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Kim Dokja hated winter. The snow required extra work to get around, the sun only came out when he was stuck in a windowless office, and every step outside threatened assaults by slush or ice. Winter slowed everything to a crawl. For someone who was already prone to temporal abnormalities, and lacking punctuality in general, this irritating season ensured that he would always be late to his destination.
The worst offender of winter, however, was the cold. Being saved by his company of friends hadn't conjured his body anew. In it was still etched the memory of every broken bone and scar, beyond one lifetime's worth of injuries, eager to ache with compounded interest whenever the temperature dropped.
It was a sullen kind of ache, a petulant sensation that demanded attention, much like his stories at times, but unlike those in that there was nothing he could do to allay it. The most he could do was burrow under every blanket and comforter in the house, praying that no one would ask him to leave his cocooned couch.
―――✧―――
Kim Dokja was not in the best of moods today. It was his day off and his plans of hibernation were dashed when an unfairly handsome someone dressed in layers of black topped with a loosely worn scarf tossed a familiar white coat at his mountain of blankets. He'd had everything ready too - a fully charged smartphone, a bag of snacks and a drink just within reach without having to leave his insulation for too long, and the TV set to a random movie marathon as background noise.
"Grocery shopping."
To be fair, Kim Dokja knew beforehand that he was on shopping duty for today, but it was his day off. Did no one in this house understand that?
Day. Off.
He had hoped that by wrapping himself up in advance that Yoo Joonghyuk might overlook the outing, but the stubborn stickler of a sunfish was allowing no leniency for him this afternoon.
Paired with a trademark glare, Yoo Joonghyuk made a low sound of annoyance when the man made no movement from the couch. "It's going to be snowing again later today,” Yoo Joonghyuk said. “The sooner we finish, the less we'll have to deal with on the walk back."
It was a valid argument and one that Kim Dokja might have agreed to, if he wasn't already cozy and in no mood to disrupt that balance. "Why don't we go tomorrow then? No need to rush against the weather." It wasn't his strongest volley back, but his energy was anywhere but here today.
"I'll let Lee Hyunsung know then." The intensity of Yoo Joonghyuk’s glare didn't change, but a corner of his mouth rose in a smirk.
"Huh? What does he have to do with this?" Caught off guard, Kim Dokja finally looked up from his smartphone at Yoo Joonghyuk and immediately felt a chill at that smile.
"You've just volunteered to take his shoveling duty tomorrow morning. I'll grab him for shopping now."
Kim Dokja immediately winced at the thought of spending the morning clearing any amount of snow, let alone the length of their sidewalk and multi-car driveway. Snow removal was the last thing he'd ever thought about as a factor when suggesting that they all live in a big house together and went hunting for one.
"Wait." Reluctantly he began to struggle out of the layers of comfort, but Yoo Joonghyuk had nearly left the room. "I said wait!" Kim Dokja threw one of the decorative couch pillows at the man and watched it gracefully cartwheel through the air and fall pitifully short of its goal.
Thankfully, though, it still did its job of getting Yoo Joonghyuk to pause and turn around, looking down between the pillow and Kim Dokja with one eyebrow ever so slightly raised in disappointment and ridicule.
"You know you need me for shopping,” Kim Dokja pointed out. “I know what the kids like." He had managed to get most of the way out of the blankets by now, but his left foot was still caught around some deep folds of fabric that had gotten tightly tucked into the cushions.
Things like this were why he hadn't wanted to get up. Couch cocoons were serious business, both in building and deconstructing. Maybe he needed to give a seminar on this topic to the company so they'd have a better appreciation for it.
With a shake of his head in resignation, Yoo Joonghyuk walked over and helped Kim Dokja free his foot, "What they like isn't that hard to figure out. It's mostly junk." He pulled the white coat out of the mounds of fleece, afghans, and comforters, handing it back to his companion before saying, "Let's go."
―――✧―――
Despite all the protests and procrastination, the shopping trip turned out to be mostly painless for Kim Dokja.
Yoo Joonghyuk's subtly irritated expression, on the other hand, told the story of listening to the man in the white trench coat extol endlessly about the benefits of keeping more snacks in the house. Kim Dokja had eventually won, his trophy being a heavy bag of assorted junk food which Yoo Joonghyuk refused to allow in the same bags as the 'normal groceries', leaving him to carry it himself.
The forecast for the late afternoon hadn't been wrong. Large, lazy snowflakes were starting to amble through the air as the two left the grocery store. Nothing had started to accumulate yet along the cleared walkways from the store to their neighborhood, but with how cold it was and the sun soon setting, it would definitely be a chore by morning for anyone looking to travel.
The audio entertainment for their walk back had been provided by Kim Dokja, eager to share the most recent events of a web novel he had started reading earlier in the month. The story had caught him by surprise since he was rarely interested in stories about athleticism of any kind.
Unfortunately his retelling wasn't resonating with Yoo Joonghyuk in the same way. The taller man was making fewer and fewer non-committal hums of attention as they traveled.
Feeling a bit winded, Kim Dokja's words eventually trailed off as did his steps, falling a few behind Yoo Joonghyuk's assertive pace as he looked out at the park they were passing through. It was a surprisingly large one for the area, featuring a spacious clearing of relaxed hills peppered with various playground equipment including swings, low-set balance beams, and child-sized pull-up bars. The grounds were surrounded by a line of trees, helping to separate it from the residential neighborhood on one side and the small shopping center on the opposite end. Outside of the cleared pedestrian path they were on, everything was coated in a shimmering layer of untouched snow, deep enough that no grass or leaves were able to poke through.
...
...An intrusive thought.
...
"Joonghyuk-ah," Kim Dokja spoke with renewed energy as Yoo Joonghyuk glanced behind and finally realized the lost distance between the two of them. He slowed his pace a touch as Kim Dokja caught back up. "Can you do me a small favor real quick?"
Yoo Joonghyuk gave him a tired look. "Can't it wait until we're back at the house?"
"It will only take a second. Just hold my bag. I need to tie my shoe." He held out the bag of snacks as Yoo Joonghyuk stopped and turned to face him fully.
"You're wearing slip on loafers," he deadpanned, not even needing to look down. The ex-regressor frowned at Kim Dokja as he eyed the bag. "You wanted that junk, so you're carrying it the whole way back. Don't try to pawn it off on me mid-way."
Kim Dokja made an exasperated noise as he shoved the bag into Yoo Joonghyuk's already full arms. "That's not what I'm doing, you bastard. Just hold it for a minute, alright?"
"Kim Dokja." Yoo Joonghyuk's furrowed brows pressed closer together, but he reluctantly held the extra grocery bag.
Knowing that the snacks were now safe, Kim Dokja began to walk out into the ankle deep snow. The gaze that followed him could have easily melted all the snow along his path if they could find a way to harness it. With that in mind, he kept his pace quick while still savoring the soft sounds of snow compressing under foot as he climbed the low rise.
Yoo Joonghyuk watched his companion reach the top of the hill and turn around in a lighthearted spin, but his eyes widened as he caught a brief glimpse of something that made his stomach drop. Something that no one in the company had seen in years - a unique smile, one that could break a scenario as easily as one's spirit, a smile that always left its witnesses with a bitter taste afterwards.
With those thoughts rushing back, Yoo Joonghyuk watched as the reader openly fell backwards into the snow, arms outstretched from his sides. A sparkling flurry of dry snow that hadn't yet fully settled on the landscape spun upwards into the air at the disturbance, free to dance once more along with the newer snowfall.
"Ki-!" Yoo Joonghyuk wasn't able to get the exclamation out before an arm raised from its fresh indentation in the snow, waving lazily, aloof, signalling that the reckless man was okay. The arm then dropped back into its spot as a quiet took over the scenery.
It was cold. That wasn't unexpected, but it still felt like a jolt as Kim Dokja's body hit the snow. It had welcomed him, molding to his form like a frigid hug as he lay still. A cradling mound of ice crystals pressed against the back of his neck and head, numbing the bare skin as it desperately tried to pull the heat from his body. The coldness seeped in at every opening it could find and did its best to blossom past the protection of his white trench coat.
Blankly looking at the dense grey clouds above, there was something comforting to be said for a blanketed sky, weighted down and brought closer to the earth. Kim Dokja slowly let out a breath, watching the cold air transform it into an evanescent fog just as fleeting as that thought of thin comfort before less pleasant ones swept in.
The silence of the surroundings pressed against his ears uncomfortably, an oppressive, isolating, stillness that made his heartbeat quicken, fearful that the world had stopped now that its steward had left his post.
It was cold. It was quiet.
It was familiar in all the wrong ways.
"What are you doing?" Kim Dokja blinked at the break in the saturnine atmosphere, pulling him away from unpleasant thoughts, but didn't look at the source of the deep voice who was now standing next to him, free of the groceries. How had he come up the hill unnoticed?
Yoo Joonghyuk wondered if the man had even heard him as a new silence settled in. Kim Dokja's actions so far were more than enough to warrant worry, but the vacant look in dull eyes that were missing a trademark scintillant darkness had him pulling out his phone to start scrolling contacts.
"...I-I don't know," he said, his voice faint and distant. "...I don't know...grounding?" There was a sincerity in the uncertain words, a rarity for the impish man. Kim Dokja shifted his vague focus off to the side without moving his head, unwilling to face the one beside him.
"Grounding?" Content for now with getting a response, Yoo Joonghyuk slipped his phone back into his pocket.
"Mn." Kim Dokja took another long pause as he considered how best to explain, his voice still hesitant as he finally began, "During...that time...it was easy to get...lost." He took a deep breath of the sharp air and let it out before continuing, "So I had to do something if I felt like I was getting...too immersed." His bare fingers dug into the snow under his hand, pulling it into a lump, squeezing at it tightly. "I had to make use of what was there in the subway car. The cold of the window against the back of my head was a reliable constant to turn to...until I could no longer reach that." Long lashes settled along the top of his cheeks as Kim Dokja closed his eyes, his brows slightly pinched as he continued, "After that I used any piece of metal within reach, like pressing my wrist against the cold of the stanchions while laying on the floor." He opened his eyes again as he looked back up towards the sky. "The cold was important in keeping me there...but it was irritating too."
"And now?"
"I don't know...it seemed like it might be comforting?" His expression was thin and tight, the corners of his mouth pulled faintly downward.
"Was it?"
Kim Dokja finally turned his eyes towards Yoo Joonghyuk. "No, not really."
The ex-regressor didn't say anything, just holding out a hand to the man laying in the snow. Kim Dokja accepted it with a firm grasp, standing back up before turning to look at the mar he'd left on the pristine landscape, feeling guilty. Gloved fingers brushed through the back of his hair, dusting out loose snowflakes and gently prying little clumps of ice that had been matted in.
"How long was that?" Kim Dokja turned back to his companion and started shaking out his coat and stomping his feet a couple times to restore some warmth after the snow had slipped into his shoes.
"It's been about 10 minutes, maybe a little more." Yoo Joonghyuk made his way back down the hill to where he had left the groceries.
"10?!" Kim Dokja spluttered while trying to quickly get back to the sidewalk without getting more snow in his shoes, "I hadn't meant it to be that long. I-I...ack!"
An abstract pattern of greys and black was being firmly wrapped around his neck.
"You're going to catch a cold at this rate, fool." Yoo Joonghyuk took this small moment of fussing with the scarf to really look at Kim Dokja, something he hadn't done in a while.
Some light had thankfully returned to his eyes, but they still weren't as dark or as vivid as in the past. While his skin was more pale than usual and now brushed over in reds from the cold, the coloring under his eyes looked unusual in a different way.
It took a second for him to realize what it was - Kim Dokja was using a concealer of some kind to hide the dark circles under his eyes. His slightly chapped lips also showed hints of being worried at recently.
As easy as it would be to chastise him for still hiding things from the company, his family of friends, it seemed that they were just as guilty in these years since the reader's return of only seeing what they wanted to see, believing that he was fine despite knowing how withheld he could be.
Yoo Joonghyuk finished tying off the scarf before bending down to start collecting the grocery bags. He wasn't quite quick enough to get them all, however, as Kim Dokja grabbed two along with his bag of snacks. "With how tight this is, I may well die before we even get home, you jerk."
With small hums, one in annoyance and one in quiet relief, the two men resumed their walk home together.
―――✧―――
From the moment they opened the front door and were hit by a rush of warm air, it was chaos. Three of the kids, now well into their teenage years or more, were waiting inside the entryway, ready to attack.
Shin Yoosung grabbed the groceries out of Kim Dokja's arms and walked off to the kitchen with a bounce in her step, quickly followed by Biyoo in her human form pulling his scarf and coat off. She briefly leaned outside just long enough to give the coat a good shake before hanging it up inside to dry.
He barely got a greeting out to the group and his slippers on before Lee Gilyoung was ushering him off to a prepared hot bath. Yoo Joonghyuk stood out of the way by the door with a faintly knowing look tinting his usual stony expression.
The bath was quite pleasant and something that Kim Dokja was immediately thankful for as it chased away the cold that had lightly numbed his fingers and toes. It ate away at his aches, dulling them to a more acceptable level that didn't demand quite as much of his attention. He would have happily stayed in there for most of the evening if a knock at the door hadn't reminded him that dinner would be soon and the water was sadly beginning to cool.
Left for him outside of the bathroom door was a basket of his more comfortable lounging clothes, warm from being given a quick tumble in the dryer. The extra step of care caught him off guard, but he was thankful for it.
Kim Dokja quickly put everything on while it was still toasty, lightly smiling at the sweater at the bottom of the folded stack. The kids had worked on it together for him a year or so ago - Lee Gilyoung and Shin Yoosung had picked the colors and pattern while Biyoo had learned crochet to make it. It had stretched more than planned, so it was slightly loose and oversized on him, but it was something he treasured.
He easily pulled it on over his tshirt before giving his hair a quick comb and headed back towards the kitchen for dinner.
An impenetrable wall of Yoo Joonghyuk met Kim Dokja at the entryway and redirected him before he could say a word or offer to help. "Living room,” Yoo Joonghyuk said. “I'll bring dinner out there in a couple of minutes for everyone."
"Dinner in the living room?"
"The kids want to watch a movie that’s about to start." Yoo Joonghyuk gave a small shrug, "It won't be an issue."
With a small nod, Kim Dokja went to the living room where he found his trio of chaos plus Yoo Mia. They were sitting on the floor around the coffee table and couch with thick seat cushions and blankets, discussing a show they had watched the other day.
"Why aren't you all on the couch? There's plenty of room."
Shin Yoosung gave him a warm smile. "We saved it for you, ahjussi."
Kim Dokja turned to give the couch a proper look and found it covered in layers of blankets, just waiting for someone to stretch out and cocoon into them all. Maybe he wouldn't have to give that seminar about this after all, but he still didn't feel quite comfortable. "Are you all sure about this?" He fidgeted with his phone, absently rubbing his thumb against the texture of the volume buttons while observing the kids.
"Yes, we're sure, hyung." Lee Gilyoung stood up and gently pressed on his left shoulder, encouraging Kim Dokja to sit down on the couch before resuming his spot on the floor next to it.
With a small but content huff of resignation, Kim Dokja leaned out to fondly ruffle everyone's hair. They were too old for things like this, he knew, but he couldn't help himself.
A hand batted his away as he neared Yoo Mia. "You're welcome," she said, and gave him a nonchalant look before turning back to the TV to find the channel they wanted.
He couldn't help but smile a little as he sat back into the couch, bringing his feet up to stretch out, and began pulling the blankets down layer by layer to tuck into his cocoon.
It wasn't long after Kim Dokja had settled in and found the most comfortable position on the sofa for reading from his phone and watching the TV when Yoo Joonghyuk entered the room carrying a tray of food.
On one side were plates stacked six high, a fascinating tower of white ceramic circles, each topped with a thick square wrapped in foil. Balancing the tower on the other side of the tray was an oversized bowl of freshly made popcorn seasoned with what smelled to be soy sauce and butter, a simple yet savory pairing.
Yoo Joonghyuk handed out a plate to everyone and sat the tray and popcorn in the middle of the coffee table, leaving it easily within reach of everyone. He joined the watch party, sitting down on the oversized cushioned footstool at the end of the couch.
Kim Dokja tried to shift his feet in the tight mass of blankets to make room on the couch proper, but was stopped with a hand gently pressed to roughly where his ankle should be.
He shook his head lightly at Kim Dokja as he gave a stoic look, "Eat."
The king of the blankets shrugged his shoulders at the dismissal of his efforts and turned his attention to the plate before him. As he had seen in the stack, it was just like the others, a white plate topped with a thick square wrapped in foil which was warm to the touch, but there was something else on his plate which he hadn't seen from the angle earlier...something red and very unappealing despite the craftsmanship.
"What's this?" He pointed offendedly at the plate featuring a bouquet of three roses carved from tomatoes.
Yoo Joonghyuk looked up from beginning to unwrap his foil square. "Gilgeori toast. I thought it would be easier to eat while on the couch than omurice."
Kim Dokja gave him an unimpressed look. "You know what I'm talking about."
"Are you going to eat them?"
"No."
"Then enjoy their beauty." He turned away from Kim Dokja's rolling eyes towards the TV and took a bite of his dinner.
The warmth of the foil was pleasant in his hands as Kim Dokja picked up his sandwich and unwrapped the top, revealing thick slices of golden brown buttery toast embracing a sweetened omelette. He bit into it and was immediately hit by the variety of flavors and textures; the crunchy carrots, scallions, and cabbage; the soft, fluffy egg; and it was all lightly dressed in ketchup, mayonnaise, and a touch of thinned out gojujang for a flavorful spicy bite at the end.
"I'm surprised that you would allow street food of all things in the house, let alone make it," He spoke around a bite.
Yoo Joonghyuk made little reaction to the observation. "Well I made it, so I can keep it within reasonably healthy tolerances."
The other half of the room shushed the men from further discussion as the movie started. The rest of the evening was quietly spent together with only a few challenging glares whenever multiple hands went for the popcorn at the same time.
―――✧―――
His opinions on winter hadn't changed and he was still far from feeling better, but today had pressed another sliver of hope into Kim Dokja's palm. Another reason to look forward, believe, and trust.
It wasn't easy for him, but he could vaguely make it out in the long distance. It was there and he'd get across that gap eventually due to those around him.
Kim Dokja wordlessly mouthed a shy thank you to the room, unseen by the majority as they watched the movie. Feeling a faint warmth bloom across his cheeks, he looked down and resumed reading something on his phone.
It hadn't been that bad for a day off after all.