Work Text:
~~~~
The phone screen glowed too bright in the dim living room. Kim dokja knew, by common sense, that he should stop scrolling.
He'd told himself that three videos ago, and two videos before that, and yet here he was, thumb moving on its own, dragging comment after comment up into view like he was searching for something to hurt himself with.
not what I expected tbh
is Joonghyuk ok? like actually ok?
he could've had ANYONE
sorry but he's just. average. like painfully average
yeah? Then ur a fucking insect fucking ugly bitch
excuse me?
your fucking excused ugly bitch. whining about someone's look when u look like shit is a WHOLE new level of audacity
who tf r u to judge my looks
who tf are u to judge his looks then? fucking ugly people and their ugly ass hearts
His lips thinned. He set the phone face-down on the couch cushion beside him, harder than he meant to, and it bounced once before going still.
He exhaled through his nose and let his hand fall to the curve of his stomach instead—eight months now, low and heavy, the babies shifting slow and sleepy under his palm like it could feel his pulse spike and wanted to calm it down. Sorry, he thought at it, absurdly. Not you guys, never you.
He knew what he was. Not pretty. Not handsome, not really—smart-looking, maybe, on a generous day. decent. he'd made his peace with that a long time ago.
atleast he thought so he did.
He and his husband had planned this. No face, no name, nothing for the fans to hold up to the light and pick apart—because Joonghyuk's fans didn't just love him, they guarded him, teeth-out, and dokja had watched them tear into people over far less.
It hadn't mattered in the end. One camera angle, one door opened at the wrong second during a live stream, and eight months of cautiousness had unraveled in under a minute.
Yoo Joonghyuk had posted within the hour.
I'm married, expecting, and if my husband's privacy is violated again I will pursue legal action. go whine about your cheap ass mentality than call my husband ugly. unfollow me or block me, I don't give a fuck. I only want level headed humans with common sense as my viewers.
He had even filed cases against many people and won a lot of money from them which stopped the wave of hate under his platforms.
Not outside his Twitter, YT, Insta, Twitch though.
If anything it had confirmed the ugliest theory in the room: that Yoo Joonghyuk, national golden boy, MVP three years running, was married to a transgender man who was pregnant.
There'd been a video within the day — some stranger with a ring light and too much confidence—titled Is Yoo Joonghyuk gay or straight?? like his husband were a specimen pinned under glass, like the shape of dokja's body was a public question up for a vote.
Like having a vagina and still identifying as a man inside is a sin.
He wasn't a question. He was just a person lying on a couch with his feet swollen and his back aching.
There were kind comments too. he knew that. people defending him, telling the others to grow up, pointing out that none of this was theirs to have an opinion about in the first place. he knew, it probably balanced out.
It didn't feel like it balanced out. It never did.
I shouldn't care, he told himself, the same sentence he'd been repeating for weeks like a charm that had stopped working.
But he did. being trans had never been a neutral fact about himself, not once, not from the first year he'd understood what the word meant and what it would cost him.
It came pre-loaded with other people's opinions, whether he asked for them or not, and pregnancy had only handed the internet a new angle to aim from.
He remembered the hallway outside his third-year classroom, the particular pitch of laughter that meant it was about him. He remembered thinking he'd outgrown flinching at it.
Apparently not. Apparently eight months pregnant and hormonal and tired down to the bone, he flinched just fine.
The worst ones—the ones his thumb kept sliding back to, like pressing on a bruise to check if it still hurt—were the side-by-sides.
Yoo Joonghyuk on one half of the screen, some old photo of Lee Seolhwa on the other, glossy and effortless and very beautiful in a way Kim dokja had never once managed even on his best day.
when you had a diamond and picked gold, one caption read. Another: proof god blesses some people TOO much — had to give him one flaw.
One flaw.
That was what he was, apparently. The single defect in an otherwise perfect life.
Kim Dokja stared at the ceiling and made himself breathe slow.
What if he thinks that too.
The thought arrived uninvited, the way the worst ones always did, sliding in sideways when he was too tired to slam the door on it. What if some part of Yoo Joonghyuk—some quiet, unspoken part he'd never say out loud because he wasn't cruel, he was never cruel—looked at Seolhwa's face on his screen and thought about a version of his life that was easier.
Beautiful. Uncomplicated.
A wife instead of a husband who came with a body the whole country had opinions about, a gender the whole country was still arguing over whether to respect, a face that was, at absolute best, decent.
His hand tightened slightly on his stomach. The babies shifted again, one small deliberate press against his palm, and dokja let out a breath that shook a little more than he wanted it to.
He didn't say any of this to Yoo Joonghyuk. He wasn't sure how. Some fears sounded stupid out loud, and this one—what if you settled, what if some part of you knows it— felt like it would only embarrass them both.
~~~~
Yoo Joonghyuk had never understood his fans, to which on his marriage, his partner, they'd decided, apparently, to have opinions about, he understood them less by the day.
He always had anger issues, being with dokja for years has calmed it down deep inside him but he has been trying his utter best to smash it down for a while. Lest he will become a serial killer.
He stood in the cereal aisle with a basket looped over one arm, reading the back of a box he had no intention of buying but he would because dokja liked the mascot on the front and would smile if he brought it home, and thought—not for the first time—that the people screaming online about his husband's face had never actually looked at it.
Because Yoo Joonghyuk had.
Carefully, from the very first time Kim dokja had turned around in a crowded music arena and asked if the seat next to him was taken.
Long lashes that made his eyes look perpetually a little startled. Skin so pale it went pink at the ears in about four seconds flat, whenever he was flustered, which was often, which Yoo Joonghyuk found ruinous to both his heart and dick every single time.
A mouth made for pouting even when it wasn't trying to. Wide eyes that only shows the infinity amount of universe inside and Yoo Joonghyuk can count them every second and still not get exhausted.
He wasn't sure when "handsome" had stopped being the right word and "beautiful" had taken over, except that it had happened early — before Yoo Joonghyuk had said a single word to him.
Kim Dokja was slight through the shoulders and slender at the waist, and pregnancy had only rearranged the rest of him into something Yoo Joonghyuk was, frankly, indecent about noticing.
Because beyond his reasoning, how can that already sinfully round ass can get even plumper and pleasantly distracting?!
And don't even talk about his pussy. Yoo Joonghyuk lives to eat it. Intercourse is risky at this stage so he had settled with just eating out his husband, not a bad thing, not at all.
He'd thought his husband was the prettiest person in any room he walked into (he still did) he can't fathom how can anyone with perfectly fine eyes can look at his husband and decide he's average. Envious people, really.
Which was why the comments made no sense to him. He'd stopped trying to make them make sense weeks ago.
He was reaching for a jar of the plum preserves dokja had been craving when someone's shoulder clipped his.
"Sorry," he said automatically, already stepping back—
—and then the woman's face did the thing faces did now, the little stutter of recognition, and she was fumbling in her bag for a pen before he'd finished the apology.
"You're—oh my god, you're Yoo Joonghyuk. My son is such a huge fan, could you—I don't have paper, could you just—" She turned around and presented her shoulder, sweater and all.
He signed it quickly, already calculating the fastest route to the register and home, to the couch, to folding himself around dokja and staying there for the rest of the night.
He'd made it two steps when she called after him again, Yoo Joonghyuk swore he didn't sigh visibly.
"Congratulations, by the way," she said, "on the baby. My sister had morning sickness so bad with her second, tell your husband ginger candy, the hard kind, not the chews—"
And here he actually paused, because that was useful, that was the kind of thing his husband's doctor hadn't mentioned, and he found himself thanking her with something close to real warmth.
Then she smiled, a little too knowing. "That's really your husband? The one from the video?"
He nodded.
Her face rearranged itself into something soft and sorry, the exact expression people gave car accidents. "Oh. That's a shame." A small, apologetic laugh, like she was doing him a favor by saying it. "You rushed into that marriage, didn't you."
Yoo Joonghyuk had hit plenty of people in his life—on ice, on purpose, within the rules. He was fairly certain that if she'd been a man he would have decked her right there between the cereal and the preserves and dealt with the consequences later.
As it was, he only looked at her, and something in his expression must have shown through, because she went quiet real fast. His husband always says his face gets real scary when he's glaring or scowling.
He let the silence sit a second longer than it needed to with disdain in his eyes.
Then he looked her over, slow, deliberate, the same unhurried once-over she'd apparently thought she was entitled to give his husband.
"Don't project your insecurities onto my husband," he said. "You don't get an opinion on how he looks—not when you look like this."
A small, humorless scoff escaped him. "He's beautiful. You're just jealous, and it's not a good look on you, which I doubt, anything is actually."
She didn't say anything else. Standing dumbfounded at the layers of insults told in one single breath as effortless as drinking water. Did she forgot he's a gamer? He's naturally sharp at words. Even more when he's married to a certain man whose words cut razor straight.
He rolled his eyes, dropped the preserves in his basket, and walked to the register without looking back—paid, bagged, gone, already thinking about the particular way dokja bats his lashes prettily when he wants to have sex, and how none of these people, not one of them, had ever actually earned the right to have an opinion on either of them at all.
~~~~
Yoo Joonghyuk had decided, with the full weight of his professional opinion, that nothing in any afterlife could possibly beat this :
his head shoved under dokja's oversized shirt, forehead pressed flat to warm breasts, one muscular arm slung heavy around his husband's waist while the reader's fingers moved slow and absent through his hair gently.
Yoo Joonghyuk nuzzled his face against dokja's small breasts, eyes half lidded, inhaling deeply. The scent of sweat mixed with the unique musk was intoxicating to him.
(A/N : actually dokja had top surgery but I gave him breasts for this particular scene only so joonghyuk could have fun. He threatened me in my dreams yk.)
He licked and sucked at the pink nipples lazily, drawing out the milk and lapping it up, occasionally fondling one breast like a stress relief ball. The feeling of dokja's supple flesh in his hand and against his face was pure bliss.
He could cum right now with just fondling this two pieces of heaven. Actually, they had never done it, did they? Thrusting his dick between dokja's breasts, just the image of those small breasts jiggling while he thrusts between th—okay, they are definitely doing it, tomorrow for sure, he will ask when his husband is in a good mood, he has always been particularly shy at things like this, so cute.
Where was he again? Yeah. This is heaven, he sighed contentedly, Better than heaven.
His husband was scrolling something on his phone one-handed, holding it up over his head, and Yoo Joonghyuk could hear the tinny audio through the fabric and didn't care in the slightest what it was.
Then he heard his own voice. Flat, clipped, unmistakably his—coming out of the phone speaker.
Most people, he assumed, would react to that. Freeze, sit up, ask what the hell was playing. Yoo Joonghyuk considered it for exactly half a second and concluded he didn't care.
The building could be on fire and he still wouldn't move his face out of dokja's breasts. He sucks one nipple, licking it. He's extremely busy.
Kim Dokja, predictably, was already spiraling.
"Joonghyuk-ah, look at this," he whined, voice pitched up with the particular urgency he got right before he talked himself into a full anxiety loop.
Yoo Joonghyuk grumbled a complaint into his shirt that came out as nothing but noise, then dragged his head reluctantly upward, poking free of the collar just far enough to squint at the screen dokja pushed towards his eyes.
Ah. The grocery store. Someone had filmed it from between two shelves, apparently proud of themselves for the angle. So fucking annoying.
And they'd cut it exactly where it was useful to them, kept the fan's request for a signature, kept her tip about the ginger candy, kept every soft, sympathetic second of her—and sliced clean past the part where she'd smiled and told him he'd rushed into his own marriage.
What survived the edit was Yoo Joonghyuk, unprompted and unhinged, tearing a stranger apart in a cereal aisle.
He rolled his eyes and dropped his head straight back down into dokja's chest, voice muffled and irritated.
"Cockroaches. All of them." He paused for a beat. "She insulted you. I put her in her place. That's it, that's the whole story—they just cut the part where she earned it."
He exhaled through his nose, unbothered, already halfway back to sleep. "This kind of person only wants controversy, not the truth. I'll handle it."
Kim Dokja didn't relax the way he wanted him to. His fingers went still in his hair, and Yoo Joonghyuk felt the shift in him even through two layers of cotton—that particular stiffness that meant dokja was already three steps deep into a worst-case scenario.
"Dokja, calm down."
He was scrolling again, faster now, thumb dragging up through a wall of comments Yoo Joonghyuk couldn't see and didn't want to.
"I don't care what they say about me," Kim Dokja said, and it came out steadier than his hands looked. "But you can't just — Joonghyuk, you are your career."
Yoo Joonghyuk opened his mouth but dokja beat him to it. "Every sponsor, every stream, all of it runs on people actually wanting to watch you. If this turns into some whole thing—If enough people report it, or advertisers get spooked, or the platform decides you're bad press—that's not nothing. That's a decade of your life."
"I know how to talk to a camera," Yoo Joonghyuk muttered.
"That's not—I know you could start over. Modeling, hosting, whatever, your face alone would carry you through half of it."
A short, humorless breath escaped him in worry. "But I don't want you to have to. I don't want one edited clip to undo ten years because some woman couldn't keep her mouth shut."
Yoo Joonghyuk lifted his head again, properly this time, enough to press his mouth to the curve of dokja's collarbone slowly, more reassurance than anything else.
"I'll take care of it," he said against his skin. "I already have an idea. Trust me."
His eyes were already falling shut again, voice dragging with sleep. "Right now I just want to sleep."
Kim Dokja looked at him a moment longer, thumb hovering over the screen like he wanted to keep scrolling, keep counting the damage.
Then he set the phone face-down on the nightstand, wrapped both arms around his husband's shoulders, and let himself believe him. He was asleep within minutes.
"Joonghyuk-ah, stop sucking my breasts. I can't sleep."
"Don't sleep then, I don't care."
"Joonghyuk!"
~~~~
Six a.m., same as every morning of his adult life, and Yoo Joonghyuk didn't move.
He lay there with his face still half-buried against dokja's breasts—his nipples red and bite marks around them from Joonghyuk waking up in few times in night and showering them with love, and getting scolded by a sleepy dokja—listening to the slow, even sound of him breathing, and thought—not for the first time, though the thought had gotten worse with age instead of better—that he was completely, hopelessly in love with this man.
His warmth. His weight against him. The stubborn, particular shape of his mouth when he was annoyed. All of it.
Ten years ago, if someone had told him he'd end up like this—soft, sappy, counting a decade of his life around one person's schedule—he would have laughed in their face.
he would've said something insufferable about how love didn't change a man, how he had a career to build and no room in it for distraction.
That version of him hadn't met Kim dokja yet.
It happened in New York, of all places, dragged there by Han Sooyeong for some famous musician having a event in the music arena he barely remembered the name of now, he only remembered the noise, the crowd, and the older man who'd dropped into the seat beside him and asked, politely, if it was taken.
(A/N : Dokja was 24 back then)
Yoo Joonghyuk generally preferred women. Older ones at that. It had never really been in question. But the man beside him had been—objectively, the prettiest person he'd seen in years, and hot in a way that got him almost a boner.
With that face and slender body, it was impossible not to.
He'd nodded like an idiot and got sunbeamed by the smile.
Spent the rest of the set stealing glances he was sure weren't subtle, while the man in question stayed completely oblivious, like it had never once occurred to him that anyone might stare and admire his beauty.
Yoo Joonghyuk never got his name. Never got his number, or his Instagram, too proud and too eighteen to just ask.
He spent the next three years occasionally furious at himself about it—not constantly, just often enough, some idle afternoon, to think I could've had that ass and meant it.
Then Macy's Fourth of July fireworks, three years later, and there he was again.
Same face, older, even prettier, which was beyond his understanding because how.
They struck up a conversation over the crowd noise and somewhere in it discovered they lived in the same building—Kim Dokja had moved in only days before.
What followed was months of bickering. Small things, stupid things, whose music was too loud through the wall—until the bickering turned into something closer to friendship.
And the friendship turned into Yoo Joonghyuk flirting at every opportunity just to watch Kim dokja splutter and go pink to the ears.
Kim Dokja avoided him for the better part of a week after the first real confession.
Yoo Joonghyuk cornered him anyway, because he'd never once in his life let something he wanted just walk away twice.
They started dating within the month.
Married in under three years. Neither of them had ever felt calmer and more in love beside anyone else, before or since.
That eighteen-year-old in New York would never have believed any of it.
~~~~
Yoo Joonghyuk finally peeled himself out of bed, showered, and pulled on a hoodie and sweatpants for his run.
The streets were quiet at this hour, mostly quiet, except for the murmurs that followed him half a block at a time — someone's phone lifted, someone's voice pitched just loud enough to be heard on purpose, can't believe he still shows his face after what he said to that poor woman.
He didn't slow down. Didn't so much as glance over. Whatever confidence these people had that their opinion mattered to him, it was, frankly, so dumb it was cute.
He stopped on the way back for a box of the chocolates Kim dokja liked, drank a glass of warm milk standing at the counter, and pulled out his phone to text Uriel.
Ignoring her previous 47 messages of worrying about dokja and cursing in multiple languages towards haters.
Me: the mall from two days ago, i sent you the address before. get the cctv footage and the audio. post it on the youtube and insta, and wherever
Uriel: fucking finally.
Uriel : i've been waiting for you to ask.
Uriel: want me to write the caption or are you doing your usual three-word masterpiece
Me: you write it. mock them a little. the ones who believed some woman over cctv evidence.
Uriel: say less.
Uriel : this is the most fun I've had managing you all year
Uriel : also can I talk to dokj–
Yoo Joonghyuk switches off the phone real quick. Nobody has any business talking to his husband. Especially Uriel. The one time he felt kind and let her talk to dokja, it went on for hours.
Coming back to the real subject.
That was it. That was the whole plan. Uriel had been his manager long enough to run his accounts blind, and she was, unlike him, actually good at being petty in writing.
He cooked breakfast, then went to wake Kim Dokja, guided him to the table carefully, and watched him eat with satisfaction.
~~~~
By the time Kim Dokja wandered into the gaming room an hour later, Yoo Joonghyuk was already live—camera off, as always, just his voice and his hands on the keyboard.
Kim Dokja didn't announce himself. He just crossed the room and settled onto his husband's lap like it was reserved seating, which, as far as either of them was concerned, it was.
Yoo Joonghyuk made room without missing a beat of the match, one arm coming around Kim Dokja's waist to anchor him, chin dropping to his shoulder while he played with total, narrow focus.
After every win he tilts his head slightly, expectant, and Kim dokja rewarded him with a kiss to the corner of his mouth, or his jaw, or—when he was feeling generous—his lips.
Between rounds Yoo Joonghyuk's free hand found its way to the curve of his stomach, slow circles that had Kim Dokja sighing and going loose against his chest.
Kim Dokja was scrolling lazily through his phone during a loading screen when he saw it—Yoo Joonghyuk's post, already climbing, a link right at the top. He tapped it.
The footage ran clean and unedited: the woman stumbling into Joonghyuk's shoulder, the apology, the fumbled signature, the tip about ginger candy, and then—the part someone had so carefully cut before—her face going soft and pitying, her voice, faint but audible, telling him he'd rushed into his marriage.
And then Yoo Joonghyuk. Every word of it, uncut, unforgiving.
Kim Dokja pressed a hand over his mouth, grinning behind it despite himself. He scrolled down to the caption—Uriel's work, unmistakably, dry and merciless, pointing out that an entire online mob had chosen to believe a stranger's edited grievance over their own eyes.
And that judging a man's husband on looks was a strange hill to die on when the husband in question was, and Joonghyuk quoted here, the prettiest man to ever exist.
The comments underneath had flipped overnight. Apology after apology, crying emojis, we were so unfair, I'm actually sorry.
Kim Dokja laughed softly and leaned in to press a kiss to Yoo Joonghyuk's jaw. "Thank you, Joonghyuk-ah."
Yoo Joonghyuk finished the match in what had to be breaking another record, and turned his head to kiss him properly, slow and smiling against his mouth.
"I just did what needed doing," he said, when he finally pulled back. "And stop caring what they think. People like that will find something to hate no matter what you do—it's never really about you, it's whatever they can't stand about themselves."
He tucked a strand of hair behind dokja's ear, thumb tracing his cheekbone after. "You're beautiful. Have you already forgotten how I worship you every night. Are you blind or something?"
Kim Dokja went red to the ears and swatted his arm. "Joonghyuk! Shut up." A pause, quieter, half-muttered into his shoulder.
"It's—my hormones have been everywhere lately, okay. It got to me more than it should've."
Yoo Joonghyuk only smirked and said nothing else, filing the confession away like a small, valuable thing.
What Kim Dokja didn't know—wouldn't know until much later, if Yoo Joonghyuk had anything to say about it—was that the second he'd settled onto his he had quietly flipped the camera on.
The plan was simple enough.
Let the people who genuinely liked Kim dokja, who'd always liked him, see exactly what the rest of the internet had spent a week arguing about—how thoroughly, embarrassingly gone Joonghyuk was for him,
how easily dokja laughed, how pretty he actually was up close, unfiltered, uninterested in performing for anyone.
Kim Dokja fell asleep on him a while later, probably from exhaustion, curled loose and warm in his arms.
Yoo Joonghyuk finished the round one-handed, wiped a thin line of drool from the corner of dokja's mouth with his sleeve, and pressed a slow firm kiss to his full lips before glancing back at the chat scrolling past as fast as lightning.
jihye65_7: IM CRYING HE JUST WIPED HIS DROOL???
gamer_beomjun: the way he's just casually the softest man alive and still 3-0ing ranked
leeseol_stan22: ok i take back everything i said last week this is actually adorable
anus_lurker99: he's so pretty omg no wonder joonghyuk's whipped
sp_1863: kim dokja hey if you ever leave him hit my dms 👀
sp_1863: just saying. options are good
Yoo Joonghyuk's expression flattened.
"Fuck off," with an expressionless face, he blocks the viewers and muttered under his breath, low and immediate, no real heat behind it except the part that meant every word. "He's mine."
He started another match and kept playing, one arm still locked snug around his sleeping husband, entirely unbothered and completely happy.