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Sometimes it’s Yoo Joonghyuk that does it to them, too tactile and insistent. Other times, it’s Kim Dokja, with those endlessly dark eyes, looking at Yoo Joonghyuk as if he’s never seen him before, drawing his gaze to that slack, awed mouth.
Without any good reason, the strange atmosphere will seize them. A feeling that lingers in the space between them, but has nowhere to go. It simmers, following Yoo Joonghyuk around and worsening his temper, raising his voice and roughening his hands. Kim Dokja’s nape glistening with sweat in the mild weather, his tongue sharp and dismissive.
There are days when Yoo Joonghyuk can’t be in the same room as him without exploding into another argument. Just the sight of him, thin and overly confident, grinds on his nerves. If Yoo Joonghyuk ever grows fangs, he’ll make sure to rip Kim Dokja’s throat out before he finds a way to get rid of them.
“What kind of idiot can sleep with somebody else’s hand around their throat?” he bites, finding anything to be mad at.
Kim Dokja blinks, and then damn near laughs at him. “That’s what you’re mad about? That I trust you?”
Yoo Joonghyuk doesn’t usually care, not enough to argue about it. But today he’s wired up and suddenly can’t get past it, so he insists, “You should never lower your guard.”
With dark, empty eyes, Kim Dokja tilts his smile crooked. “Are you threatening me? Don’t tell me—should I be worried you’ll strangle me at night?”
Without a good enough answer, Yoo Joonghyuk seethes. He can keep Kim Dokja safe from everything except two people: themselves. Kim Dokja would kill himself over and over, and Yoo Joonghyuk would kill him with his own hands. Has done, shed that precious blood over a stone floor and watched it dissipate into thin air with the rest of him. That’s what being Kim Dokja’s most beloved means, having to kill him every night to let him sleep in peace.
Kim Dokja would let him get away with anything. Find a way to justify it, that Yoo Joonghyuk is in the right to hurt him, that he deserved it, somehow. If Yoo Joonghyuk cut Kim Dokja into tiny pieces and ate him, he would only smile tiredly and whisper about, Joonghyuk-ah, I hope the taste of my story satisfies you.
Satisfy him...
There’s only one thing Yoo Joonghyuk wants these days, and Kim Dokja dances around it.
So Yoo Joonghyuk presses him, crowds him against the table until Kim Dokja has to sit and lean backwards to keep the distance between their chests. A startled, frightened look fills his eyes, his mouth endlessly chattering, “Yoo Joonghyuk, hey! What are you doing? How are you actually mad? Ah, don’t hit me, come on, man…”
His legs fall apart easily, his head tilting up in what was probably meant to be confidence, but it only leaves every part of him open. Yoo Joonghyuk’s arms on the table cage his hips inside his embrace, cutting off any escape. Nobody is around, not for a few hours.
There’s a beat of silence. Then,
“Yoo Joonghyuk,” Kim Dokja says, his voice suddenly serious. Everything about him screams, closer, come closer, his body bending like a tree under the wind of Yoo Joonghyuk’s presence. “What are you doing?”
The heat of his body feels like another skin over Yoo Joonghyuk’s own. Kim Dokja consumes, immediately, all of his thoughts.
Yoo Joonghyuk pushes off from the table. “Be more careful.”
“Huh? What… what’s up with you?” Kim Dokja’s voice falters over the sound of his name, breaking it into unspoken fragments. He’s still splayed out on the table, tilted backwards as though Yoo Joonghyuk is still standing in between his spread thighs, like he has yet to realize he’s stepped away. Under his thin shirt, Kim Dokja’s chest heaves.
When Yoo Joonghyuk turns his back and leaves, his hands shake with leftover adrenaline. He feels sick, enough to feel the discomfort curdling.
If he pressed further, asked for it, Kim Dokja would give in. If Yoo Joonghyuk took by force, stole what would otherwise be freely given, Kim Dokja would let him with only a sigh. It doesn’t matter what it is that he wants, Kim Dokja will find a way to get it for him eventually.
If he pushed him down, Kim Dokja might put up a performance, insisting that Yoo Joonghyuk must be feeling unwell, or that he must be afflicted with a scenario penalty, but he’d eventually give up the show and fall into him easily, willingly. Yet, with this, they both know that Yoo Joonghyuk will never force him, and that Kim Dokja will never offer it first.
Yoo Joonghyuk would never hurt Kim Dokja. It's a shame, then, that it's all he seems to do.
He's not a violent man. At worst, he is aggressive, ill-tempered and discourteous—no angel, that's for sure. But Yoo Joonghyuk isn't a creature of bloodlust either, he doesn't crave the adrenaline of a fight like some people do. What he does in the scenarios is for survival, he takes no pleasure from slaughter. It's easier to kill than it is to persuade, but it's not a pleasant choice. All he can do is wade through the tides of each day, face the waves as they come and erode every opposing cliff into sand. In none of his lifetimes has Yoo Joonghyuk ever not felt the despondency and burden of violence. He's not as unfeeling as he sometimes wishes he was.
He hates how Kim Dokja draws it out of him. How easy it is to slip up and say something harsh, to threaten him. Yoo Joonghyuk would never follow through, but he would. Oh, he would. All Kim Dokja has to do is push him that way, and Yoo Joonghyuk doesn't know if he's a good enough person to stop what would happen next. More than anything, Yoo Joonghyuk regrets hurting the people he cares about. He has hated every blow Kim Dokja takes in his stead, but has easily dealt twice as many.
This kind of awareness builds up inside a person. That you grew teeth to protect what is yours, and then turned around and sank it deep into their neck, pierced through skin and muscle and bone and cartilage, ground it all under your molars. It makes you sick to drink that blood, but it flows down your throat either way.
A person who hurts what they love is no better than a person who hates. Either way, you destroy it. And if that thing comes back after it dies, again and again, and you hurt it, again and again, then your love means less than the dirt you bury it under.
Rather than pain, or pity, or anger, Kim Dokja has only ever deserved understanding. Try as he might, Yoo Joonghyuk cannot give it to him.
Not in the way that matters.
Barely an hour later, Kim Dokja hunts Yoo Joonghyuk down in his room and confronts him in the doorway.
“You can’t just shove me around like that,” he insists. His stance is wide and trying to be confident, but his angrily crossed arms only draw Yoo Joonghyuk’s attention to the pale, shifting gaps between his shirt buttons. “We’re close, aren’t we? We can talk these things out like civilized people.”
Yoo Joonghyuk drags his eyes back up to his face, raising an eyebrow at Kim Dokja’s frown.
Slowly, purposefully drawing out the words in a low voice, he says, “You came here to talk?”
It’s almost funny how quickly Kim Dokja’s composure cracks. His voice falters strangely as he stumbles over a, “Well, what else would I have come here for?”
Yoo Joonghyuk doesn’t bother to entertain any more of this. He knows that if he does, Kim Dokja will stand here and try to make him ask it out loud, to taunt him into admitting it. “Don’t play these games with me—you know what I want.”
And Kim Dokja does, which is why he frets at the door and splutters nonsense, and then gets irritated at Yoo Joonghyuk’s silence, and why he storms off with a crimson face, murmuring under his breath. That guy, he refuses to embarrass himself. They’ll be like this for years if Yoo Joonghyuk waits for Kim Dokja to come to him first. It’s good, then, that he has so much practice in waiting.
In bed that night, Yoo Joonghyuk doesn’t say a word to Kim Dokja in response to any of his nervous, casual greetings. He tosses his coat and sword onto the floor and clambers into bed fully clothed, belts and sheath still digging into his skin.
With an rough, frantic movement, Yoo Joonghyuk grabs Kim Dokja’s jaw and feels him go limp. It’s easy to just—lay his head there. Hear his pulse hammering out of his body by cramming his ear straight into his neck. Distantly, he hears a wheezing noise that could honestly come from either of them. A strange rattling from Kim Dokja’s chest.
He smells like clean water and generic, inoffensive soap. Somehow, this only worsens Yoo Joonghyuk's mood. What he wants is the scent of sweat, dirt, earthen and deep. The musk of a human after a day's work. The realness of it, invigorating. Just the thought of it has Yoo Joonghyuk's mouth hanging open, like he might be able to taste a hint of it on Kim Dokja's clean, freshly showered skin.
“Are you alright?” Kim Dokja’s hand hesitantly falls against the back of his head. With practiced movements, he runs fingers through Yoo Joonghyuk’s thick, disarrayed hair.
Just his touch is enough to make Yoo Joonghyuk’s skin set on fire, a heat that gathers in his abdomen. He wants so badly to press down into something, the mattress, Kim Dokja—hell, the floor, for all he fucking cares—that he could die from the desperation alone.
A half-aborted thrust forward escapes from his instincts, and Kim Dokja freezes underneath him, grip pulling on his scalp.
It takes all his willpower and more for Yoo Joonghyuk to stop his hips midway, to stop from grinding straight down onto Kim Dokja’s muscled stomach.
He forces out hard breaths with the force of his need, trying, trying. It doesn’t help that his dick has already risen to attention in his constricting pants, aching from being teased with a light press against Kim Dokja’s body. Just that much feels so damn good, Yoo Joonghyuk feels like a rusted cogwheel trying to keep himself up and away from grinding down hard and taking his pleasure. Though, if… if he did… Kim Dokja would lay there and let him… would card his fingers through his hair and let him chew all over his neck… would lay there and take it…
…damn this motherfucker!
Yoo Joonghyuk rips himself away and tumbles straight down onto the floor. The suddenness of it does nothing to break him out of his desire, and only frustrates him more. For a serious instant, he considers just fumbling himself out of his pants and getting off right there, doing anything to alleviate the heavy pain of his cock. Because fuck, he needs something. Needs Kim Dokja underneath him. But the ground will do. It'll have to.
Yet before he can flip over and ignore the shock of pain on his back to rut against the floorboards like some kind of mad dog, Yoo Joonghyuk brutally tears himself out of his own head.
With a grunt, he forces himself to sit up and fucking deal with it. It’s only the discipline of over a hundred years of training that stops him from clambering right back onto the bed to bear down on Kim Dokja hungrily.
Like a dog in rut. So hard he could finish with just a single touch. What the hell has he become? What is he doing to Kim Dokja? What is he doing to them both?
Much like earlier, Kim Dokja stays still where he left him, as if he hasn’t caught up. Yoo Joonghyuk is tall enough that his head and shoulders clear the mattress, so after a moment, he dares to swallow his shame and frustration to look at him.
Bad idea. Kim Dokja’s awed, flushed face and wet eyes only make his unsatisfied dick throb more. Yoo Joonghyuk will die if he does not get to bury it inside of him tonight. He loves him too much to even look at him.
...it shouldn't be like this.
Yoo Joonghyuk has been in love before, had other relationships, and he had never felt so frantic and desperate back then. It had been simple and comforting to take her into his arms and kiss her ear, to reassure her and be reassured. Intimacy came slow and natural, brief moments in the spaces between the channel broadcast.
Even before the apocalypse, he remembers how relaxing sex used to be. Light hearted. His tastes leaned basic and vanilla. Sure, he had his rough moments too, but it was never more than a way of spicing things up every so often.
Now, not a day goes by without the stirring of desire; he wakes up needing him, falls asleep needing him. He is greedy and wrathful when it comes to him, in a way he has never felt before. This kind of love is new and shameful to him, the strength of its sincerity, with a loss of control. With Kim Dokja, Yoo Joonghyuk wants him constantly.
So of course, he ends the night by laying side by side with Kim Dokja, neither one looking at each other.
When Yoo Joonghyuk had disappeared to dunk his head under freezing cold water, he’d been dismayed to find that it couldn’t shock the sense back into him. He’d gotten himself off roughly, biting his sleeve to smother the desperate, animalistic noises, agonized when his orgasm took far too long to arrive and felt like an empty, disappointing nothing. It left him with twice the need and none of the satisfaction.
Wearing a nasty sneer for himself, Yoo Joonghyuk had shoved his pants back up, then stomped into the room loud enough to wake everybody else on the floor. Damn near stormed straight back out with rage when he saw Kim Dokja was still waiting for him on the bed.
What kind of fool would stay after a show like that? Is he trying to drive Yoo Joonghyuk crazy? If he wants it so bad—bad enough to excuse that kind of animalistic humping, to have laid there and looked up at Yoo Joonghyuk with such glee and desire as he’d pressed against him—why doesn’t he just…! Damn… damn this bastard!
He wonders at Kim Dokja’s sanity as he settles on the bed next to where he lays, observing wearily as he stares back up at him with shining, expectant eyes.
“Get out,” Yoo Joonghyuk warns, his voice rough and exhausted. He feels ashamed of the force of his desire, how he can barely control himself in front of this man. It’s all too obvious that he’d jerked off in the bathroom, and Kim Dokja’s tiny smirk betrays that.
As if offended, Kim Dokja huffs, “No,” and then playfully swats at the now deflated crotch of Yoo Joonghyuk’s pants. Oversensitive as hell, even after a pathetic excuse of a climax, Yoo Joonghyuk reflexively snatches his wrist out of midair and Kim Dokja twists away with a grin.
After another failed attempt, Kim Dokja settles back down on the bed and closes his eyes. Yoo Joonghyuk watches him silently, still aggravated, when he speaks again and says, “Either way, it’s over now, so just come back and sleep.”
That is true, but no thanks to him. Yoo Joonghyuk allows himself exactly ten seconds to imagine that he’d given in and shoved Kim Dokja’s face down to take care of ‘it’ with his stupid, irritating mouth. It’s a nice thought. Really nice… maybe a bit too pleasing. He grunts as his dick tries to give itself another valiant effort. He decides to save that mental image for a day when the chafing of his underwear isn’t about to give him an aneurysm.
Kim Dokja continues with a, “Next time, I could just help... you. To get it over with. So that we can sleep. I don’t… not really… care.”
In a saner state of mind, Yoo Joonghyuk would have probably punched him in anger and told him to go fuck himself. He nearly does—really. Balls up his fist and everything.
Unfortunately, Yoo Joonghyuk is bone-tired and still freezing cold. “I’ll hold you to that,” he mutters as he loosens his hands, and slips under the covers beside Kim Dokja.
As he settles, he keeps his eyes open long enough to see Kim Dokja raise his eyes to him, his face awfully kind and vulnerable. He is beautifully, frighteningly open, willing and unfastened.
If they were different people, one of them might say I love you.
Unable to bear it, Yoo Joonghyuk covers that expression with a hand, shutting his own eyes to block out the sight.
Underneath his palm, Kim Dokja’s wavering breaths betray his earlier confidence, and he doesn’t try to push Yoo Joonghyuk away. The heat of him is a mere whisper, his open lips a caress on his skin.
The comfort of the position is quietly thrilling, the way his hand encompasses the width of Kim Dokja’s face with ease. Neither of them acknowledge the strange intimacy of it in the still, cold night, but they’re certainly not thinking about anything else.
In the silence, Kim Dokja’s throat clicks and swallows, his eyes squeezed shut and trembling.
Though already falling into a haziness, Yoo Joonghyuk feels yet another distant stir in his abdomen.
Before he falls asleep properly, Yoo Joonghyuk tucks his fingers around Kim Dokja’s throat, covers his neck fully and presses against his short, hastened breaths.
They fight about it again and again. Yoo Joonghyuk scolds him for letting himself be so defenseless, and Kim Dokja brushes it off every time. Then something else will happen, and they’ll argue about that too. Any excuse to get all up in each other’s face and yell, to storm away frustrated and unsatisfied. These days, it’s the only way they talk outside of the scenario planning.
Sometimes Kim Dokja wins and Yoo Joonghyuk has to find an old car to destroy so he doesn’t beat him up. Other times, Kim Dokja throws his hands up and generously gives in, but that only infuriates Yoo Joonghyuk even more.
I don’t know what you want from me! Kim Dokja will snap, and Yoo Joonghyuk will seethe because he knows exactly what he wants, what they both want, and will try to say that. Just like always, Kim Dokja will deflect, crossing his arms and saying, Didn’t I tell you before that we can talk without yelling? Why are you always so mad?! and then they’re fighting once more. Either way, Yoo Joonghyuk loses and Kim Dokja wins.
But no matter what, one thing stays true. Most nights, they fall asleep together in one bed, with Yoo Joonghyuk’s hand around Kim Dokja’s throat.