Work Text:
Yeosang stopped on his hike to stretch his legs and look around. The trail faced the lake, and he and Jongho had almost reached their destination—Jongho’s favorite climbing spot. Yeosang gripped the straps of his small (but dense) pack of climbing gear more firmly on his shoulders and sighed. This wasn’t really his thing. Briefly, he glanced sideways at Jongho, who had an amused grin on his face.
“I’m not tired,” said Yeosang defensively. The taller boy held his hands up in surrender. 'I didn’t say a word,' is what he clearly meant. As an experienced climber, his pack was considerably larger and heavier, but he acted like it weighed nothing.
They reached the cliff quickly after that. Yeosang blinked and he was faced with a towering cliff that was nothing like those indoor climbing walls. He was screwed. Suddenly, a voice to his right interrupted his train of thought.
“Hey,” it said simply, a little too close to his ear for comfort. Yeosang knew that voice like he knew his own, so he responded before he even saw him.
“Wooyo? When did you get here?”
Then he saw him. Wooyoung looked disheveled and clearly groggy. His hair stuck out at odd angles and he was wearing his rattiest sleep shirt and shorts. “Your face is all puffy. Did you just wake up?”
His best friend yawned in response. “Sue me if I slept in. I don’t know if you remember, but we drank a lot.”
“I think you mean you drank a lot,” Yeosang corrected him. The cliff face was forgotten. Seeing Wooyoung reminded Yeosang of something he wanted to ask his friend. “Hey, you didn’t answer my question yesterday. How'd you know?”
Wooyoung looked more awake now. In fact, he seemed to perk up at his friend’s question. “Know what?”
“You know,” explained Yeosang, “you made fun of me for my coffee order…which was messed up, by the way…but how did you know what I ordered? It’s not like we live together anymore.”
Wooyoung rolled his eyes, running a tired hand through his hair. “Okay, first of all, it’s not that I made fun of your coffee order. It’s the fact that you ordered a gigantic mocha frappuccino right before we got coffee last week.”
Yeosang snapped his fingers and pointed at him. “Exactly! There’s no reason you would know that! You got in my car and just started laughing at me, and I’d already thrown out the empty cup! Did you have San spy on me or something?”
Wooyoung laughed. He doubled over in high-pitched giggles before answering. “Not the lid! You didn’t throw away the lid.”
“But how did you know my order?!” Yeosang turned to Jongho for backup, but he was already set up with his climbing gear and halfway up the cliff. Frustratingly, he didn’t seem aware of their conversation in the slightest. Meanwhile, Wooyoung was wiping tears from his eyes, still chuckling.
“You dreamed about it,” he said simply, and Yeosang just stared at him.
“What?”
“You had a craving and you dreamed about it. I was there. So I had a pretty good guess when you picked me up for coffee. Who buys two stupidly sweet coffees in the span of two hours?”
“I—I dreamed…?” Yeosang stammered. Wooyoung seemed a bit too matter of fact about this. Definitely too amused by it, too. He wrapped his arms around Yeosang’s middle and spun him around to face the cliff.
“You’re dreaming right now. Jongho hasn’t noticed I’m here. And he’s made it way too far up that cliff in the short amount of time we’ve been talking. He’s strong, but not that strong. Also, do you even remember how you got here?”
Come to think of it, Yeosang didn’t. “I’m confused,” was all he said.
“Yeah, it’s cause you’re dreaming. I can sort of join in other people’s dreams sometimes…it’s not always intentional, though.”
Yeosang turned the new information over in his mind. It made very little sense, but he also couldn’t find it in him to resist it. It just was. Which, admittedly, is a very dream-like thing to feel. He stared at the cliff and blinked a few times, just processing. “How come you never told me?” he asked.
Wooyoung shrugged. “I kept meaning to say something, but I figured you wouldn’t believe me.”
At that moment, Yeosang whirled around to face him. “Were you spying on my Starbucks order intentionally?!”
Wooyoung just laughed again. Then he looked past Yeosang at Jongho, and his brow furrowed. “Wait…shouldn’t Dream Me be here too? I invited you rock climbing a couple days ago.” There was a pause.
"Um..." Yeosang started to say, then Wooyoung placed his hands on his hips and looked at Yeosang, clearly offended.
“You’re telling me I invited my best friend to go rock climbing, he said no, and now he’s dreaming about rock climbing with Jongho and only Jongho? I even offered to take you to an indoor climbing wall!”
Wooyoung pouted, and Yeosang shook his head, “No, come on, you’re reading into it. It’s not that I wanted to go with Jongho instead…”
“I can’t believe you’d go without me!”
“Wooyo.”
“I feel so excluded, Yeosangie.”
-
Yeosang’s eyes shot open. He sat up straight, trying to get his bearings. Then the blood came rushing to his head and started pounding in his skull…he was on Wooyoung’s couch. Right, their adventures yesterday...maybe it wasn’t just Wooyoung who’d drunk too much. He steeled himself against the hangover punching at his gut and his head now, and he stood. Noises drifted in from the kitchen, and luckily it smelled like Wooyoung had made breakfast, so Yeosang shuffled across the living room to join him.
“Wooyoung,” he said, his voice gravely from sleep, “I had the weirdest dream. You won't believe--” He turned the corner into the kitchen and he stopped short.
His friend sat on the floor with a large plate of scrambled eggs in one hand and a cool bottle of water in the other, which he held up to his aching head. He was wearing the same pajamas as in the dream, and his face was just as puffy. Somehow his bedhead was even worse, though. Wooyoung looked up at him from the floor.
“Morning, traitor," he said.
