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Hongbin wakes up...not well-rested. He should be well-rested. He’s slept comfortably and for enough hours. But his eyelids are heavy, his mind fuzzy around the edges. He tries to sit up and his vision spins, so he sinks back down into the pillow.
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” Hakyeon says softly, looking at him over the top of his phone. He’s probably been awake for hours already, patiently waiting for Hongbin. Fundamentally incompatible sleep schedules, even when Hongbin is trying to make them align.
“Not ready for it to be morning,” Hongbin mumbles into the comforter. “Why am I still so tired?”
“What time did you go to bed the night before this?” Hakyeon asks – he already knows last night, obviously.
Kind of him to try to get to the bottom of this while Hongbin’s mind isn’t functioning enough to do it himself. “2 or so. That’s not that bad.”
“The night before that?”
“Probably like, noon. I don’t know.”
Hakyeon chuckles. “Well, there’s your answer.”
Hongbin makes a noise that he hopes properly conveys his frustration.
“Just go back to sleep, angel,” Hakyeon says, petting Hongbin’s hair.
“I really did want to fix my sleep schedule. I didn’t want to waste our time together sleeping.”
Words spill out of Hongbin’s mouth when he’s this tired, things he’d normally try to keep to himself. It is a little silly to admit you’re ashamed about sleeping too much, right?
“You’re not wasting time,” Hakyeon says. “We have all the time in the world.”
Which isn’t really true. They’re only together now because Hakyeon’s finally wrapped up filming for his latest project, and Hongbin’s only staying over for two or three days, as long as he thinks he can go without streaming before chat starts getting suspicious. Another short burst in the long line of short bursts that their relationship consists of these days.
It seems cruel that Hongbin found his soulmate so young, just for life to take them in such different directions that he can’t even keep himself awake at the same hours as him.
He’s grateful the fog in his brain keeps that thought distant enough that he doesn’t feel any specific way about it.
“It feels like I am,” Hongbin says. “I don’t know why. Everything always feels like it’s my last chance.”
Words just tumbling down onto the sheets again.
Hakyeon is silent for a moment, probably trying to parse what the sleep-addled nonsense Hongbin is spewing even means. He’s quite good at that – soulmates, and all – so it doesn’t take long for him to formulate a response.
“I hate to be an armchair psychologist, and I hate to bring this up right now,” Hakyeon says, which is only half-true: he loves to be an armchair psychologist. “But you did have a traumatic experience where you lost something that was important to you without getting closure. It’s not surprising that your brain is afraid it’s going to happen again.”
Right, that. Hongbin would argue that it’s not a fear so much as an understanding, now, that nothing is as secure as it seems. Everything could go away in the blink of an eye; is it wrong to want to be sure he lives every moment fully until it happens?
Maybe, if it’s made him feel bad about sleeping.
That feeling he was grateful not to feel before has hit him now, making the back of his throat feel tight. He sighs and gives into his eyelids’ desire to be shut.
“Roll over so I can spoon you,” Hakyeon demands, and Hongbin does.
Hakyeon snuggles closer and wraps an arm around him, placing his hand atop Hongbin’s and weaving their fingers together.
“As long as we’re both alive, I’ll be with you,” Hakyeon says. “And if I did die tomorrow, I’d be grateful I got to spend my last day with you asleep in my arms. Then, in my next life, I’d search for you until we were together again. We have entire lifetimes ahead of us. You can sleep for a few hours now.”
“Making me cry isn’t going to help me sleep,” Hongbin says.
Hakyeon squeezes his hand, just short of painfully tight. “No crying! Sleep!”
Hongbin takes a deep breath, and he sleeps.