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Jisung collects dreams.
When the night falls and the city sleeps, he goes from house to house, jumping from dream to dream and bottling them up in tiny and delicate glass bottles. He doesn't knock and doesn't ask for permission, for he doesn't want to be found. Jisung simply slides in someone's mind and wanders through those wonderful and mysterious lands he can never find in his head.
The thing is, Jisung doesn't dream. He can't dream.
Many, many centuries ago, so many ago that he can't even remember when exactly he was born, he was cursed by Hypnos, the serene yet terrible God of sleep, to be forever sleepless and walk the Earth for the rest of his days. And so now he wanders the fantastic and imaginary worlds other minds create, collecting those fascinating things he cannot possess himself. Pretty dreams, sad dreams, weird dreams, bad dreams... he wants them all, and takes them all.
Jisung stores his precious gems in an infinite room with infinite rows, full of infinite dreams he stole from infinite people— truth be told, he stopped counting centuries ago. He treasures them like they are the most valuable thing in existence— to him they are— and revisits them once the night comes to an end and there are no more dreams to collect.
It's been a while since Jisung lived outside the dreams he takes, for more than a couple minutes that is, and he has forgotten what being human really feels like. Now, he feels more like a phantom, a colorless shadow lurking on other people's minds but with no real impact on their lives.
He never really cared about that, forming ties is not good for someone like him anyways, someone who is damned to live forever but with no rest, someone who will see the end of days, who will be there when the sun loses its brightness and everything green dies out.
Jisung never really cared, until he stumbles upon Minho and his dreams.
Never in his lifetime, and that was much to say, has he encountered a mortal whose dreams were so magical, so enchanting. Jisung can't explain what it is, but he finds himself coming back to him the next night, and the night after that, and the one after that too. Eventually, Minho’s become the only dreams he visits.
He has such a vivid mind. The images that fill it feel so full of life and love and so many feelings Jisung had forgotten how to feel a long time ago, and soon Jisung's infinite room of infinite rows gets filled with more and more of his dreams.
It isn't long, either, until his heart and mind are filled with a kind of warmth only Minho can make him feel, with his bright mind and the melodious voice he hears in his dreams and is sure sounds even better in real life. He becomes enamored with the idea of him his dreams project, and with the feeling of sheer bliss he feels when he roams the roads of the boy’s mind.
For the first time in his cursed existence, Jisung wants to live outside his treasured dreams. He realizes he has been missing out on so much happiness and so many adventures.
For the first time in centuries, he wants to take a ride on the rollercoaster of life. He wants to dive deep into the unknown waters, wants to fly across the endless skies of possibilities.
For the first time in forever, Jisung thinks he fell in love.
He wants to hold Minho in his arms and for him to hold him in his. He wants to kiss Minho goodnight and wake up by his side. He wants to taste the sweet and bitter taste of love, and wants him to be the one whose lips he takes that poison from.
Jisung wants, no, longs for him, for everything of him. But he can't have him, he can't even take a bite of that unattainable and forbidden fruit. Such utopic fantasy can be nothing but that, a fantasy, because Jisung's eternity is damned, and he can't, won't, drag the boy into it. Not when it's only a matter of years before he loses him.
Because for someone like him, whose life will outlast all things living and lifeless, an eternal existence in solitude after tasting the immortal sweetness of Minho’s love is the worst nightmare he could ever live.