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Part II

Yoo Jonghyuk kisses him for the first time with blood flooding his mouth.

It is as if every interrogation he’s had since the Dark Castle crumbled has vanished out of his mind. Days and weeks spent wondering where Kim Dokja had gone and if Kyunguk would survive—if they both would survive—are swept cleanly out of his mind. The quiet and embarrassed moments of wondering at attraction or lack thereof, about men and women, at his own past intimacies. His lips bleed over Kim Dokja’s and his hand fists into Miteum’s fur, and he forgets about it all.

There is something almost virginal, he feels, in this; not just because he has never kissed a man before, not simply because his fingers brush the fur of Kyunguk’s side and he feels nothing shame-like, nothing at all but habit. Kyunguk has taken comfort from his touch so many times now. But Kim Dokja reels against him as if he has never imagined, could never imagine, such a thing happening. He trembles for a second. He hesitates.

It’s the first time Yoo Jonghyuk sees him struck by surprise.

Jonghyuk finds that very little of it matters. The sounds of rolling stones, of footsteps into dust. The cold wind on his face and the light of a blackened sun. He kisses Kim Dokja without thinking of anything, one hand at his own dæmon’s side and the other at Kim Dokja’s. Their lips lathered in blood.

---

He takes his time in disrobing him. His fingers stroke patched-up pieces of skin, fragments of stories pulled together in a semblance of a body. Part of Yoo Jonghyuk wishes that he had done this months ago in that darkened theater. Before that even; he pictures his hand around Kim Dokja’s throat at the top of that broken bridge, pretends in the confines of his mind that his hold then turned gentler, kinder. That instead of dropping him into the mouth of a monster, he pulled him against his front.

Kyunguk does not always stay perched atop Kim Dokja’s shoulder now. Whether this is due to the present circumstances or because of the state of the two’s connection, Yoo Jonghyuk can only guess. But he feels the rat’s side pulled against Miteum’s in the darkness of the room. He puts his open hand over Kim Dokja’s belly and hears him sigh in the silence.

He feels as if he has waited a long, long time for this.

“Are you just going to stare?” Kim Dokja asks.

Yoo Jonghyuk graces him with a quick glance upwards. Kim Dokja’s eyes shine even at night, now, with the change in his status. It’s not enough to convince him that only playfulness motivated those words.

“I like to take my time,” he replies.

He parts the coat and shirt over Kim Dokja’s shoulders—feels, in a rush of arousal, like a man walking on water, like Sisyphus on the hill making away with his task.

He feels drunk on power.

“Don’t you?”

Kim Dokja doesn’t answer. His hand claims the naked skin at Yoo Jonghyuk’s nape and pulls him in for another, more biting kiss. Heat spreads between their bodies like the sick tang of alcohol, dampening skin and fabric and smelling sweet between their breaths.

Jonghyuk kneels higher astride Kim Dokja’s hips so he can support himself with one elbow by the other’s ear. He strokes down and up his chest with nothing on his mind but the feeling of warm skin. He drags his nails down the fat of Kim Dokja’s belly, hooks his fingers into the belt of his pants. Tugs.

Kim Dokja breathes over his face loudly. If there were light around to see, his mouth would be wet and red.

They haven’t taken the time to speak of whos and hows. Yoo Jonghyuk knows what he wants now, and he thinks he knows what Kim Dokja wants as well.

Miteum’s side dips and shudders where Kyunguk rests, alive.

He wishes only moonlight could see them naked and tangled together. He wishes he could be alone when hands pull the white coat entirely off of Kim Dokja’s body as if peeling off armor. A fierce and lonely part of him for once strives to rebel against the unfairness of having to share this, of having to broadcast the feel of Kim Dokja’s mouth on his or the way his ears redden; the shape of his damp body pressed against cotton sheets; the gasps out of his lips as Jonghyuk works fingers into him.

— Do you like this? he asks, slick and hot inside him and biting over his belly, his ribs. Do you?

— I wouldn’t let you do it if I didn’t.

It makes Jonghyuk smile against him, makes him push in a third finger alongside the two that are holding Kim Dokja open. Kim Dokja groans and pushes down against him, which must mean something good, which blossoms warmth in Jonghyuk’s knotted lungs. He is harder than he has ever been before, and for things that he never thought to find arousing at all.

For solid shoulders tensing over the bedspread. For sweat gathering at the hollow of a throat, between too-far-spread collarbones. For Kim Dokja’s cock resting against the inside of his thigh, red and hot and weeping.

Yoo Jonghyuk strokes it with the same care he stroked Kyunguk’s back the first time.

“Fuck,” Kim Dokja growls in low, low voice. “Please—”

“That’s what I like to hear.”

“Fuck you.”

Yoo Jonghyuk should scowl. All he can do is smile.

He sinks into Dokja’s body like a stone sinks into a pond. The sound that Kim Dokja makes then is something he wants to keep burned into mind, to cradle and covet far from every eye. His spine pains him in those moments of stillness before they both adapt, Kim Dokja to the feel of him and Yoo Jonghyuk to everything else that has lingered and swollen up since their separation.

He gasps. He groans. His body shakes and stutters with friction and with heat. He feels sweat over his own naked back where Kim Dokja’s fingers are buried—where they slide up and down, down, until they reach his ass. Kim Dokja is the one who pulls him the rest of the way in as if meeting a challenge, his starlit eyes glowing like two moons.

Yoo Jonghyuk swears and moans and picks up the pace.

Arousal undoes him with every thrust forward. He aches with it as one aches from heartbreak, despite the pleasure and warmth, despite the proximity. He pants into Kim Dokja’s neck and feel the other panting too. He grabs onto his shoulders with nails that feel like claws, as if this would ever be enough to keep Kim Dokja in place.

Kim Dokja’s breathing turns pained. “Slower,” he mutters with his lips to Jonghyuk’s ear, and Yoo Jonghyuk obeys without the need for thought. The slow roll of their hips becomes stickier, slower, as if the pace of each second is giving them respite. Their chests rub together with every breath. Yoo Jonghyuk has never felt closer to someone else before; he has never felt the want for more, either, like a wave carving rock into the shape of cliffs.

He does want more.

Kim Dokja whines pitifully when Jonghyuk pulls out of him. He has to take himself in hand at once, the cold air on his cock and the sight laid before him almost too much, too soon—but he breathes. He looks at Kim Dokja from above.

“Get up,” he rasps out.

There is protest painted all over Kim Dokja’s face that he doesn’t care to listen to. Yoo Jonghyuk pushes him aside so he can lie with his back to the sheets. He pulls him in for another kiss. For a moment Kim Dokja relaxes, leaning into his embrace until they are entirely front-to-front, crushed by the overheated air into complacency. Then Yoo Jonghyuk breaks away and says, “Sit on me.”

Kim Dokja takes a long time to comply.

He moves slowly, hazily. He sits astride Yoo Jonghyuk’s thighs as if afraid to come closer, though he masks it by bending forward for another languid kiss. He rubs off against him in pleasurable waves, one hand over Jonghyuk’d shoulder and the other dragging through the hair running down his belly.

“Come on,” Yoo Jonghyuk breathes. “Come on, Kim Dokja.”

Kim Dokja chuckles haughtily. “All right.”

Still he stumbles as he places himself. His hold on Jonghyuk’s cock is awkward, his hips trembling slightly as he takes him in inch by inch. The grip of his body is so warm that Yoo Jonghyuk’s eyesight blackens; that his body shudders from fingertips to toes.

— I might not be very good at this, Kim Dokja says then.

— Why?

It is unlike Kim Dokja to devalue himself.

He moves, then, stuttering back and forth. Yoo Jonghyuk grabs his hips with enough strength to bruise, digging into soft flesh till his fingers feel bone, till muscles tense underskin. He rocks into the crux of Kim Dokja’s body and watches him avidly. It is greed of the heart, he feels, that makes his mouth water. It is lust of the soul.

“Why?” he repeats.

He strokes his hands over Kim Dokja’s chest and tries not to come yet. The weight of him burns every one of his nerves, sets his loins aflame. He won’t last very long.

Kim Dokja frowns and says, “I’ve never done this before.”

The pause he marks then is enough to make Jonghyuk understand that he means more than simply riding a man’s cock.

— No one? he asks.

— No one.

— How old are you again?

“I’m twenty-eight, bastard,” Kim Dokja replies through his teeth. “I knew you’d be smug about it.”

Yoo Jonghyuk pushes himself upright and kisses him again.

He picks up the pace with the sort of desperation reserved for death scenarios. Their teeth knock together until they stop kissing, until all they can do is groan with their open mouths shivering together. Like this they are once more chest-to-chest, and Yoo Jonghyuk’s back hardens with the strain of rocking up, of breathing in. Kim Dokja takes himself in hand and moans. His shoulders tense and curve around the width of Jonghyuk’s hand; for a second they look about to grow wings again.

He hardly feels himself come at all. His mind is clouded with heat and languor, his hands pressed onto Kim Dokja’s damp skin. His throat laxens on a moan that sounds like relief, like a sob. The dark room turns around his head.

Their sweat has cooled over their skin by the time they let go.

---

Jonghyuk wakes some hours later with Miteum sleeping over him.

Neither dæmon had made much noise during their lovemaking. They had stayed huddled together at the foot of the bed, taken in by the same emotion but unable to play a part in it. Miteum’s eyes glow in the early light of morning as she watches him sit up. She says nothing at all.

Kim Dokja is sleeping next to him, Kyunguk nestled at the crook of his neck, right where some time ago Jonghyuk was sucking skin.

They are truly asleep, the both of them. Yoo Jonghyuk has developed too much awareness for anyone to fool him so easily. The cover has dragged down when he rose from his pillow, baring Kim Dokja’s upper back. Goosebumps are rising on his skin. He brushes them with a finger.

Many messages await him from the ever-watching Star Stream. Yoo Jonghyuk is no doubt considerably richer now than he was the day before, but he has no intention of keeping any of it. Whichever constellation saw fit to reward this as spectacle will find their money returned swiftly.

With a quirk of the lips, he wonders if Kim Dokja will do the same.

His hand trails from Dokja’s back and up his nape. It finds Kyunguk’s warm and frail side, much warmer now than it had been in the weeks Kim Dokja had spent trapped outside the scenario. His fur has grown back too; it is as black and lustrous now as when he first said eyes on it.

Kim Dokja sighs in his sleep and pushes back against his hand.

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