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Everything was moving in slow motion, people pushing past him as he could only stand frozen hopelessly on his feet. His eyes dart around the room, landing on his brother before someone forcefully pushes past him causing him to stumble on his feet. He turns his head back towards where he saw Isaac, but suddenly he found himself standing in the midst of the flame. Fire surrounded him on all sides casting an orange hue across all his vision, but something was off. He couldn’t feel any heat at all. He looks down at his hands which showed no sign of scarring when they were just swimming in meters tall flames. When he looks back up the fire was gone, leaving the demolished chapel completely dark. He frantically turns trying to find any semblance of the life that once had existed within the encompasses of the surrounding walls, ash slowly falling around him like snow. He stops in his tracks when his eyes meet his older brother- he wasn’t just there. When did he get there? He calls out to him, trying to get closer to him to question him on what’s going on, but all he gets in response is a cold death stare.
Whispers begin to echo and ricochet around the emptiness of the temple, starting off indecipherable but then slowly transforming into daggers blaming him, screaming how it should have been him. It felt like a thousand tiny threads tying around his heart and constricting, his hands coming up to cover his ears as he crumples over. He shoots a pleading look at Isaac, the child in him wanting his older brother to take care of this and make it all go away. However, the aura surrounding his brother only grows darker as he begins to walk towards him an inferno spreading once more with each step he took. Causing the man on the ground to panic knowing Isaac intended to take him too.
He lets out a scream, startling himself awake as he lurched himself forward in his bed. “Yohan,” he hears, the voice oh-too-familiar, causing him to swing his head towards it. Isaac? Why was he still here? And why was he reaching out to him? “Go away,” he cries out, voice much weaker than usual, wanting the hallucination or whatever it was to just leave him alone. He was awake now. Why was it still here? He fights against what he though was the older man as he tries to wrap his arms around him. The room was too hot and it felt like the walls were coming in on him, and his nightly demons had decided to materialize into his reality to strangle him once and for all. The more he struggled against the arms around him the tighter they got. The man was speaking to him, but the pounding of his heart overpowered his ability to compute what was being said. Until he could, “Yohan, it’s Gaon! You’re safe now.” The pleading voice practically begged.
Gaon? It sounded familiar like a character from a beloved book that someone read in their childhood and were suddenly reminded of. His mind races to place the word, flashes of the young judge that had slowly wormed himself a place within his home steadily making their way into his mind. His fight slowly dissipates upon the realization, hands that had been pushing at the younger’s chest slide down to grip at his forearms instead. He needed something to hold onto to stabilize himself, to remind him that this was real and he was no longer in the hellish world his own mind forced him to live though. If he were in a better mental state he would have already yelled at the other to leave the room, but right now he was sure he would break if he didn’t have something from his present to ground him.
He lets his head fall forward landing against Gaon’s chest a bit more forcefully than he meant, not realizing he had began to cry until he registers the sound of himself sniffling as he takes in an extremely labored breath. He feels a hand begin to lightly pat at his back, in an almost hesitant attempt to comfort him. The sweater that the younger was wearing still had hints of the fabric softener that the maid used on their clothes; it was mixed with something else faintly recalling catching a whiff of the scent whenever they were working. Was it cologne or just the way his subordinate smelled?
He has to let out a chuckle at the thought of Gaon just being a mere “subordinate” to him. Most bosses didn’t live and make a home with their subordinate. Most bosses didn’t get home to a home cooked dinner made by said employee with a note accompanying it from a very disloyal AI system. Nor do most bosses walk into their employees lounging on their furniture, as if it were their own, laughing with their niece. Subordinate was such a distant word. Even on a personal level he knew their relationship was far past that. They both had become almost dependent on the other, craving each other’s approval and input. To the point they had began to fill the cracks within each other’s lives, filling in a void that was only noticeable once it was no longer existent.
He feels Gaon’s hands come to either side of his face to pull him away from his chest. He allows it to happen. The younger man’s eyebrows were furrowed causing his forehead to wrinkle slightly, and even in the darkness of his room Yohan could make out the worry in his expression. It made his heart ache to have something so tender and genuine directed towards him. “You laughed?” He questions, sounding convinced that the older man had finally snapped losing any sense of sanity left within his being. That after all that the younger had witnessed from the head judge, tonight had been his final straw. His final break from reality.
“Yeah, so what?” He shoots back towards him, bringing a hand up to wipe at the streaks his own tears had left on his face but was blocked from the large hands still on his face. At that he feels thumbs begin to stroke at his cheeks, gently erasing the marks from his face. He probably looked rather pathetic at the moment, and would have to find something to blackmail Gaon with to make sure he would never speak about this to anyone ever. Not in all honesty that he really thought that he would. Instead of squashing the other’s fear of his imminent insanity, he instead asks, “why are you here?”
“I was going to get a glass of water from the kitchen and I heard you having a nightmare,” he replies simply, but it was not the answer to the question that Yohan had truly meant.
“Not that,” he sighs, wanting his voice to come out more exasperated than it actually did. He really needed to get himself under control. “Why are you still here? In my house?”
He watches as the gears turn in Gaon’s head as he tries to figure out an answer that actually made sense. He had already admitted many times to trying to snoop into the older man’s history, into his past to try to figure him out. However, both of them could discern that somewhere along the way he had given up on trying to find proof that Yohan was this villain everyone wanted him to be. That the more he tried to look into him the more he understood him, the more he agreed with him. So, why was he still here? Unless there was something else.
“I don’t know,” Is what Gaon decides on, pulling away from him completely to grab something set on the nightstand. “It’s comfortable though isn’t it?” The older man wants to scream at the loss of the other’s touch, immediately missing the feeling of them pressed together. He thinks about throwing a tantrum, but decides against it when he remembers the presentation Elijah had tomorrow. She needed her sleep. A glass was pushed into his face, about three-quarters of the way filled with water. “Drink this.”
He takes the cup from the younger, deciding to be difficult almost as an instinct. He glares at the liquid, “Is this from the tap?”
“You can’t taste things anyways.”
“I know the difference though.” He still drinks it though.
Gaon takes the glass back from him once he had finished, setting it back on the nightstand after getting rejected when offering to get the him some more. His eyes narrow when something clicks within his brain. “I thought you were on your way to get water when you heard my nightmare.”
The younger doesn’t even pretend to be sheepish for a moment, answering a little too honestly. “I went to go get it first. I was hoping you’d be through with whatever was going on with you by the time I got back, so I didn’t have to deal with it.” The admission shouldn’t amuse him as much as it does, but he can’t help it. Kim Gaon was the oddest puzzle he had ever come across, and every new piece of it he finds only makes him more compelled to solve it. It doesn’t stop him from reaching out to pinch the younger’s cheek in retaliation. Good he thinks at the small yelp that left the other’s lips.
He then shifts forwards pushing the man backwards, reveling in the fact that his muscular junior never put up a fight when he manhandled him, so that he was laying flat on the mattress. “You’re not allowed to leave.” Don’t leave me is what he wants to say. Not now, not ever. “Your punishment for picking water over me.” He could pretend his words were about entrapping the other to a night in his bed. He could pretend this was just another game of him wanting to be the predator against the baby deer, who was currently looking up at him with doe eyes. He could pretend it wasn’t because the younger had worked his way into his heart, had built himself a home there, and he feared the consequences of ever losing that. He could pretend like it wasn’t a desperate plea for him to never leave his home.
“Whatever,” Gaon huffs, but he doesn’t seem at all bothered by the demand. Maybe the younger had caught on to more than he realized. Had finally learned how to decipher the secret meanings behind the words he said versus what he actually meant.
Whatever indeed. He’d deal with this tomorrow when his brain didn’t feel so fuzzy and he no longer felt compelled to bury his face back into the younger’s chest. He could give himself tonight to be weak, to align his body against the other man’s, to accept the comfort of the hand lazily stroking through the messy strands of his hair. He could deal with the aftermath of this and manipulate his image back into the powerful fear-inducing judge in the morning. But for now he would be weak.