Suddenly, you grow faint
(I can't seem to say a single word)
I'm scared to open my eyes
(I want to go to you, I want to fall back to sleep)

Everything is the same, only you are not here
In this dream of the moment you left me
I cruel night is endlessly coming for me
I close my eyes again, taking me back to that dream

To an eternal dream that I will never wake from

Jaehwan runs. He's been running for a while now, but there's no sweat coming down his forehead or making his shirt stick to his back, and for some reason or other it annoys him. He soon realizes that he doesn't remember why he's running anymore, and that's when it hits him: He's waking up again.

He regains consciousness but doesn't open his eyes. Every morning is like this for him nowadays. He clenches his fists and relaxes them again, surprised to feel them both empty. That isn't how he went to sleep, and it's important, it's very important that he hasn't lost what he clung to, the object which allowed him to find sleep once more.

When he opens his eyes, Taekwoon is sitting on the other couch in the living room. There are two, you see, because Jaehwan and his brother could never share the space in only one when they were kids. After one too many nights of feet in uncomfortable places and red-faced screaming, their parents bought another one and positioned the two in an L shape in their living room. Jaehwan and his brother have both long since moved out, of course, but here he is now, lying under a furry, black blanket on his parents' couch. More importantly, Taekwoon is sitting on the other one, elbows leaned on his knees, hands clasped and his eyes on Jaehwan's sleepy face.

”How long have you been here?” Jaehwan asks, squinting in the light from the lamp in the corner.

There's a pause, and the distant sound of traffic between them is comforting.

”About half an hour.”

Jaehwan frowns. ”You could have woken me up.”

”I didn't want to. You looked too peaceful.”

”Well, I wasn't.” Jaehwan stretches, pushes his face into the couch cushion and rolls onto his back. ”I was having all these weird dreams.”

”Weird dreams, huh?” Taekwoon straightens his back and turns towards him. ”Was I in any of them?”

Staring at the ceiling, Jaehwan tries to remember. ”No,” he says eventually. ”That's what was weird about them.”

Taekwoon gives him a small smile. ”Dreams are important, you know. They can tell you a lot about a person.”

Jaehwan turns his face towards him, feeling playful. He always does when it comes to Taekwoon. ”Yeah? What do you dream about?”

”Let's see...” Taekwoon leans back, clasped hands on jeans-covered thighs. ”The weirdest dream I have ever had... was when I dreamt that I was at an underground subway station.”

”Go on.”

”I had no idea where I was, but there was a lot of people there, so I tried to ask them, but... no one would tell me.” He gives Jaehwan a pointed look at that. ”In the end, I got up on a bench and started yelling for someone to please tell me where the hell we were. But it was like nobody could even hear me.”

Jaehwan winces. ”Sounds scary.”

Taekwoon purses his lips, but his eyes say nothing. ”It was weird.”

”And that's supposed to tell me a lot about you as a person?”

”Hm,” Taekwoon chuckles. ”You already know everything about me.”

Pain flashes at him as his mind tries to dismantle the other man's sentence. ”Stop mocking me,” he breathes, closing his eyes again. This is not how this was supposed to be.

”I'm not,” Taekwoon says, and leans forward again. He scans Jaehwan's face patiently, and Jaehwan feels almost shy again under his stare. It hasn't happened now for a long time. ”Are you still tired?”

”Mm.” Jaehwan looks up at the other man expectantly. ”You?”

Taekwoon nods back. ”You're sleeping an awful lot lately.”

”Well, I'm tired. If you're tired, you should sleep too. Right next to me.”

”Should I?” Taekwoon asks, amused and affectionate. Jaehwan nods, lifting his blanket to show all the space he doesn't have right next to him.

”Did you put the blanket on me? I don't remember having it on me when I fell asleep.”

”Yeah, I did. But I can't crawl in next to you, Jaehwan. There's no space there.” Taekwoon is up on his feet, looking over into the small, dark space between Jaehwan and the back of the couch.

”Sure there is,” Jaehwan argues, a little annoyed at how long it's taking the other man's warmth to embrace him. ”There's plenty if you remove the cushions, look.” And he does so, throws them to the other end of the couch and kicks them away, then turns back to give the other an anticipating look. ”Come on.”

Taekwoon gets up and comes over to Jaehwan's couch, his face says ”yeah, yeah,” but there's a smile about to drag at the corners of his mouth, and Jaehwan knows that look far too well. One of his knees pushes down between Jaehwan and the backrest, and Jaehwan, on his back, looks up at the man above him, smiling at the position and the familiarity of everything, and Taekwoon smiles back, slightly more embarrassed than the younger, before he presses his back against the couch and slides down as well as he can, effectively taking up every last inch of the space that separated them. Jaehwan turns over on his side, pushing his face into Taekwoon's chest, because this is what he has been waiting for, and God only knows how long it has been. The older's arm traps him in, doesn't hold him too close, but enough for Jaehwan to feel fully enveloped in safety, warmth and every other beautiful thing this world has to offer.

”Taekwoon,” he mumbles into the other's shirt.

”Yeah?”

”What changed?”

Taekwoon's hand comes up to his head to comb through his short hair. ”Nothing changed, Jaehwan.”

Jaehwan shakes his head slightly. ”Are you saying there was this whole other part of you that I never knew, all this time?”

Hesitation lingers over them both. ”If you want to put it like that.”

”But why wouldn't you tell me?” Jaehwan huffs. ”Why would you keep something like that from me?”

”If you could see yourself...” Taekwoon begins softly, and pauses to press a soft kiss to his forehead. ”If you had met yourself when I did... You'd understand.”

Jaehwan takes a moment to try to translate that in his head. ”Okay, well, I can't. So you'll have to tell me.”

Taekwoon leans his face against the top of Jaehwan's head. ”You needed protecting, Jaehwan. You needed help. Not me.”

Crawling closer, Jaehwan shakes his head. ”That's so dumb,” he says. ”That's so unbelievably dumb.”

”Maybe,” Taekwoon agrees. ”I loved you too much, that's all.”

”Don't say that,” Jaehwan chokes out as quickly as he can. ”Please, don't say that. It makes it all seem even worse.”

There's a short pause. ”Okay.”

”I don't understand how it's possible to love someone so much and still be so clueless,” Jaehwan continues, glad that he can't see the other's face for now, or he might end up crying. ”I barely thought of anything else, and I still missed the whole point. Isn't that dumb?”

Taekwoon laughs softly. ”Everything is always dumb with you.” He rubs Jaehwan's back, as if in encouragement. ”I don't blame you for not seeing it. You didn't want it to be true, and I didn't want you to know.”

When he tries to think of something to say, he comes up all curses, so he stays quiet and keeps his eyes closed. He tries to find peace in the silence, but how can he? How will he ever quench his thirst for answers, for words, for the sound of the other man's voice, now?

”We should sleep,” Taekwoon says and silences Jaehwan's messy mind for a second.

”Why?”

”Because I'm falling asleep.” Jaehwan laughs a little, forgets, or pretends he does.

”Okay,” he agrees. ”Go to sleep. You'd better still be here when I wake up.” He leans his body onto the other's even further, and pretends he doesn't know what it means when Taekwoon doesn't reply.

”Let's have better dreams this time, okay?” Taekwoon says, whispers it right above Jaehwan's ear, and his lips hover over his temple, small, warm breaths that spill over Jaehwan's skin and leaves nothing but a cold emptiness behind. And that is, Jaehwan supposes, the story of the two of them.

Even so, Jaehwan nods into Taekwoon's neck. This is all he could have ever hoped for. ”You know that if you had told me, if I had been there with you at the subway station that night when nobody could hear you, I would have listened. Right? I would have done anything...”

”Sleep, Jaehwan,” Taekwoon interrupts, holding him tighter for just a moment.

And Jaehwan shakes himself back to reality. ”Right. Okay.” He sighs. ”I'll dream of you this time.” Maybe he can enter Taekwoon's dream, reenact what happened when nobody could hear his cries for help, and change their past. Could that be possible?

He sleeps again. He dreams, but of things that he can't decipher and that hold no meaning to him, to the extent that he finds the dreams pointless. And when he wakes up again, Taekwoon is gone, just as he thought. There's no blanket covering him, and the apartment is filled with the sounds of his parents going about in the kitchen, no doubt trying to fix him something to eat, because they know he hasn't been capable of doing it for himself for several weeks now.

And in his hand, unmistakably, is what he was missing in his dream; he groans involuntarily when he understands that this is reality, and he squeezes the paper in his hand, like he has every time he has woken up for too many days to count in a row, hard enough that the letter will soon be unreadable – not that it matters. He has every word written on the page memorized by heart either way. But the note was left for him on a day when things that seemed so right turned terribly wrong, and his memory of reading it for the first time is the last memory he has of a time when he still felt complete, when he wasn't afraid, before he walked into the other room and was greeted by images he wishes he could burn out of his mind, but that he knows, of course, are there to stay forever.

Because he didn't see it. Because Taekwoon told him about his subway dream once before, months ago, but he still could not understand. Now he thinks he does, though. He thinks he understands that even though Jaehwan was fragile and Taekwoon was strong, that never meant that Taekwoon didn't need to be taken care of, too.

He pulls his arm over his eyes to shield them from the light as he turns over on his other side. All he wants to do is to go back to sleep.

Jaehwan runs.

Next on my list of songs to write for is VIXX's 대답은 너니까. Could you help me out, come to my writing tumblr and leave me a pairing for the fic? I'd appreciate it greatly. (Don't forget to check my "fandoms & pairings" page to see which pairings I'd be willing to write for first, though~) Thank you.