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Kim Dokja, when asked about what he is to Yoo Joonghyuk (which, when he thinks about it, actually happens pretty often), easily falls back on “we’re companions in life and death” and usually gets away with not saying or thinking too much about what exactly that means.
(It’s better that way. Not thinking about it means he doesn’t have to admit to himself that he has no idea how to correlate the immense mass of tangled threads and lived experiences that make up the massive story they share to regular human-relationship terms… perhaps partially because he hasn’t really ever experienced anything that transcends a collegial friendship. Partially because even now, with so many people grown dear to him, defining what he has with someone who is also the protagonist of a story that Dokja has been carving into the walls of his heart since he was 15 is just… hard.)
They are companions (and it’s best to leave it at that).
And yet, Kim Dokja is not as surprised as he probably should be when Yoo Joonghyuk approaches him one night—once he’s the only one still up, refining plans and rationing supplies for upcoming scenarios—asks him to come to his room, leads him there by a hand on his wrist which he probably should have resisted a little if only to maintain his illusion of indignation, and presses him into the door to kiss him like someone who has been waiting.
(It’s not an overwhelmingly romantic way to initiate intimacy, but then again, his protagonist never really was. Idealist, yes, but one for overtly amorous gestures?)
(It’s probably not the right debate to be having in his head when he’s experiencing what is, for all intents and purpose, his first ever kiss. Luckily, aside from all the incredible things Yoo Joonghyuk is, a mind reader is not one of them.)
He tries explaining it.
He’s pent up.
He has no lover this round.
Rekindling his relationship with Lee Seolhwa is too painful.
Out of the current members of their Company, he is simply the most convenient.
Whichever it is, the night doesn’t end with that kiss, and Kim Dokja wakes in the morning with plenty of things to feel embarrassed about (such as, his aching body and the unfamiliar discomfort in his backside that he’s going to have to scour the depths of the Dokkaebi Bag to find an inconspicuous relief-item for; or, the dozens of angry marks and splotchy bruises that altogether make his skin less pale than it probably has ever been, making him cover his face in mortified embarrassment as he recalls in detail how some of them ended up there)—but none of the guilt he probably should be feeling.
It doesn’t come, even when Yoo Joonghyuk’s arms tighten around him to stop him from waking up just yet. Even when he pries Dokja’s hands away from his face to check on him, or when he lifts his wrist to press his lips to the palm of his hand in a way that probably shouldn’t make his stomach flutter the way it does. Even when he thinks he probably should have told him he’s never done anything like this before, because he owes him at least that much, to know that he's picked someone like Dokja who’s really not very good at this—even then, the guilt doesn’t come.
(And honestly, just like he wasn’t that surprised that Yoo Joonghyuk decided to sleep with him, he’s also not surprised that all his explanations for how this all could possibly have happened sound like excuses even to his own ears.)
-
“You should get some sleep,” says Yoo Joonghyuk when he pulls him away from his work the following night, and probably means it.
He still ends up pressing Dokja into the mattress three minutes later in an effort to lick into his mouth until he forgets how oxygen works. He conveniently forgets how they even got there, which is so easy to do when all his senses are occupied with kissing the most beautiful man he knows to the best of his woefully inexperienced abilities. And when Yoo Joonghyuk closes his mouth around a mark on his neck from the night before, just like he had when he first made him come, well.
(Sleep is a foreign concept for the next hour or so as he takes him apart with his fingers and mouth, again and again, and because Yoo Joonghyuk is a bit mean he doesn’t let up until he cries.)
It’s easy to just fall into a pattern after that. They start a bit of a routine.
They’re both usually late to bed anyways (although Yoo Joonghyuk, that crazy bastard, also maintains himself an early riser, up with the sun to train for the challenges ahead), which is probably why no one else remarks on it when they’re consistently the last ones still up at the end of the night.
Once the rest have gone to bed, Yoo Joonghyuk will leave him alone to his plotting while tending to his own equipment for a while—an hour or so, usually, before a hand on his wrist stirs him from his thoughts. Like Pavlov’s dog, his body learns to stir with it.
(Sometimes, he’s hard even before Joonghyuk puts his sword down, and his only comfort in the face of the newfound unquenchable sexual appetite this arrangement has awoken in him is that at least his Companion’s seems to have it a hundred times worse.)
-
Yoo Joonghyuk likes him on his back.
There are several reasons why Kim Dokja thinks this is the worst way to fuck the protagonist of this world. (Him being the protagonist of this world is the first.)
“So first of all, it’s easier from behind,” he argues, attempting an appeal to logic based on the limited data of the handful of times they’ve tried it like that, and it is easier on him. At least on his poor hips. “You also reserve way more energy that way. Isn’t it better to go for longer?”
“It’s good like this,” Yoo Joonghyuk counters, and accentuates his point with a thrust that pushes a strange, new sound out of his chest that’s just one of many he’s recently learned he’s capable of making. “I can keep it up.”
“That…” he breathes, “isn’t even what I’m talking about.”
“Hm.”
The following, successive jabs that somehow all find their mark succeed in pulling more of his voice out to the point where he’d be embarrassed if it didn’t also feel so good. Maybe they had been equally meant to tell Dokja to shut up.
This, too, is why he doesn’t like it. Like this, he has no control. He just has to lie there, limbs dangling uselessly and take whatever Joonghyuk sees fit to give. Even the Wall is left useless, stretched so thin its messages become incomprehensible, just a distant thrumming along with the rest of the world. He’s like a fish washed up on a sun-dried beach where his only relief are the waves of ecstasy licking at his core, brought by the same merciless man who keeps him this pinned, this exposed. He can’t even turn away, hide his whines and the horrifying depths of his own need, because he never lets him. He makes him look, makes him see how he watches him.
(It’s worse when he leans down and makes him kiss him.)
It’s so cruel.
It’s a very, very cruel coincidence that Joonghyuk’s favourite way to fuck him, the one he’s taught his body to ache and cry and long for, is the one Dokja hates the most.
“No need to be shy.”
He hardly realises he’s been turning away. He’s only barely aware of his somewhat cooling need. Did I… already…? His vision feels blurry, and he thinks it’s probably not normal to cry this much during sex no matter how good or how intense it is, but he doesn’t actually know and it’s not like he has any way to tell.
Whatever it is, all he knows now is Joonghyuk’s hand on his chin, and he lets him tilt his head back to face him, to see that he’s as flushed with exertion as Dokja feels, sweat dripping down his chest, and he is… smiling.
Isn't this a bit out of character? But well. To be perfectly fair, this whole thing they have… no, this entire turn really, is so madly out of pace with the story and protagonist he knows—he’ll at least admit to that much.
So here he is, very much by his own fault, two mind-altering orgasms into their session and Yoo Joonghyuk’s hard dick still very much inside him, with said protagonist smiling at him like he’s done something incredible, like he is something incredible, and he hates how his body reacts to that but wouldn’t that be something if it was actually—
“Stop thinking and focus on only me.”
It’s kind of hard not to when your cock is in my ass— he wants to snark back, but it takes him a moment to find his voice. By the time he does, he’s so overwhelmed again by the sheer madness of it all and can only glare weakly up at his tormentor. “…how can you say that so confidently.”
Yoo Joonghyuk doesn’t answer, only presses the pad of a calloused thumb against his drying lips, the way he had done just a week ago when he had first instructed Dokja in how to suck him off. The memory is both thrilling and mortifying, and fuck he really wishes Joonghyuk would stop smiling at him like that before he starts to think—
“Good boy.” Dokja feels he’s crying again, already, but Joonghyuk is there to kiss them away, to lick at the salty trails like they’re a spring of water offered up to a thirsting man who’s braved a cruel desert. “…only think about me.”
He kisses him then—or maybe Dokja kisses him first, closes his eyes and licks clumsily into his mouth to imitate something Joonghyuk has showed him before, something that had made his own toes curl and head spin, but fuck. Am I even doing this right?
He never gets to ask, is quickly caught back in that devastating embrace, as Joonghyuk lifts his hips and fucks into him again, building in him anew a familiar pressure that he’s come to crave like air. Their kiss doesn’t end, but he has long lost control of it. He’s held tight, embraced and devoured, like it all means something.
Like it means something…
-
It’s only some time later—when Yoo Joonghyuk, who lingers at their table to relay and confirm some intel on a possible hidden dungeon, departs with a prolonged touch to Dokja’s wrist that prompts Han Sooyoung to mutter something about how disgustingly PDA prone some people are when they’re in love—that something clicks into place.
Oh.
(□Ki m Dok jas br ain is som eti mes ve ry sl ow□ the Fourth Wall chimes, unhelpfully.)
It means something.
-
Once that realisation finally makes it through, it’s like he feels his whole body anew. The marks on his neck ache fiercely and the blood in his veins throb under his skin that suddenly feels a bit too hot, a bit too much.
Yoo Joonghyuk isn’t even going to be here tonight, gone on his solo hunt long before Kim Dokja could even say, inside the safe confines of his own mind, oh shit, he’s in love with me.
It’s a dangerous path to go down, dangerous because he can feel his stories vibrating along with these thoughts (and the last thing he needs right now is a fable like “The Reader who gets fucked silly by the protagonist he loves” germinating for all the <Star Stream> to see).
They really have a lot to talk about.
(Even so, the corners of his mouth keep tingling, twitching in and out of a private smile.)
He lies back on his bed, the one that’s been used incredibly little as of late, exhales.
Hurry up and come back, you idiot.
[The story ‘Life and Death Companions’ wants to turn to the next page.]