Chapter Text
He’s in the same place, they’re both there again. Long, sprawling hills, sky a light rosy hue, grass stretching on endlessly, it all melts into one vague blur as he tries to focus further; Jongho can’t make out anything else.
Except you.
You’re standing in front of him, just like always, with all his focus on you, and he looks at your outstretched hand. It’s inviting, incredibly so, along with the smile that plays on your face, and Jongho feels uncharacteristically shy.
Your smile grows wider and you wiggle your fingers as he purses his lips, and he pretends that the tinge on his face is due to the light from some distant star that he can’t possibly name.
He huffs lowly, before stepping forward and grabbing your hand. It’s soft, warm against his own and Jongho can feel the warmth spreading upwards, his arm tingling. Hand in hand, they walk together, over the grass which seems to never end, and he wonders just how long he’s been walking with you in this place which he’s never seen, yet knows inexplicably better than even his home.
He wonders how he knows you, when he’s never met you. His waking moments are spent pondering upon that very question.
Eventually, you halt, and Jongho looks at you questioningly. He follows your gaze to see a picnic blanket and basket laid out under a tree. It all seems to have appeared out of thin air. The tree hadn’t been there a moment back, either.
“Why are we here?” He wants to ask, but the words don’t leave his mouth. He’s not sure he’d be able to let out any sound even if he tried.
You turn to him, eyes sparkling, and Jongho feels a surge of affection within. Your grip on his hand tightens, and you start walking again, eagerly dragging him and he lets himself get carried forward.
You slip your hand out of his only to sit down on the blanket, and he falters for a moment, not sure if he should join you before deciding that, yes, he should.
You spend the next few minutes looking around, gesturing animatedly to things that keep popping out of nowhere, soft petals raining down, butterflies, a few stray leaves. And Jongho spends all that time looking at you, looking at the way your hair falls slightly into your eyes despite your numerous efforts to push it away, looking at the way the corners of your eyes crinkle when you smile just the slightest. He wants to touch your face, feel it with his hands even as he commits it all to memory, and he’s about to indulge himself.
His fingertips land on your cheek, and he finds himself in his room again, eyes fluttering open as he’s ripped out of his dream.
He’s quiet for a moment, before he exhales, disappointed. It’s always at the crucial moments that he’s woken up.
He didn’t always dream of you. There was a time when he slept through nights dreamlessly, or dreamt of things that he can’t even remember anymore. He did dream of a stranger during the day, the rare times when he napped. But it stopped around three years back.
Since then, his nights have been full of dreams of you, and when he’s too tired during the day, his naps are devoid of dreams, or his dreams; devoid of you. He wonders why the pattern has been reversed.
Shutting his eyes for some more moments yields no result. Resigned, he pulls himself out of his bed, deciding to go through his day instead.
The next seventeen or so hours are pretty much uneventful, till he gets into bed at around midnight.
-
He’s in the same place. But you’re not.
He tosses and turns in his sleep, eyebrows knitted even has he continues to slumber, and it’s only when the early morning sun shines through his window that his eyes open. For the first time in ages, he’s woken up not because he can’t be with you any longer, but because he just couldn’t find you.
Elsewhere, in a hospital, the doctors declare you to be in a state of coma.
-
He’s been walking for hours now, reaching the same place over and over again before a new path opens up, only for him to arrive at his initial position. He’s never been here before, branches drooping with leaves frosted over as the trees cast dark shadows on the ground. It’s cold, incredibly so and he wonders exactly how much longer he’ll be here, how many weeks he must spend here before the figurative snow thaws, the sun comes up and flowers bloom again.
He’s tired. Lonely. It feels like he’s looking for something, and at moments he feels like he’s almost found it, but then he turns back, or hurries over the hills to where he expects to find it, but there’s nothing. There’s not a trace of what he wants, and he’s starting to believe that his mind is playing tricks on him.
Perhaps the place had always looked like this, but he’d just never paid enough attention to notice it. Not when he had you next to him, smiling like a ray of light in a place so lonely without you. Where was the pink sky, the flowers which floomed and the fluttering butterflies?
Where were you?
It’s been days since he last saw you.
Jongho is scared.
Thankfully, he doesn’t have to wait for long. He stirs as his slumber breaks, and he wakes up, ready to face another day with nothing more than emotional exhaustion and a glaring lack of your presence.
-
One of his co-workers is in the hospital in the next district because of some issues, and Jongho gets roped into visiting him. He’s still worried and more than a little upset about the lack of his favourite person in his dreams, but when everyone requests it of him, he can’t refuse. He doesn’t really have a valid reason that he can give, anyway. “Sorry, the person of my dreams is missing and it sets me on edge,” isn’t really something he can say with a straight face.
He takes the train to the district, then walks from the station to the hospital. He already has a map, and with the help of a few kind strangers, it isn’t long before he reaches his destination. Relieved, he looks around for a moment. For a hospital, the place sure looks uplifting. Maybe it’s because of the small flowers and leaves adorning the sidewalk, shucked off from the trees as their branches sway in the wind. Yeah, that’s really not how he remembers other hospitals.
He enters, asking the receptionist for directions and she gives him a pass, allowing him to go up to the floor where his co-worker’s room is situated.
Jongho spends the next few minutes making small talk with the other man, and he thanks him, laughing awkwardly. He’s not too banged up, and he even says so, nervously admitting that the other person involved in the accident suffered way more. Jongho still eyes the casts on his leg and shoulder skeptically, and his co-worker waves off the look with his free hand. “You should see the other person. For real. I’d feel better if you went and visited them. I can’t move yet so I’ve not gone, and I get the feeling their family won’t be too happy to see me. But please go and visit them for me, Jongho-ssi.”
Jongho sighs. Nothing to be done when an injured person asks something of him. He ends up nodding, and bowing one last time as he leaves the room. He goes back to the front desk, smiling at the receptionist innocently and asking where the other accident survivor is. They’ve survived, surely?
It’s only when he’s in front of the ICU that he understands what his co-worker meant. Yeah, compared to broken bones, a coma is far worse.
And the only reason Jongho’s allowed to enter the room is because the patient’s parents all but push him in. They seem to recognise him for some unknown reason, and he understands soon enough, when he’s in the room, in front of the patient.
The person who’s been missing from his dreams has manifested themselves in the real world, lying on the hospital bed with equipment supporting them.
He stares, a bit stunned and a lot light-headed, at the person who lies on the bed.
It’s you.
You, with your face which he’s always wanted to touch, caress with his hands, and your hands which he’s always held while walking with you to the ends of the world. They’re stretched out at your side, and his own hands twitch in response to the memories that resurface. With your hair flared out on the white pillow, akin to a halo as it frames your head, you look a little like an angel.
Just like in his dreams.
Yet, you’re totally different from his dreams.
You’re pale, unnaturally so, with the IV stuck into your hand delivering weird, concerning but essential things into you. Your face looks peaceful, but it doesn’t have the radiance that it possesses in Jongho’s deeams, and his heart clenches painfully in his rib cage.
Is this why he’s not seen you in his dreams recently? He realises it’s been a week and two days now, around the same time when his co-worker got into the accident. No wonder you’ve not had time to jump into his dreams when you’re fighting to just have some of your own.
He turns, unable to look at you and his met with your parents’ eyes. “How’d you know it’s me?” He asks, because it’s the only thing he can bring himself to utter.
One of them pulls out a folded piece of paper, unfolding it before his eyes as he stares. It’s a sketch of his own face, and Jongho’s eyebrows raise in surprise. “You’re the child’s favourite thing to draw.”
Jongho leaves the room after that, throat too tight to want to stay there; not when your parents looked like they were just waiting for him to get out so they could cry again.
He just goes back once to see his co-worker, asking them where he was when the accident happened. Jongho needs to extend his trip to this district, and he’s okay with it. With that in mind, he gets out of the hospital and hails a taxi for his destination.
It’s just an old roadside market, set up against a row of residential buildings. He sits down on the steps leading up to one of the shops, and waits.
There’s nothing out of the ordinary. At first glance, anyway. But the longer he stays there, the more convinced he gets that something is unusual about the place. He feels goosebumps on his arms as the wind blows, the evening getting colder as the sun sets, nighttime setting in and clouds floating by, obstructing stars periodically. He leans against the wall, watching as the shops shut down one by one, and it’s only when the owner of the shop he’s using as shelter looks at him impatiently that Jongho gets up and forces himself to walk.
He’s going to look for you as long as you need him to.
He walks past a narrow alleyway, and for a moment it feels like the air gets especially warm, then back to the biting cold that’s settling into Jongho’s bones through his thin shirt.
He turns around, and the urge to go backwards gets even stronger, pulling at his gut and making his feet carry him in front of the alleyway again. But something stops him from going inside. It’s like an invisible wall in front of him obstructing him from entering the darkness.
And then he’s reminded of his home, his parents, his life that he’s almost put on hold to chase the unreasonable thoughts in his head.
He turns around, irritated at himself, and walks down the dimly lit road, all the while cursing his inability to do anything. But what can he even do? He’s barely even an adult.
Should he take the train back home? That’ll be inconvenient, his mind provides, and he’s ashamed to admit that he thinks that only because he doesn’t want to be away from you. The next moment he berates himself for being ashamed. So what if he wants to be near you? Jongho is entitled to want to be close to you; you’re his soulmate for god’s sake. He shakes his head, walks till he reaches the busy roads again, specifically the one where the hospital is situated.
In a split-second decision, he enters the building opposite to the hospital, and sets out all the money that he has onto the counter. Hotel rooms for one night are surprisingly not that expensive.
He makes a call to his parents, lying through his teeth about meeting up with a friend and crashing at his house, and the second he’s in his room, he flops down on the bed. When his head hits the pillow, it’s only a matter of seconds before he’s pulled under his dreams.
-
He’s in the same place, branches drooping even as the trees shed more of their leaves, sky greying, and Jongho walks briskly, trying not to focus on the cold ground under his shoes which makes his feet the slightest bit numb. He’s going in circles again, almost, over one hill and then the next, and reaching the first again by some forsaken chance. And he’s starting to get tired. He wants to get away.
Nevertheless, there’s something crawling up his spine, whispering into his ear, goading him and he wants to prove to it that he can stay here.
And so he does, trying to entertain himself with memories of you as he walks around the desolate land.
He remembers your face. How it’d looked in the hospital as you lied still, unaware of the rest of the world. How it’d looked in his dreams, when your eyes had been trained solely on him. Or how it’d looked when you were looking at something other than him, eyes lighting up in excitement and interest.
He remembers your hands. How they’d looked, still and unmoving, and how they’d felt when they were in his own, fingers intertwined with yours.
He remembers how he’d thought you looked like an angel in the room with so much white. He thinks of how you always look like an angel, even with the brightest of colours that’d painted their world of dreams.
Cold or not, dull, hopeless or not, endlessly repetitive or not, he just wants to walk with you. In this place, and in the place that he used to inhabit with you. And in the world where you’re separated from each other by the distance of a mere district. In the world where he’s alive and breathing, and you’re monitored by doctors trying to save you. Where he’s standing next to you, watching you while you’ve escaped to some place far away from your mind.
He calls out your name for the first time, letting it echo in the place. To think that he even knows your name now, but you don’t know his fills him with a sense of urgency.
He calls out again, louder this time, letting the sound travel farther.
Like the flame of a candle growing against winds that try to put it out, he sees your figure in the distance, staring back at him with emotions in your eyes that he cannot decipher.
He almost trips over his feet as he hurries over to you, afraid that it’s but a mirage, a figment of his imagination that’s crying from your absence. But as he draws closer, you don’t disappear; your presence just gets stronger till he can feel you as he stops some feet away from you.
You look at him, he looks at you. Wordlessly. Then you crack a smile and wiggle your fingers, and Jongho’s lower lip trembles slightly.
“You found me.”
They’re the first words he’s heard from you; he’s heard your voice now.
He nods. Mustering up the courage, he responds. “I’ve been looking for days.”
“I know,” you reply, still smiling, and Jongho steps forward. It’s a big risk he’s taking - you might just disappear again. But he reaches out and places a hand on your arm. Nothing happens.
Right, that’s safe territory. His raises his hand again, pressing it lightly to your cheek, and your eyes get even brighter as your smile widens. He breathes out.
“Don’t go away.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” You say, shrugging, looking around casually.
“You have to come back, please.” He tries again, stepping even closer, slowly, as if approaching a spooked animal. He’s not one for physical displays of affection, but he swallows his pride and traps you in his arms as he hugs you for the first time. He can do that much for the person he l… likes being with.
“But I’m here. Right here, next to you, in our world. There’s just us here, isn’t it so peaceful?” You pull back, smiling at him encouragingly, and he shakes his head vehemently.
“I’m not the only one that needs you. You… you’re so important to so many people, you can’t just stay here.”
You look at him questioningly, head tilted as you go over his words before frowning. “What about you?”
Ah, the million-dollar question. To be brave or to be a chicken who can’t admit to his own feelings; that is the question.
“I… I need you there too, in the real world. I can’t just see you at night, please.” The plea slips out with another call of your name, and Jongho tries not to wince at the way your eyes glimmer with tears.
He doesn’t know how to talk. He’s never been good at that. All he can try now is express himself through actions, even though that’s something he’s never been good at, either.
He pulls you into his arms again, holding you tight as he buries his face in your hair.
“Come back. I’ll be there.” He mumbles.
He swallows back the lump in his throat when he feels your head move against his cheek. Squeezing his eyes shut, he wishes he could wake up from this dream with you. And if not with you, then he wants to never wake up.
-
Jongho’s eyes snap open as he lies in the hotel room, sweating as a shudder goes through his body. He’s breathing heavily, exhausted, head spinning, but he forces himself to rip away the sheets and stumble over to the window overlooking the hospital.
After nine days and eleven hours of being comatose, as the doctors and nurses mill about, conversing frantically, you finally open your eyes.