonghyuk’s features with the tips of his fingers and count the scars, discolored somewhat from the sun, until he commits them to memory.
Kim Dokja fancies them ripples on the fabric of the universe - collections of stars, and the moon, as if they’ve all been blown out. Thinks he can see the cosmos peeking beneath Yoo Joonghyuk's skin. Kim Dokja wants for his whimsy to grow wings - to put his lips to the jagged edges of Yoo Joonghuk’s topography until they, too, cut him open. Maybe he can bleed into him and Yoo Joonghyuk can bleed into Kim Dokja and merge into this single, monstrous entity - not two, but one.
This doesn’t feel real, but then again nothing about Yoo Joonghyuk feels real, however tangible he may be.
He wouldn’t mind if Yoo Joonghyuk kissed him right now, and Kim Dokja very much minds that. It’s discomfiting how close Kim Dokja feels to him in this moment.
Kim Dokja doesn’t know what to do; a man lost in uncharted waters. “I,” he licks his lips, can see Yoo Joonghyuk’s dark eyes follow the motion, and darken even still, even as he himself remains motionless. “I like your hair.”
And Kim Dokja does like Yoo Joonghyuk’s hair. It’s peppered with white streaks, hangs over his eyes, and it compliments his features nicely. It makes him look somewhat weathered, like a statue that’s seen one storm too many, and has yet survived. His hair is beautiful. Yoo Joonghyuk is beautiful, but Kim Dokja is saying it just to fill the silence; a facetious, empty-headed remark.
“Kim Dokja,” says Yoo Joonghyuk, like thunder. Kim Dokja can feel his fingers, wet with lubricant potion, at the very entrance of him. It smells like lavender, and Yoo Joonghyuk’s voice is kind - it spears through Kim Dokja like something sharp and ominous and more than a little thrilling. “I’m going to fuck you.”
His heart drums into his chest. He feels electric.
“I’m going to fuck you,” Yoo Joonghyuk repeats, and Kim Dokja’s voice won’t leave him. It flutters like a caged bird within the confines of his throat. “And you’re going to like it.”
And, well. Who on Earth is Kim Dokja to contest such persuasions?
And then those fingers move, and Kim Dokja can’t think about anything anymore.
Small blessings.
—
It's a lot. It's not enough. It's everything, all at once, and Kim Dokja suffocates under the waves of heat, pain, pleasure coursing through the entirety of him - until he believes it over, only to be dragged back and all over again.
Kim Dokja feels crushed, even though Joonghyuk is by no means putting more weight than he absolutely needs to. He hovers over Kim Dokja’s slouched form over the counter - with one hand reaching around and at the base of Kim Dokja’s flat stomach. Over the faintly glowing mark it lays, pressing down with long, lightly clawed fingers. They spread, there, as the other hand settles on the surface of the sideboard, near Kim Dokja’s head - effectively caging him beneath. Kim Dokja finds himself imprisoned here, between the counter and the solid, tangible presence of Yoo Joonghyuk’s body.
Yoo Joonghyuk stands on two powerful hind legs, and Kim Dokja’s bony hips are up and angled. Kim Dokja can feel everything when positioned like this - with his elbows on the counter, knees on the sitting stool, head bent forward, unsure where he ends and Yoo Joonghyuk begins.
He feels like he’s being shaped differently - like his body is being forced to make way to more than it can handle. It doesn’t hurt, not anymore, but again, that’s most likely because of the markings.
He's still frightened.
(“Where did you get that?” he’d asked, voice shattered, spent, but no less accusatory for the fact. “Actually, the better question is, when did you get that?”
“It doesn’t concern you,” had been Yoo Joonghyuk’s answer, who had arranged them just so he could open him - with tongue and fingers, dedicated. He hit something inside Kim Dokja, and Kim Dokja saw white, mouth agape around the shape of a silent scream.
“It literally fucking does,” he’d barely managed to choke out after the feeling passed. “I’m the one being—”
“Fucked?” Yoo Joonghyuk finished, with a bit of a curve to his mouth that had rendered Kim Dokja weak in more ways than one - had him turning pliant like silk, following the cadence of his words the way sunflowers seek the first rays of dawn. “We haven’t even started yet.”
And that had been that.)
"I can't," says Kim Dokja, sobbing desperately, even though the thought of Yoo Joonghyuk not inside him makes him want to cry all the more. Kim Dokja doesn't know what he wants, is a stranger in his own body - a captive in his own bones. He wants out of his epidermal suit. He’s bursting through his britches, limbs trembling and listless.
"You will," says Yoo Joonghyuk with the absolute, devastating certainty he says everything else. "You're being so good, Dokja. So good to me."
You're going to kill me , thinks Kim Dokja, craning his neck to look up at Yoo Joonghyuk, the man and the beast both, above him. The embers of the shop’s waning hearth reflect on his hair, on the sharp angles of his face. It paints him in an orange glow, and, oh, supplies his mind, delirious - primal: but then, what if not this parting would elicit such sweet, sweet sorrow?
Yoo Joonghyuk’s hands are everywhere. He is everywhere - inconceivably, impossibly inside him. Kim Dokja feels stretched to his highest capacity, where there is no longer a give to be had. In the shade between his body and the furniture he can see the contour of Yoo Joonghyuk - he can feel the wall of muscle of Joonghyuk’s abdomen against the angles of his own back, and Kim Dokja feels the world still. He feels all sorts of misaligned with it, like the core of him has been misplaced, somehow, and maybe it has.
“I’m going to move,” warns Yoo Joonghyuk, and Kim Dokja’s toes curl.
His whole body arches as it makes way for the whole of him, and he can feel the heat of Yoo Joonghyuk’s breath against the crown of his head and Yoo Joonghyuk’s hands are so big, he is so encompassingly big . Kim Dokja can see him inside, he thinks hysterically, his stomach distended, pulled taut over the shape of Yoo Joonghyuk’s cock.
This is madness.
Yoo Joonghyuk tugs on his hair and bites into the tender space between his neck and his shoulder as he fucks him - slow, unhurried, and it’s as if he reads Kim Dokja’s need by the oscillation between their bodies, predicting his tides with an ease that feels both insultingly practised and not , and Kim Dokja will never not be in love with him.
He’s unimaginably, unbearably hard, and Kim Dokja screams himself raw into the palm of Yoo Joonghyuk’s hand until he can’t do that, either.
Eventually, Yoo Joonghyuk tips him over the edge, and Kim Dokja falls, but there’s no pain to the resulting crash - only Yoo Joonghyuk’s arms around him as he drips scorching saturation between his parted thighs, belly round, heavy with it.
He feels so very full. Too full.
And yet, he is weightless. He is Ophelia on her flower bed - floating, drifting off into a deep, wet slumber – lulled by the low rumble of Yoo Joonghyuk’s voice.
To sleep, perchance to dream…
Kim Dokja hasn’t slept this well in years.
—
“You sure are glowing a lot for someone so deep into debt,” grouses Han Sooyoung, pen hovering over a blank page.
Kim Dokja hums, non-committal, around a wedge of clementine. The cicadas blare their summer song loud enough to be almost deafening at times, but the subtle breeze outside is enough to keep them cool - a reprieve - as the sun descends lazily below the horizon.
The shop is empty today, so Yoo Joonghyuk has opted out of Kim Dokja’s people skills services to focus on cleaning for the afternoon, which has earned him enough time to sit and read. Han Sooyoung sits to his right, Biyoo dozing in his lap like a small house cat.
The sounds of Yoo Mia cursing at her homework are faint, but present, and he makes a note to try and help her in twenty minutes or so, if she’s not done by then.
But, this is also Yoo Joonghyuk’s sister - which means she’s just as stubborn as he is, and what could have and perhaps should have been a source of friction just reads as impossibly endearing to Kim Dokja, at this point.
Even if her pet name for him is “old man”.
“I told you to pick something out of the loot, despite Joonghyuk-ie’s protests,” Kim Dokja reasons, swallowing. “You refused. Even though –and this is me reminding you– I don’t owe you shit.”
“You owe my Sangah,” she retorts, a little too aggressively, but that’s just Han Sooyoung in a nutshell. “So you owe me by extension.”
“I’m sure Sangah-ssi appreciates being referred to as a commodity.”
“I will end you.”
“Not as hard as Sangah-ssi will end you if she finds out—”
“Kim Dokja, I’m going to start preparing dinner,” his husband’s familiar voice calls from inside of the house. The sound of hooves approaches them as he draws nearer, and Kim Dokja’s words die in his chest before he can say them.
He is, even a year later, still a sight to behold. Same stolid veneer, same lived-in imperfections, and all the more breathtaking for it. It’s unfair, really - Kim Dokja ought to despise him for it.
But how could he ever? While Yoo Joonghyuk is undeniably still himself, it’s as if his edges have softened; eroded, somehow. The warmth Kim Dokja feels has less to do with the heat of the season, and everything to do with the way Joonghyuk’s eyes crease minimally when they land on him - with the tiny crows feet at the corners of them become only a smidge more apparent, and the elusive laugh lines that frame the fullness of his mouth.
He knows them: he’s kissed each and every single one of them - touched his fingers to every patch of skin like holy markings. Kim Dokja knows him.
Yoo Joonghyuk might still be capable of slicing him open should he be inclined to, but after a full year of bodying Kim Dokja’s insecurities and various traumas from his previous world, he feels pretty confident in the belief that he won’t.
Maybe Yoo Joonghyuk will see reason sometime and leave Kim Dokja for someone better - someone more beautiful, someone more clever, someone who doesn’t drive him up the wall with morning banter and terrible tea. Someone who can give him biological children. Someone who won’t need magical markings to satisfy him in bed - let alone to survive him in bed.
But, at least today, Yoo Joonghyuk is his, and Kim Dokja is Yoo Joonghyuk’s.
And maybe, after all, today is enough.
“You’re still here,” Yoo Joonghyuk notes, but his comment is aimed at Han Sooyoung even when his gaze is on the chaos gremlin he calls his mate. “We’ll pay Sangah next month.”
“Maybe if you stopped making eyes at each other for five minutes you could pay us this week,” she mumbles in response.
Kim Dokja, uncharacteristically bold, balances his weight on the tip of his toes, and reaches citrus-stained hands to cradle that beloved face in his palms, and he feels as if he were holding the sun. He might as well be.
“It’s a bit challenging to kiss you if you don’t shut up,” he says, but his tone is light enough that it could easily take flight.
Yoo Joonghyuk surges forward, and Kim Dokja emits a weak sound of indignation as he fuses their lips together, and his mouth tingles and his bones melt and -
And just like that, Kim Dokja is happy.
Hay. Who knew.
The End