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Kim Dokja, as a rule, keeps his secrets close to his chest, and more than once has carried them all the way to the grave without spilling a drop: this is part of what makes him himself. It’s habit by now for him to smile a fox-faced, close-mouthed smile, and to give some inscrutable direction that he hopes his company will follow to the letter without asking why.
They don’t ask why, and they listen. Somehow they win, and win, and win again, until none of them dares jinx it with questions for fear of snatching a defeat from the jaws of victory. It’s like a curse in paradox: the stakes get higher with every win until the pedestal is so ear-ringingly, dizzyingly far from the ground that the fall alone would kill them all. So they keep their mouths closed. They don’t ask, even when they watch Kim Dokja begin to fray at the edges.
Han Sooyoung notices first: Kim Dokja’s teeth set against the free edge of his thumbnail, worrying it as he pores over something on the ever-present phone. He’s bent over in his seat, his back a hunched and bony arc beneath the thick, neat fabric of his white coat. She can count the knobs of his spine from across the room, the bony projections of them making tiny, uncomfortable angles under the sturdy cloth, and she tells herself, it’s none of my business.
She doesn’t ask, listening to the faint sound of nibbling teeth until she can’t bear it anymore. He’s not quite chewing, but it’s close, and soon enough she leaves him to his own devices, unable to stand the questions burning holes in her tongue.
Yoo Joonghyuk has been gone for two days, and Kim Dokja makes jokes about it. He makes them with a smile and an airy gesture as if it doesn’t matter, talks about tomcats on the prowl, and they all laugh. It’s a scenario reward gone wrong, a trap that almost closed around Kim Dokja himself but was gifted to Yoo Joonghyuk instead: pointed cat’s ears, a long and slender cat’s tail, and both in a lustrous shining black.
He was furious, of course; there had been a stand-off, Yoo Joonghyuk with his ears laid flat in the dark waves of his hair and his tail a wiry bottlebrush of affronted energy, and Kim Dokja calm and smiling. Not even Han Sooyoung had dared to open her mouth about it until he was well out of earshot.
Whatever unknowable stress Kim Dokja is under, though, only escalates when Yoo Joonghyuk comes prowling back into the camp, even after the first night.
Yoo Joonghyuk moves into his tent the very next day, and no one dares question it. They buy a larger tent, consolidate their things to fit inside. Shin Yoosung and Lee Gilyoung squabble over some of them despite his best intentions. Even so, Kim Dokja laughs and breaks up the argument by sharing it with as much evenness as he can manage, and neither of them notice the chapped and peeling skin around his fingernails, the places lower on his fingers where teeth have made tiny raw spots of pink half-healed flesh on knuckles and cuticle.
He pats each of their heads in turn, and reassures each of them: everything is under control. Everything is going according to plan, Kim Dokja promises. And they believe him without question.
Three days later, it comes to a breaking point, whatever it is — and it is almost a disaster. Han Sooyoung is needling Kim Dokja about something unimportant, wagging a half-eaten lemon-scented lollipop at him. There are cracks in the glossy yellow candy from her impatient teeth, and Kim Dokja counts the neat indents of her molars in the sugar, mesmerized as she waves it in front of his nose.
He’s fiddling with his fingers in his lap. They hurt, pulsing with a low ache in the bitten nails and picked cuticles and worried flesh, and he’s trying not to think about anything at all, to let her presence soothe him.
“— and if you don’t know how to proceed, you should let someone else have a crack at it,” she’s saying. The tone is lighthearted. She doesn’t mean it, and Kim Dokja knows it. But the tender, exposed quick of his bitten-ragged thumbnail catches a spot on the inside of his forefinger. He picked a flaking bit of skin from there last night in a fit of what do I do, how do I fix this dissociation, and when his thumbnail drives against the sore spot, it breaks the paper-thin membrane of skin remaining. It draws blood, and with it a spike of adrenaline slams through him like a bullet train. His heart feels like it crashes against the inside of his ribs. It aches like a fresh bruise.
He stands up in a hurry because he can’t sit still with fight-or-flight alarms blaring in his skull, sending galvanizing lightning shocks down the long bones of both legs. Even Han Sooyoung’s running mouth snaps shut. She flushes hotly, and then he watches the color drain out of her cheeks.
He must look angry, Kim Dokja thinks from strangely far away, like he’s slipped out of his skin. He can’t feel what his face must look like, can’t imagine it, as if his whole body has taken two steps to the left, leaving behind the ghost of him. His eyes feel like burned-out holes in his head. He’s so tired all of a sudden, so exhausted he can’t think or feel anything else.
“I didn’t mean it,” Han Sooyoung starts, and then, “you don’t look so good. I know you’re under pressure, but…”
Her voice trails off, and she looks up at him, briefly miserable, and he can’t look at her any longer. He doesn’t trust himself to talk. He gives a stiff, jerky nod, and then turns away, walking to his tent. He disappears inside.
They’ve all sacrificed things. Each one of them has given away parts of themselves to become what they are today, and Kim Dokja knows this. Still, even with his metaphorical pockets full of coins and his head full of spoilers and all the cheating and dealing and scrambling he’s done, he is fairly certain he has very little left to give away. The blade of self-sacrifice is so impossibly, perfectly sharp that Kim Dokja is pretty sure he never felt it carving and paring away bits of him until here he sits, hollow and scooped-out and depleted, with bleeding fingers and an aching, threadbare heart.
He isn’t quite sure how long he sits in the silence, cross-legged among the blankets, with his head filled with radio static. He is pretty sure that he ignores someone coming to the tent flap to talk, though. Maybe multiple someones, but he doesn’t have the presence of mind to keep a count.
Kim Dokja doesn’t have any ideas left, he thinks. The vending machine is empty, or maybe someone has broken the glass and stolen all the good things from inside. There’s nothing here but shards of glass in the shape of thoughts, too big and sharp at the edges to fit properly into the soft wrinkles of his mind.
The tent flap pushes in, and suddenly Yoo Joonghyuk’s broad shoulders fill the space between outdoors and the safe silence inside the tent. He’s quiet, and there’s a first-aid kit in his hand, and Kim Dokja looks up at him with his eyes glazed and hazy. Yoo Joonghyuk’s dark, pointed ears are folded back, almost disappearing among his curls, and his expression is… complicated, in a way that Kim Dokja is not used to seeing. He feels disconnected from his body, like his consciousness is floating a few feet away, tenuously attached by some thin and drifting balloon-string.
“Kim Dokja,” Yoo Joonghyuk tries, kneeling in front of him. He’s too big. Even in the biggest tent the dokkaebi bag had to offer, his hair almost brushes the roof like this. He reaches out with both scarred hands, and he takes hold of Kim Dokja’s wrists, gentle even when he flinches.
He draws them out of Kim Dokja’s lap with agonizing, careful slowness, and inspects the casualties: sore fingers, cuticles picked ragged, nails bitten so short the pink and angry nail bed shows at the edges, but the damage stops at the knuckles, other than the unavoidable scars of battle etched white on his pale skin.
A hot wash of shame fills Kim Dokja as Yoo Joonghyuk’s dark and observant gaze catalogs all the little self-inflicted hurts, but it’s like there’s a hole in the bottom of him: it drains slowly out of him before it can grow deep enough to drown, like water poured into a sieve. He doesn’t think he can hold onto anything right now, even if he wanted to.
“You’ve been hurting yourself,” Yoo Joonghyuk observes bluntly, looking at his hands, not meeting Kim Dokja’s eyes as he runs a strange, warm fingertip, the pad of it more cat than human, along the ragged side of Kim Dokja’s finger. There’s no fingerprint there, no ridges and whorls to snag and cause pain, but the sensation is still somehow impossibly grounding. The balloon-string of his dissociation shortens, draws him closer to his body, and he doesn’t want to go. It’s too much work to be corporeal, to manage all the awkward angles and nuances of a body.
“Because of me?” Yoo Joonghyuk asks, and Kim Dokja shakes his head, dizzy but adamant. Some tension goes out of Yoo Joonghyuk’s shoulders. His ears slowly relax, prick forward to listen. With the full weight of his regard on Kim Dokja, he feels like maybe they’re the only two people in the world.
“Pressure,” Kim Dokja says, and his voice sounds graceless and unlovely in his own ears, an ungainly tear-choked grackle squawk of misery. He doesn’t think he’s crying, but Yoo Joonghyuk reaches out and when his fingers touch Kim Dokja’s cheeks, they come away wet. “It’s. It’s just a lot of pressure, and I — I’m trying.”
Yoo Joonghyuk sits down then, in front of Kim Dokja. He nods, like he’s satisfied, and gently draws those wounded hands into his lap, opening the first aid kit. The faintly astringent scent of medical supplies drifts up from the little box, and Kim Dokja wrinkles his nose, making a face.
“Ugh,” he says, and it sounds a little like a sob.
“I know,” Yoo Joonghyuk answers. It’s gentle, surprisingly so, even for a Kim Dokja that knows him better now than he ever has. He can almost believe this is the aftermath of a fight, and he feels very young; he can almost feel the scratchy, uncomfortable scrunch of his school uniform against his skin. If he tries, he can imagine Yoo Joonghyuk’s broad shoulders blocking out the light from the classroom windows in his memory as he uses a saline-soaked scrap of gauze to meticulously clean Kim Dokja’s battered fingers.
He takes his time with his work – each digit receives a careful, diligent inspection and a once-over – until they are clean. By the time both hands have been gently washed, the wet gauze is pink with Kim Dokja’s blood, and Yoo Joonghyuk folds it gently to hide the stains, setting it aside.
“You don’t have to do this alone,” Yoo Joonghyuk says simply. He opens a tube of ointment, and gently he dabs it onto the spots of broken skin. It’s strangely comforting: it reminds Kim Dokja of watching him mend the tears in his clothes, the bright silver flash of the needle moving into and out of the dark fabric as he works by lantern light, flickering gold in his eyes and in the eye of the needle, too. He thinks of Yoo Joonghyuk tugging the long dark thread, of watching the torn cloth gently pull itself back together, two pieces becoming one until there’s only the faintest line, dark on dark, to show where there was ever a tear.
It feels like that, watching Yoo Joonghyuk stick gauze to each anointed wound, and letting him wind bandaging around them, until each slender digit is isolated in a sterile layer of clean white as the only visible evidence of Kim Dokja’s quiet self-destruction. Yoo Joonghyuk is mending him with tender, thorough patience, sewing the frayed edges of him back together. He likes this, he thinks.
“I mean it,” Yoo Joonghyuk says after a few quiet moments, and there’s a frown looming between his brows, in the way his ears swivel back again, flicking in embarrassment as he tries to hide his softness.
Somehow becoming a cat-man has made Yoo Joonghyuk more expressive, like a cat’s thoughts are superimposed over his in ghostly miniature: instinct, perhaps intended to be just enough to run the heightened senses, but which turns out to be just enough to make the ears and tail move with verisimilitude, too. Somehow, it has made him impossibly more of himself, both softer and harder. “I’m here, Kim Dokja.”
He tears the last strip of bandaging with his teeth, and tucks it gently into place. Kim Dokja flexes his bandaged fingers and looks up at him, smiling a halfhearted smile. He can feel his face again; he knows what it’s doing now. Even if it feels stilted and awkward, it belongs to him, and that’s an improvement.
“You fixed me,” he marvels softly, and Yoo Joonghyuk makes a sound of dissent, almost a scoff.
“Something like this can’t fix anything,” Yoo Joonghyuk says, voice low and warm and steady. “Even if I wanted it to. Maybe it’ll stop it from hurting for awhile, though.”
He reassembles the first aid kit to have something to do with his hands, lays gauze and ointment and bandage back into its place, and clips the lid back down as if he was never there. “Even if that’s all I can do, it’s still not all that you deserve.” There’s an edge of self-deprecation to Yoo Joonghyuk’s voice, his tail flicking and swishing slowly behind him with unresolved tension as he thinks about this. Maybe he’s looking for the words, and Kim Dokja lets him, sitting with the quiet between them.
“I should have seen you struggling,” Yoo Joonghyuk says after a few moments of shared silence, putting the box aside. His hands rest on his thighs, his elbows poised as if he’s trying to make himself look bigger, but it just makes him look unsure and uncomfortable. “But I didn’t. And I’m sorry. But I’m here now, and I’m going to do my best to help.”
He doesn’t give either of them a chance to think about this, and Kim Dokja makes a confused noise, but it doesn’t matter because Yoo Joonghyuk is gently but firmly bullying him over onto his back. He’s pushing with all the broad, warm strength of him, climbing over to kneel with his thighs on either side of Kim Dokja’s, their bodies pressed together so close that a breath of air couldn’t sneak through. Kim Dokja looks up at him, blinking and deeply nonplussed.
“I’m very flattered that you want…” Kim Dokja is starting to say, tensing, when Yoo Joonghyuk makes a soft, low chuffing sound somewhere deep in that ridiculous chest, and he simply lowers himself on top of Kim Dokja.
At first, Kim Dokja considers panic for a brief second, but then his body catches up with his brain — and very suddenly, he feels it happen. The relief starts in his chest – like someone has cut loose a ship’s anchor from the backside of his heart – and seeps outward to warm him through in a feeling like the sun rising for the first time in days. He draws a deep, slow breath, and feels the ragged, jangling alarm-bells of his nerves come down a notch, and then another, and then again in a slow, ratcheting progression of feeling.
Yoo Joonghyuk is as heavy as he is considerate, and he arranges himself carefully around and over Kim Dokja’s body, his forearms and knees holding some of the weight of him, but not much. He feels like gravity, warm and implacable, and he tucks his nose in against the hollow of Kim Dokja’s throat, heaving a long, steady sigh as he makes himself at home.
It feels like the first night Yoo Joonghyuk had come to him, Kim Dokja thinks, but without the urgency. Now, the enormous, incongruous shape of his life-and-death companion weighing on him is not arousing, but settling, as if he is gathering all of Kim Dokja up and neatly tucking the tattered edges of him back into his skin. The deep pressure feels good, the steady beat of Yoo Joonghyuk’s heart over his making his own match the quiet and patient rhythm, and then — miracle of miracles — he starts purring.
At first it’s a thready, small sound, but then Kim Dokja raises his hands, places them in the warm space between Yoo Joonghyuk’s lean, muscular shoulders, gently strokes down his back.
“Feels good,” he mumbles, a little breathless, and he laughs when the frequency of the purring deepens, until he can feel it more than hear it, like the vibrations of it are melting into his own body, or making their way out instead of in. “They say cat purrs are healing.”
One of Yoo Joonghyuk’s ears is very near his cheek, and it flicks with annoyance. “Mm,” he hums, the sound thick and warm and distorted in a throat that is otherwise occupied. He presses a warm, close-mouthed kiss against the side of Kim Dokja’s throat, and Kim Dokja gently buries his hands in the soft, dense waves and curls of Yoo Joonghyuk’s hair.
He can’t feel the texture of it through the bandages, and that’s a damned shame. He knows it by heart, though, the way there’s a curl near the crown of his head that will wrap like body-warmed silk around his finger at the least provocation. He knows there is a stubborn lock that refuses to lie on the correct side of Yoo Joonghyuk’s part, too, no matter how wet he combs it down. He knows that the strands are heavy and smooth and lush, and that Yoo Joonghyuk’s scalp is where he holds much of his tension, second only to the tight clench of his abdomen, always ready for a fight.
Feeling unbearably grateful, Kim Dokja kneads the bandaged tips of his fingers into the knots of muscle tension he finds there, works them slowly, even if his fingertips ache with a distant sort of pulsing sting.
“Kim Dokja,” Yoo Joonghyuk scolds, his tail curling slowly with undisguised pleasure and his voice almost incomprehensible around the vibrating in his chest. “Stop. Your fingers.”
He presses his forehead against Kim Dokja’s neck more firmly, and settles more heavily against him. The purring rattles through both of them. Kim Dokja understands now how a purr can help mend a broken bone: it wraps around his insides, blankets him in an all-over warmth that has little to do with the human furnace that is his companion. It settles into the dry and aching creeks and riverbeds of his soul, into places he had not realized were empty, and the sound of Yoo Joonghyuk purring is, maybe, one of the few things Kim Dokja has ever admitted to himself he might need to stay alive.
He threads his fingers and palms full of Yoo Joonghyuk’s hair, and he laughs. It feels good to laugh, like it’s shaking something hard and tight out of his chest, as if his heart had calcified itself to stillness and is moving again, carrying warmth and life to the rest of him.
“Or what?” he asks, teasing, gently shaking that oversized head with both his handfuls, and Yoo Joonghyuk’s purrs are interrupted with a rough, thick grumbling noise. He nips, then, and Kim Dokja startles: he’s drunk on relief, on intimacy, and on the feel of that big, heavy body bearing him down into the tangle of their shared blankets. Everything smells like Yoo Joonghyuk: inimitable, faintly of pheromones, and softly — just a little — of clean, warm fur.
“Nevermind,” Kim Dokja mumbles, laughing. He closes his eyes, and realizes again just how tired he is. He hasn’t slept heavily in an age. Sure, he’s napped, or dozed, perhaps, against Yoo Joonghyuk’s cozily snoring form, but he can’t remember the last time he let himself get deep enough to dream. He misses it, he thinks. And then, the next thought he has might be five seconds later, or five minutes later, because Yoo Joonghyuk hasn’t moved a muscle.
He forces himself to draw in a deep, stirring breath, and then says, plaintively, “What if I do it again? Fall apart, I mean.”
Yoo Joonghyuk’s lashes are long enough that Kim Dokja can feel them against his neck as his protagonist’s eyes open again. He makes a small, thinking sort of noise, and this is how Kim Dokja knows that Yoo Joonghyuk is giving the question his full consideration, following the shape of it all the way to all four corners of the thought, exploring the depth of it before returning with the answer. It’s breathtaking in its simplicity.
“I’ll put you back together again,” he says finally, voice quiet and slow.
“How many times?” Kim Dokja wants to know. He sounds petulant and childish, he knows, because he’s so, so sleepy and his eyes don’t want to stay open, but he wants the answer like he wants to keep breathing, or maybe even more at this point. His hands are still in Yoo Joonghyuk’s hair, and he twitches, tightening his grip in an attempt to keep himself above the level of dreaming.
“As many times as you need me to,” Yoo Joonghyuk says, his words unabashedly fond. “Now go to sleep, Kim Dokja.”
He presses another kiss to the warm, fragrant hollow behind Kim Dokja’s ear, and he doesn’t fuss about his hair being tugged, or about the embarrassed, happy little squirm that the body pinned beneath his does.
Kim Dokja drowsily considers the merits fighting sleep for a while longer out of sheer stubbornness and the want to enjoy Yoo Joonghyuk’s affectionate mood, but while he’s thinking about it, it rises up and claims him anyway, wrapping him in a dark, slow-moving, impenetrable sweetness. When he wakes, he hopes Yoo Joonghyuk will still be there, and he thinks that if he is, it might be enough to hold off the tide of his own self-destruction for just a little while longer.
Maybe enough nights like this could hold it off forever.