Chapter Text
Chapter 1
The fish swam backwards. Their scales shimmered as their bodies glided through the water. Their feathery, deep blue fins fluttered as they moved in a way that was as graceful as it was impossible. But impossible things happened all of the time in dreams.
Jeonghan was dreaming. The realization always came to him all at once. It was the same as when it rained; one minute it was a clear day, and then, suddenly, a heavy smell in the air seconds before the sky opened up. Dreaming was like that. Just a split second of tingly awareness before the truth of it hit him: this was a dream.
Dreams just felt different; He was painfully aware of himself. He knew nothing around him was real, and yet it was all startlingly real. Impossible things. Dreams skirted at logic joyfully, sometimes terribly.
In this dream, the fish were swimming backwards. Jeonghan laughed and pointed at them, and one of the larger fish turned its head and opened and closed its mouth almost mockingly. The fish were laughing back at him. Jeonghan was standing at the bottom of the ocean while the fish swam backwards above him, and then he pointed at the clouds floating overhead.
He turned to tell the faceless person next to him, who felt both painfully familiar but entirely strange, that the clouds were particularly fluffy for clouds underwater.
The person next to him – the face was blurry the way faces could be in dreams. If Jeonghan tried to focus on the person’s features, the specific quirk of their brow, and sought out anything recognizable, every detail suddenly faded away from him in his mind. Just out of reach.
But they were in the dream with him, at the bottom of the ocean with the backwards fish and the underwater clouds. So he turned to them, as if to say, are you seeing this shit?
The person looked back. And there it was again, that nagging almost-recognition. Dark, dark hair. Thick brows and a full mouth. And then it was gone. Jeonghan didn’t know the dream stranger, but he couldn’t look away as they opened their mouth to say something and all that came out was bubbles. Jeonghan laughed and pointed. The stream of bubbles was now twirling and floating up through the school of fish to meet the clouds.
All at once, the clouds seemed to sink to the bottom of the ocean, towards Jeonghan. He reached a hand up to meet one, passing his hand through its fluff. One of the largest bubbles stopped in front of Jeonghan’s face and popped.
As soon as it burst, a voice said: wake up.
“Jeonghan-ah, wake up.”
There was an arm on him, a warm hand with fingers splayed across his abdomen over his t-shirt. Jeonghan stirred slowly, groggily. He reached out to tap his phone on the bedside table to see 10:14 P.M. staring back at him.
“Cheol?”
Over his shoulder, he met his friend’s worried gaze. Jeonghan groaned and dragged a hand through his sleep-matted hair. At his feet, a small tortoiseshell cat glared at him, annoyed that her nap was interrupted.
“Time’s’it?”
Seungcheol laughed, soft breath pattering on the exposed skin of Jeonghan’s shoulder. He reached up and tugged the shirt back up. He flopped over in bed to see Seungcheol, fully dressed in worn jeans and one of the thick canvas shirts he often wore to his workshop. He had a streak of paint or something across his forehead and a concerned wobble to his mouth.
“You just checked the time. On your phone? It’s after ten.”
Jeonghan squeezed his eyes shut, torn between wanting to go back to sleep and following Seungcheol to…wherever he planned to go next. Seungcheol smelled like butane and cigarettes, warm and a little grimy and very familiar. With his cheek pressed against the pillow, Jeonghan thought about clouds under the sea and a school of impossible fish.
He let out a long breath and focused on the feeling of his toes wiggling in the tangle of blankets at his feet. As he shifted his hips, his ancient wooden bed frame creaked like it always did. He was here in his room, he was awake. Seungcheol was here.
“Did you just get done at the shop?”
Seungcheol gave him a strange look. “A while ago. I’ve been out in the living room with our friends. At Junhui’s party? Just like you were, apparently, until thirty minutes ago.”
“All that talk of Pavlovian responses in nine year olds must have put me to sleep,” Jeonghan said wryly, aiming for a silly grin and hoping that whatever his face just did was somewhere in the ballpark. Judging by the deepening of Seungcheol’s concerned brow, it had not been.
He vaguely remembered leaving the party to come into his bedroom to lie down, but he couldn’t remember when he fell asleep. Seungcheol said thirty minutes, but to Jeonghan it could have been hours or mere seconds ago. His sleep schedule was fucked, had been fucked for the last month, and it only seemed to be getting worse. He didn’t want Junhui to think he didn’t want to be there or wasn’t proud of him. A masters in child psychology was nothing to sneeze at. Jeonghan had just needed to rest his eyes.
He pushed himself up until he was sitting up in bed. He smiled gratefully when Seungcheol reached over to the table on the other side of the bed to grab a glass of water and handed it to him. The water, when Jeonghan took a sip, was upsettingly room temperature, but he didn’t complain.
“What kept you so late this time?” He squinted at Seungcheol. He watched as his roommate reached down to scritch under the cat’s chin.
Seungcheol hadn’t been there when the party started, which was unusual both in that he never wanted to be left out of anything and also because he lived there. But his absence was also predictable this week of all weeks, when his art studio was seeing nonstop orders all of a sudden. Well, Jeonghan called it an art studio. Seungcheol didn’t like this, or couldn’t accept it, preferring to refer to it as “the metal fabrication business I inherited from my father” instead.
Whatever it was, it had stolen Seungcheol away, keeping him there most nights past his usual hard stop of 8 P.M, much to Jeonghan’s supreme annoyance. He liked it when Seungcheol was at home, even if most of their time was spent on the couch with Jeonghan digging his toes into Seungcheol’s thigh until he stopped doodling on the legal pad in his lap and paid Jeonghan the attention he wouldn’t admit he craved.
He liked that very much. In fact, it was why he’d agreed to live together. It made up for all the ways it was actually quite inconvenient to live with Seungcheol.
Among other things, the inconveniences that came with sharing an apartment with Seungcheol included: a fridge full of protein shakes Jeonghan thought tasted like chalk, Seungcheol’s wet towels in a heap on the bathroom floor, and the fact that Jeonghan was in love with him. It was really very inconvenient to be in love with your roommate. But like the fridge and the towels, he was learning to live with it.
“Sorry I came in…” Seungcheol said suddenly, nervously. His eyes flickered up to the ceiling and back, and he was chewing on his bottom lip like a child waiting for a scolding.
He sighed. “I know you don’t want me to — I didn’t know you were sleeping. No one could find you, so they sent me looking.”
He sounded sad, as he often did whenever they talked about Jeonghan’s rules. Seungcheol thought he understood. He was so ready — as he always was for everyone, but maybe Jeonghan especially — to do anything, push through whatever stood in the way, so that Jeonghan could feel comfortable, supported, loved. He didn’t understand anything, but Jeonghan appreciated this about him. He’d always loved how eager and honest Seungcheol was.
But Seungcheol didn’t understand anything, and Jeonghan was in love with him, and so he had to implement rules.
One of which was that Seungcheol was never to come into Jeonghan’s bedroom while he was sleeping. Mostly, this translated to him avoiding Jeonghan’s room entirely. He was always bad at tolerating things he couldn’t have. When they were at university, if Seungcheol was left out of plans or realized he hadn’t been invited to a party, he couldn’t even bear to hear anyone else mention it, even if the hangout was organized by people he barely knew. He treated being denied access to any part of Jeonghan’s life much the same way.
But here he was.
“It’s okay,” Jeonghan said. Sleep still clawed at him, and all he wanted was to fall back against his stack of pillows and return to it. Instead, he fell forward until his forehead thunked against Seungcheol’s shoulder. Under his cheek, Seungcheol’s hitched breath made his chest stutter infinitesimally.
“You coming back to the party?” Seungcheol murmured the question softly into the top of Jeonghan’s hair. Outside the cracked door, Jeonghan could hear Mingyu’s giggles and Seungkwan’s indignant squawks.
He sighed and nodded, which meant that he really just nuzzled into Seungcheol’s shoulder.
“Yeah, I’m coming. You should shower though. You stink.”
Seungcheol huffed and shoved him away. “Yah. Come back out to join us when you’re human again. And, Han-ah,” he gave Jeonghan a pointed stare and then directed his gaze to the bedroom ceiling. “Do something with that?”
He left, then, and Jeonghan watched as he opened the door and slipped out into the living room.
Jeonghan sighed, pressing a flat palm against his chest. He looked up at the small cluster of fluffy clouds hovering just at the ceiling, bobbing ever so slightly like birthday balloons. From the clouds’ dark, heavy bottoms, rain fell in silent sheets but disappeared conveniently — impossibly — before they actually hit Jeonghan’s bedroom floor. Instead of the normal metallic smell of rain, the room smelled strongly of seawater.
Chapter 2
The first time Jeonghan ever knowingly took something out of his dream, he was eleven years old.
It was just kid stuff, back then. A funny little trick Jeonghan could do, and no one thought anything of it because Jeonghan just seemed like the kind of child who could do all sorts of unbelievable things. As a kid, he loved magicians and parlor tricks. In summer, he’d sit cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV with his eyes glued to the screen whenever Trick & True was on, ignoring his sister pulling at him to braid her hair as he watched the slight of hand. His parents bought him a child’s magician set, and they would sigh as a seven-year-old Jeonghan ran around the neighborhood trying to convince the other kids that he could pull ribbons out of thin air. He couldn’t; it was just a trick.
For most of his adolescence, Jeonghan’s favorite kind of magic was lying. The kids who lived on his block didn’t know he couldn’t make the ribbon appear, or they didn’t care. They loved it. They’d ask Jeonghan: again, again! another, another! The younger ones would giggle and clap while the older boys who lived next door rolled their eyes but looked on with begrudging respect. Jeonghan loved that feeling. Lying was wrong, except when it made people laugh.
It took him a while to notice that while he spent his summer afternoons trying to figure out how to pull coins out of his sleeve without anyone noticing, he was also pulling things out of his dreams.
It’s not surprising he never noticed; children have such little awareness of their surroundings on the best of days and care so little for the rules of reality, and many of the early dream objects were ordinary. He dreamed he got the video game he really wanted and when it was on his nightstand the next day, he assumed his parents had gotten him an early birthday gift. One day, his favorite t-shirt with the Disney characters on the front snagged on some brick and tore. The next morning, he woke up with it in his hand, brand-new with colors even more vibrant than they’d been when he’d torn it. He hadn’t given it much thought.
And then he spent four months trying to persuade his parents to adopt a cat, only to be shut down at every turn. When no one was looking, he’d leave bits of leftover fish from dinner on the step outside, hoping one of the neighborhood strays would be tempted to hang around. He’d make sure to mention all of his friends who had pets as loudly as possible around his mom to make her feel bad for depriving him, but she didn’t budge.
The tortoiseshell cat was young, just past the kitten stage, according to the vet his parents eventually agreed to bring her to. At first, he’d thought his stray cat tactic had worked. She was just there, sitting on Jeonghan’s chest when he woke up one morning, mewing at him because she was hungry. She could have come in through the window he often left cracked. She could have slipped in through the back door when his mother made him take the trash out the night before.
But she was dream stuff. He knew it as surely as he knew anything at eleven years old. The truth of her was undeniable, because he’d been dreaming about her for weeks. Her coat was the typical orange, gold, and black that all tortoiseshells had, but the pattern was odd. The cat he’d been dreaming of had a perfect spiral, like a snail shell, on her hind leg just above her ankle. It was the first thing he checked, a cold, eerie feeling creeping up his neck that quickly burned off and became excitement when his hand smoothed over the familiar pattern while she purred.
There must have been something different on his face when he presented her to his parents, because they didn’t fight it.
“Cat.” He carried her into the den with two hands under her arms, her feet dangling merrily.
His mother looked worn down and fond; his father’s gaze was pinched and intense. They agreed to let Jeonghan keep her. He kept calling her Cat.
He was setting up her food and water bowls in the kitchen, crouched down low to pet her on the butt while she lapped at the water, when his father bent down next to him.
“Jeonghan-ah…you know you can’t tell anyone how you got her, right? You have to keep it a secret.” He had the same pinched look he had earlier.
All Jeonghan could do was nod, overwhelmed by the heavy feeling of being in trouble along with the instant relief that came with the knowledge that someone else knew the truth. His father ruffled his hair, and then he was gone.
Cat became the first big lie Jeonghan learned to tell.
⋆˚꩜⋆
“Song Yejun was in my office again today. He thinks he had an aneurysm.”
Jisoo dropped a pack of snack cakes down in front of Jeonghan and pulled out the chair across from him with a sigh. The teachers’ lounge was empty today, which was unusual for this time of day; usually, by the afternoon most of the faculty were escaping their classrooms to seek some peace and quiet or some rushed puffs on their vapes. But then again, it was getting close to summer break, which always made the long school days a little easier to bear.
“Isn’t it funny how we spend all our time as kids waiting for school to be over, and then we ended up back here as adults?” Jeonghan pulled the snack cakes closer and ripped open the plastic.
He handed one to Jisoo and shoved the other in his mouth. He’d forgotten to eat lunch. That probably wasn’t helping the dull uninterrupted ache he was nursing just behind his eyes all day long.
Jisoo snorted and rolled his eyes. “I liked school.”
“Of course you did.” As Jeonghan spoke, they both watched a few crumbs fly onto the table between them as he talked around the snack cake. He loved to be a bad example. Under Jisoo’s reproachful gaze, he finished chewing and swallowed.
“What’s wrong with Song Yejun?”
Jisoo’s mouth twitched, half annoyed and half amused. “Nothing. He’s a hypochondriac.”
“All children are hypochondriacs.”
Jisoo shrugged. “Yeah, well, his mother is a brain surgeon. His imagination runs a little more…specific than most kids’. I ran a fake aneurysm test on him and sent him back to class.”
Jeonghan looked at him with mock outrage. “What if he really was having an aneurysm?”
Jisoo scoffed. “He wasn’t. I am a trained nurse.” Then, he squinted at Jeonghan. “Shouldn’t you be in the classroom?”
“But they’re so self-sufficient at nine, don’t you think?” He blinked innocently for a few moments while Jisoo looked at him, completely unimpressed. “Seungkwannie has them outside for a volleyball game until the end of the day.”
Jisoo brightened. “Ah, so you get to leave on time today?”
They shared a look. Even as the school nurse, Jisoo knew that teaching schoolchildren meant that the day rarely ended when the kids left. But that was another perk of the end of the school year: getting home before dark.
Jisoo got to go home to his partner and cook pasta and drink red wine and fuck on the sofa by candlelight, or whatever happily in love couples did with their evenings. Jeonghan got to go home to Seungcheol and a cat he pulled out of his dreams.
When Jeonghan stood to grab his bag, he was hit with a wave of piercing pain behind his eyes so bad that he stumbled for a moment. It made his vision white out, so quickly he thought he’d imagined it. But when he turned, Jisoo was giving him a concerned look.
“Headache?” When Jeonghan nodded, Jisoo tutted. “You’ve been getting them more lately.”
“Thank you, Nurse Hong,” Jeonghan retorted, sarcasm lacking its usual punch as he clutched at his skull. “All I need is a band-aid and I can get back to class.”
But Jisoo looked as unimpressed with Jeonghan’s attempt at brushing him off as he usually was. The problem with Hong Jisoo is that he knew Jeonghan too well to let any of his bullshit slide. He’d been cataloging all of Jeonghan’s tricks and moves since high school.
“I seem to remember you having migraines a few days last week.” Jisoo helped Jeonghan hoist his bag onto his shoulder with a piercing look. “You’re not dreaming.”
Jeonghan froze for a millisecond, shocked by the correct guess. Just for the teeniest moment, but Jisoo saw it.
“Jeonghan…”
“That’s not it,” Jeonghan insisted. “I dreamt some clouds just the other day. Pain in the ass to get rid of, and my bedroom floors are ruined.”
Jisoo ignored him. “Do you remember our first year of university? When you were so stressed out that you stopped dreaming for a week around exams? You looked like death.”
He’d been so burned out and drained by his coursework and studying that he hadn’t felt inspired to dream much of anything, except for terrible things. The nightmares had been the worst they’d been since his military service, and after weeks of straining his subconscious to not bring back anything that could get him killed, his mind finally just gave up.
It was like some sort of fail-safe, Jihoon had explained when Jeonghan had reluctantly asked for advice. Jeonghan was so afraid to dream that he never allowed himself to fall into a deep enough sleep for dreams to form. But there was a trade-off. A few days without dreaming plus the exhaustion of only sleeping in short bursts, and Jeonghan was guaranteed headaches, nausea. Any longer than that, and it could be much, much worse.
“I’m fine, Jisoo. I have it under control.” He even met Jisoo’s eyes to make it convincing.
With a sigh, Jisoo stepped back and relented. “Okay. Just – be careful.”
By the time Jeonghan made it to the train, the dull ache behind his eyes bloomed into a full-blown migraine that wouldn’t ease up. As he descended from street level into the station, the bright overhead lights seemed to glow and pulse, and when he stepped onto the crowded train, he was swaying on his feet with both hands pressing into the pressure points on either side of his temple.
When the train turned, he rocked with it, unsteady. The woman next to him gave him a sidelong glance. He tipped his head and shut his eyes. The walk home was a blur.
“Hannie?”
Seungcheol greeted him with concern the minute he walked into their apartment. Oh right, Jeonghan thought. Monday. Seungcheol’s day off.
“I’m okay,” he said, but even as he said it, the headache took a sharp turn and became worse. He was hit with roiling nausea so bad that all he could do was follow a quick path from the front door to the living room sofa and collapse.
“Hey.” The back of Seungcheol’s hand pressed against his cheek as the couch dipped next to him.
“Cold,” he complained, which earned him a laugh.
Seungcheol murmured an apology. “I was just looking through the freezer.” The hand left Jeonghan’s cheek, instantly reminding him of how much pain he was in and how much he’d prefer it if Seungcheol kept touching him.
“I’ll get you medicine.”
“Mm.”
Jeonghan’s eyes were still closed when he heard a small meep and then the feeling of four tiny paws on his thigh.
“Ah, hello you.”
Cat’s fur was thick and soft like it always was, and she started purring up a storm the moment his palm gently touched her head. She didn’t care about his headache. All she cared about was lounging in his lap and getting as many ear scratches as possible, and all Jeonghan could do was indulge her. His hand trailed over the smooth curve of her back until his fingertips found the snail shell pattern and traced it mindlessly.
Seungcheol reappeared with a handful of pills and some water for Jeonghan.
“You know, Yongsun next door has a forever kitten. I saw them on the way to the vet the other day. Poor thing was not happy”
Jeonghan took the pain medicine and handed Seungcheol back the empty glass. “A what?”
“A forever kitten. Like Cat. You know – so much smaller than most adult cats that they look like kittens? Ah, so cute.” Seungcheol gave Cat a gentle stroke between her ears and then disappeared back into the kitchen, and the sounds of dishes being put away followed.
“Oh. Right.”
Cat was a forever kitten, Jeonghan supposed, though not the way Seungcheol meant. He wasn’t sure if she would ever get old enough to die. Surely some day. She had aged, just slowly. If the vet estimated she was around a year old when Jeonghan dreamt her, she must be just under two now. One year in twenty years. She aged the way any pet might when born in the mind of a child who understood very little about getting old or dying. In many ways, she was the perfect example of Jeonghan’s ability, of the wonder and horror in it. It had seemed so miraculous when he was younger, but now it pained him to think about what would happen to her when he got older. His little dream cat.
But Seungcheol didn’t know about any of that. Seungcheol went to work every day in a car with no engine; a luxury sedan Jeonghan dreamed him that would never need gas or an oil change, all because he knew Seungcheol was anxious about taking the train. He slept on a pillow that never lost its shape or coolness, and he showered with soap that always smelled exactly like Jeonghan remembered summer smelling when he was fourteen. Seungcheol thought Jeonghan was amazing, and demanded endless tricks that Jeonghan was more than happy to perform.
Cat butted her soft head against his still hand, demanding more pets.
Seungcheol knew about Jeonghan being a dreamer, but not what it meant. Despite the promise Jeonghan had made his father twenty years ago, he’d told Seungcheol so many things. But not this. Because if Seungcheol knew that Jeonghan could bring living things out of his dreams, it would only be a matter of time before he started to wonder how far it could all go. Before he realized that Jeonghan’s dreamer ability made him less of a wonder and more of a monster.
“I changed my mind. I don’t feel like cooking. Want me to order something?” Seungcheol reappeared, in an apron that he’d clearly tied around his waist with the best intentions to cook them dinner.
“Sure,” Jeonghan said, as he kept stroking Cat’s soft fur. He didn’t lift his gaze to look at Seungcheol, who was now standing directly over him, behind the sofa.
“What’s wrong?” Seungcheol sounded concerned, or petulant. It was hard to tell if he was concerned by Jeonghan’s flat demeanor or hurt that he didn’t have 100% of Jeonghan’s attention. Likely, it was both.
He leaned down with his arms crossed on the back of the couch, bringing his face closer to Jeonghan’s. In a low voice, he asked, “Is it…is it dream stuff? Should I call Minghao or Jihoon?”
Both were dreamers, like Jeonghan. He had met Minghao and Jihoon at a support group for insomniacs. Or at least that’s what it appeared to be to most people. The people who knew, knew what it really was.
“Or Seungkwan?” Seungcheol chewed his lip.
Jeonghan groaned. “No, please don’t get the psychics involved. I’m fine. Just a headache.”
He turned his head to look at Seungcheol finally, and his mouth twisted into a soft smile that he couldn’t control. He gave in a little bit and allowed a little bit of truth, like releasing a rope’s slack little by little to control the tension before it snapped.
“I’ve had a little bit of trouble dreaming lately. Nothing major. It’ll pass.”
Appeased by Jeonghan’s honesty, Seungcheol shot him a big grin. He drummed his hands on the cushion that Jeonghan was resting against.
“Maybe you need some inspiration. Taking dream requests? I need a new laptop.” He was looking at Jeonghan, and when Jeonghan didn’t reply, Seungcheol just laughed and grabbed onto his shoulders to shake him gently. “I’m just kidding, Hannie.”
Then, his face smoothed out. Serious and concerned, with the pinch of his brow Jeonghan loved so much he couldn’t bear to look at it. He squeezed his eyes shut under the guise of suffering his headache.
“Seriously, Han-ah. I know I don’t know a lot…about this stuff,” Seungcheol said, voice low, nonthreatening. “But I want to help, when it gets bad. I want to…you know.”
He stopped, cutting himself off. When Jeonghan looked up at him again, he was holding his mouth closed in a particular way. Holding whatever he wanted to say inside, trying to read Jeonghan before he moved forward. It pained Jeonghan when Seungcheol did this; he wanted him to speak freely. He wanted them to be honest with each other.
“I know,” he said to fill the silence, even though he didn’t know, exactly, what Seungcheol stopped himself from saying. It was just an offering, something that Seungcheol could accept as a placeholder for whatever he was thinking.
But of course, Seungcheol wasn’t like Jeonghan. He was brave.
“Well, I want to – to take care of you, Jeonghan-ah.” His eyes were so earnest, looking at Jeonghan purposefully. His face was flushed, his lip marked with red indents from his own teeth. “I’ve always wanted that.”
This was happening more and more, Seungcheol looking at Jeonghan like this. Well, no, that wasn’t quite right. Jeonghan can’t remember a time when Seungcheol hadn’t looked at him like this. But the looks were more brazen suddenly, and they lingered longer. The corner of his mouth was always quirked like he was thinking about saying something significant and emotional that they couldn’t come back from.
Jeonghan couldn’t let that happen, but he was becoming more and more certain that it was inevitable. But you can’t love someone if you don’t know them, and there was so much Seungcheol didn’t know about him.
Jeonghan couldn’t stand to leave Seungcheol hanging, so he reached up and squeezed his hand where it rested inches away on the couch. “Buy me kongguksu, Cheollie.”
If Seungcheol knew how terrifying a place Jeonghan’s mind could be, he wouldn’t stick around. Jeonghan watched Seungcheol hunch over the kitchen island with his phone out and met his eyes when he looked over at Jeonghan again and smiled. He wouldn’t look at me like this.
Seungcheol huffed, but his mouth twitched up. “Coming right up.”
It wasn’t that Jeonghan stopped dreaming on purpose. No dreamer would ever do that. For a dreamer, going too long without dreaming was like skipping meals. Not necessarily deadly, but more like a kind of starvation. Jeonghan tried to keep his dreaming and his waking life in neat little drawers, simple and separate, and he thought he had a good handle on it. But the more terrified he became of accidentally dreaming something he couldn’t control, and the longer Seungcheol’s soft, concerned looks lingered, the less and less he wanted to let himself dream. It just seemed like a risk not worth taking.
He watched Cat trail Seungcheol around the living room, winding in between his legs as he walked.
Maybe there was a part of Jeonghan that wondered if he could control the dreaming. That if he could just avoid the risk altogether, maybe he and Seungcheol could have something more than just almost or the could have been. Maybe those lingering looks could mean something. Maybe they could stop pretending like they didn’t already.
The problem was that he didn’t know how long he could keep this up.
Chapter 3
Most people would probably find it odd, maybe a little embarrassing, that a university club would continue to meet once its core members all graduated and entered their thirties. But their club wasn’t an ordinary club.
Jeonghan hadn’t found the group through the usual channels. There had been no flyer posted anywhere in the student union, no email blasts sent out. It had come looking for him.
He lived alone his first year at university, in a small studio his parents helped him pay for so that he never had to worry about the complicated sleeping situation that living with roommates presented for someone like him. And it was fine; he went to class, he went to the part-time cafe job he hated, he came home, studied, and then he slept. At twenty two, Jeonghan was much better at controlling his dreams than he had been when he was younger.
Before university, enlistment had been another story. His year in the military doing active duty was so painful he tried not to remember it. For ordinary people, the first few months of enlistment often inspired nightmares. The strict schedule, the grueling physical work, the existential anguish that came with temporarily having your identity stripped from you — it made perfect sense that the stress and fear of military life would seep into one’s dreams. For ordinary people, that’s all it was.
For Jeonghan, nightmares were real. Vivid, violent dreams in which he was being chased, shot at, hunted could easily cling to him and be brought into his waking world. And his waking world was a small shared quarters where four or five other young men slept. Put in danger just because they were placed in the same building as Jeonghan.
That’s when Jeonghan learned that under normal, perfectly controlled circumstances, being a dreamer was just an odd little ability that made him feel powerful and whimsical when he was dreaming kittens and magic tricks. But when scared, a dreamer became a weapon.
One time, about eight months into enlistment, he woke up after a nightmare in his quarters while the other conscripts slept, and he realized immediately that he’d brought his nightmare with him. There was always a bit of time – usually no more than a minute – after Jeonghan woke from a dream, when he couldn’t move. It was like he was watching himself sleep from above, staring down at his prone form, frozen in place.
He watched himself lying on his regulation cot with the nightmare on his chest, coiled like a snake and ready to strike out at the boy who slept one bed over. It was like a snake but it wasn’t. Snakes didn’t have legs. Snakes didn’t move quite like that. But it was like a snake in that it could bite, it could kill. And it wanted to.
A minute felt like an hour in moments like this, but slowly he had come back to his body in time to grab the snake-thing around the neck and hold it back. His struggle wasn’t quiet, though, and the others in his quarters had quickly woken up. Soobin, the boy next to him who had almost been snake food, scrambled out from under the covers and jumped away from the creature. It had been dark, too dark, thankfully, for any of them to notice that this snake was clearly not an ordinary snake. It wasn’t just its appearance. Snakes struck when threatened; this thing wanted to hurt everyone it came across and had no other purpose.
Jeonghan and the other boys managed to grab the wriggling snake-thing and brought it outside. One of the officers sleeping in the next building heard the commotion and came running, and he barely spared the creature more than a glance before shooting it. Jeonghan had volunteered to take it into the woods before anyone could get a good look at it.
The fear of doing it again, especially as the stress and exhaustion of military life continued to wear him down, made Jeonghan afraid to sleep. And the other men in his unit looked at him differently, with fear, even though they couldn’t know that he’d dreamt the snake. He couldn’t stop thinking about the look on Soobin’s face, the terror in his eyes when he looked from the nightmare to Jeonghan.
The chronic insomnia that followed eventually got him evaluated by one of the psychiatrists on base, and he was moved to non-active duty for health reasons. He spent the last year and a half of his enlistment behind a desk, bored and a little ashamed, but safe, and no longer a danger to others.
When he started university, things were better. Though they hadn’t seen each other since high school, he found Jisoo during orientation week, when they both showed up to a dance class they’d been pressured to sign up for to fulfill a physical education prerequisite and immediately locked eyes from opposite spots at the very back of class. They’d naturally gravitated towards each other when class let out, complaining about sore knees and what seemed to be a shared lack of natural rhythm.
Jisoo introduced him to Wonwoo and Mingyu, who introduced him to Jihoon and Soonyoung. His first semester stretched on, and stress kicked up around exams, and Jeonghan found himself unable to dream normally once again. Occasional stress-induced nightmares instilled just enough fear in him that he only slept in fits and starts, rarely deeply enough to dream. Everyone noticed, but no one said anything, taking it as typical first year university stress.
Until it had been more than a month since he’d last pulled something out of his dreams, and the nightwash started.
The viscous, black goo trickled from his nose when his mind became restless and he went too long without pulling something out of his dreams. It had never happened before, because Jeonghan had never let himself go so long without dreaming properly. Even in the military — nightmares were still dreams, after all.
The first time it happened, he was in a cafe with Jisoo and Jihoon after their last classes of the day. He’d been exhausted but otherwise fine, content to listen to Jisoo talk about his pre-med coursework. And then it felt like everyone was staring at him suddenly, a prickling awareness followed by the sensation of warm liquid under his nostrils. He’d thought it was a nosebleed.
“Jeonghan, what is–”
“Ah.” Jeonghan brought his knuckle to the top of his nose to stem the flow. When he pulled his hand away, he saw black where he’d expected crimson.
“Here, let me help you.” Jihoon had been calm, but watched Jeonghan intensely as he’d taken the offered napkin and held it to his nose.
He’d pulled Jeonghan outside, just the two of them on the sidewalk, and he’d said: “I know what you are. What you can do.”
“It’s nightwash, hyung,” he’d said, when Jeonghan had just gaped at him. “You have to dream. Skip class tomorrow, go somewhere you can relax, and let yourself dream.”
When Jeonghan had asked, “How do you know?” Jihoon had simply said, “Because I’m the same.”
And then he’d said, with the same intense look from before, “I go to these meetings every month. The next one is tomorrow. I think you should come with me.”
Well that was eight years ago, and Jeonghan was still going to meetings. Except now they were just this: Jeonghan, Jihoon, Minghao, Wonwoo, Soonyoung, Hansol and Seungkwan all crammed into Jisoo’s living room while Jisoo was at his weekly pilates class with Mingyu, who was a psychic like Soonyoung, Hansol and Seungkwan. It was a motley crew of people who would probably never have crossed paths otherwise.
How do you guys even find each other? Seungcheol had asked once, in awe.
Seungcheol, perfectly ordinary Seungcheol, who he’d met through Jisoo who met him through Mingyu who knew him from his time in the service. It hadn’t taken long for him to learn the truth. It had been an easy decision; Seungcheol had a way of making you believe you could trust him, even when you hardly knew him.
I mean, is there some kind of newsletter they send out for supernatural…creatures – beings? He’d made a face immediately after, stumbling on the terms. Like he was worried he’d said something offensive.
Jeonghan had laughed. More than anything else, most days, creature felt exactly right.
It just happens. Psychics and dreamers…we just go together like…pajeon and rain, or something.
He’d said it to make Seungcheol laugh as much as he did to try to explain it. Truthfully, he thought they all found each other because they all carried the specific stain of being different. Being wrong. Wonwoo called it being enlightened, but that was easy for him to say.
As soon as Jeonghan arrived at Jisoo’s apartment, it was clear they’d just been talking about him. They didn’t even try to hide it. It was clear that news of Jeonghan’s headaches had spread through the psychic-dreamer grapevine, likely started as pillow talk.
“You have to be careful,” Minghao said the second small talk subsided.
“Ah, Jisoo’s a snake. I’m fine,” he tossed out with a shrug, ignoring the hard looks several of his friends were giving him.
“But your aura looks like shit,” Seungkwan tossed back.
Soonyoung nodded. “Yeah, your energy is way off.”
Jeonghan huffed and looked at Hansol, who was characteristically serene where he sat between Seungkwan and Minghao.
“Yah. Has anyone told you guys that being psychic makes you really annoying?”
“Only people who don’t want to hear the truth, I think,” Hansol said matter-of-factly.
With a sigh, Jeonghan pushed himself up off the sofa and disappeared into the kitchen under the guise of making himself some tea. Inside the cupboard, he found four different varieties of chamomile and wrinkled his nose at them. He chose the least offensive one and was putting on the kettle when the front door beeped and opened to reveal a sweaty Jisoo, Mingyu trailing behind him.
Jisoo dropped his things by the door and made the rounds, greeting the congregation filling up his living room and stopping to plant a kiss on Minghao’s lips.
Jeonghan watched from the kitchen, hunched over the island while the kettle started to bubble.
“I’m mad at you,” he greeted Jisoo when he slipped into the kitchen to hover over Jeonghan. “You have the same taste in tea as your mother.”
Jisoo opened and closed his mouth a few times before speaking. “And that’s why you’re mad at me?”
Instead of answering him, Jeonghan reached around him to grab the now boiling kettle and pour some into his mug. Then, he cocked his hip to lean against the counter, took a reluctant sip, and met Jisoo’s eyes.
“Don’t you ever get tired of your living room being taken over by freaks?”
Jisoo looked over his shoulder, where Soonyoung and Seungkwan were now bickering over Jihoon’s head. Jisoo snorted.
“It’s Minghao’s living room, too.”
Jeonghan was quiet at that. He rolled his thoughts around, examining them at different angles. Then, he asked, “How do you guys deal with…you know.”
He succeeded in capturing Jisoo’s attention again. His eyebrows disappeared under his bangs.
“You mean Hao’s dreaming?” He shrugged, like it was nothing. “Sometimes he sleeps in the spare bedroom, if he’s worried something might happen. But there are other things you can do, Han.”
Jeonghan sighed. He was familiar with the spiel. “Right. Meditating, psychic stuff. Strange potions,” he added, waving his mug of chamomile between them.
Jisoo shrugged again. Pilates made him so docile. “It works. And that’s not all.”
Jeonghan twitched at the tone of Jisoo’s voice. “Hmm?”
Jisoo looked out into the living room, and Jeonghan watched as he and Minghao exchanged glances. Minghao smiled at Jisoo, his face transformed by it. It made Jeonghan’s chest ache just to watch.
“We trust each other,” Jisoo said. “And it helps, Hao being psychic. He’s taught me a few things, in case he’s in trouble. If he gets – what did he call it? – lost in his own dreams.”
Jeonghan stared at him. “Are you talking about going inside his head while he dreams?” It made something curl unpleasantly in his stomach. He knew enough psychics to know it was possible, but he couldn’t imagine letting anyone in his head, especially Seungcheol.
“We’ve never had to do it,” Jisoo said intently, giving Jeonghan a look. “It’s just in case.”
They stood there silently, Jeonghan sipping the tea while he wrinkled his nose dramatically and Jisoo’s mouth twitched the way it did when he was genuinely annoyed or trying to decide if he should say what he wanted to say. In this case, it appeared to be both.
“You should tell Seungcheol what’s going on. If –” he lifted his chin and talked over the small sound of complaint Jeonghan made. “If for nothing else, because Seungcheol is your roommate and I would be pretty concerned if my roommate suddenly started crying black ooze.”
Jeonghan shook his head. “You don’t know what it’s like.”
Jisoo gave him a hard look. “No. But I know what it’s like to be the Seungcheol in this situation. It’s scary.”
“The longer you go without dreaming,” Jihoon said calmly and suddenly. Jeonghan made a show of jumping in fright even though he was beyond used to Jihoon suddenly appearing out of nowhere. For someone so bulky, he was light on his feet like a cat. He leaned against the counter and looked between them. “The more intense the dreams will get. Dreams want to be dreamt, hyung. You won’t be able to control them, and Seungcheol could be put in danger.”
“That’s what I’m trying to avoid,” Jeonghan said, and his voice sounded meek, wobbly. He hated it. He hated all of this, how much he was swaying on his feet, the ache in his head, the phantom feeling of nightwash that had him bringing his hand up every couple of minutes to gently touch just under his nose.
Of course Jisoo could see it. He took the mug out of Jeonghan’s hands and set it in the sink and then pulled him out into the living room by the cuff of his shirt. “Come on, sit.”
From the sofa, Minghao watched Jeonghan the moment he stepped into the room until he took a seat on the floor across from him. It felt like his eyes were burning holes straight through Jeonghan, seeing things and understanding them in ways even Jeonghan didn’t.
Minghao just had a way of doing this, it’s what made him such a commercially successful psychic. He just seemed like he knew things, in the clairvoyant sense, even when it was just for show. It was amazing, honestly, that Minghao didn’t walk around on a constant power trip; both dreamer and psychic, the world at his fingertips along with its secrets.
Jeonghan stared back at him. It didn’t work. Very few of his tricks worked on Minghao. He ended up breaking first, to dig his buzzing phone out of his pocket.
From: Seungcheollie
Work is dragging
Jeonghan’s mouth quirked up in a small smile. Seungcheol always complained about work and it didn’t matter what the reason was – he complained if work was too busy and he got overloaded with projects, but he also whined if no one came in to chat with him and he ended up just puttering around the workshop with Chan, his studio assistant.
To: Seungcheollie
build me something
something pretty~~
His heart rate picked up and his phone seemed to heat in his hands. He was playing around with something very dangerous. Like lighting a match too close to the fumes of something he’s not anywhere near ready to watch go up in flames.
“I had the weirdest client yesterday. I forgot to tell you guys.” Mingyu sat practically on Jeonghan’s lap and then wiggled pointedly until he made room. Jeonghan just gave him a look, looking around at all of the nice wide open floor space.
“They’re all weird,” Wonwoo said.
Like Minghao, Wonwoo held a special place in the group’s dynamic. But rather than being both a dreamer and a psychic like Minghao was, Wonwoo was neither. He was something much more valuable: what the more woo-woo types, as Jisoo called them, would refer to as a mirror. His presence was both calm and calming, and he possessed the unique ability to amplify supernatural abilities, though he had none of his own. Being near him while sleeping made Minghao, Jihoon, and Jeonghan’s dreams more vivid, made it easier to pull things out. Jeonghan was very careful to never so much as close his eyes in Wonwoo’s presence for fear of what it might inspire.
For the psychics, however, Wonwoo was a gold mine. During a reading, with a hand on one of their shoulders, Wonwoo could help them concentrate on specific pathways or questions. He made them sharper and more focused. It was not uncommon, during the appointments that took place in the spare room in Seungkwan’s house that they used for readings, for Wonwoo to sit off to the side reading a book or playing a video game while one of the psychics used him to amplify their sight. Mingyu got the best deal of all; being Wonwoo’s roommate came with the perk of a highly lucrative psychic hotline that offered the dual reward of paying the rent and feeding Mingyu’s insatiable need to make small talk.
Jeonghan half listened to Mingyu’s story of his latest weirdo caller that somehow turned into him bickering with Soonyoung about something or other. He held his phone loosely in his hand, waiting for the buzz that came seconds later.
From: Seungcheollie
what me??
you’re the dreamer
dream me so many pretty things jeonghan-ah
Dangerous.
⋆˚꩜⋆
That night, with all of his defenses worn down from exhaustion, Jeonghan dreamt of Seungcheol. This wasn’t uncommon. The opposite, really, and that was a big problem. He dreamed of Seungcheol embarrassingly often: in fantastical settings full of magic and that specific brand of dreamy impossibility. He’s dreamed of them flying together, or plunging into the strong pull of the sea.
But the worst were the dreams that were completely ordinary, like this one.
They were lying in a plush thatch of green grass just over the hump of a hill, surrounded by trees and an area that looked suspiciously like the clearing by the park next to Jeonghan’s childhood home. The breeze rolled over them, tickling their faces, and Jeonghan could almost hear his mother calling for him, sticking her head out of the kitchen window to chastise him for playing so close to dinnertime. But they were alone.
Just him and Seungcheol.
“I want to play. Do you want to?”
Seungcheol’s breath tickled his ear when he turned to speak, that’s how close they were laying. Jeonghan lifted his head off the ground to look down the length of his body. He saw the bright white net of a goal post and a small pitch. None of it had been there moments ago.
“No, I don’t want to play. You go.” But he hooked his pinky around Seungcheol’s, linking their hands where they were resting between their bodies.
Seungcheol gave him a big grin, brighter than the sun that was currently hiding behind the trees. There was nothing blurry about this; Seungcheol’s gummy smile, his small teeth, the slight dimples the smile revealed — they were all painfully and perfectly rendered.
Seungcheol’s face was blinding, and everything smelled like summer. And Jeonghan loved him, he loved him.
“Seungcheollie,” he breathed.
As Seungcheol scooted closer and leaned towards him, Jeonghan felt his body growing warmer. It was like a cloud had cleared and the sun was beaming down on him, even though it hadn’t moved from its spot behind the oaks. Seungcheol’s pinky wrapped around his more tightly, and Jeonghan became acutely aware of the feeling of Seungcheol’s skin in a way that made him feel prickly and on edge. It was the way things felt moments before they stopped being dreams and followed Jeonghan into the waking world.
“I want to kiss you, please, Jeonghan. Let me–”
Seungcheol was so close. His eyelashes were making shadows like moons on his sunburned cheeks. Jeonghan leaned forward and parted his lips.
He said, “I’m sorry. I have to wake up now.”
And he did.