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Youngjae wouldn’t be able to tell you how it started, or how long it’s been.
The best he’s been able to come up with—within the imperceptible haze of time—is that it was some sort of sick punishment. The kind of experience so deeply divine, surreal, that it would make anyone believe either that there was a god, or that everything was completely godless.
Youngjae doesn’t know where he stands on that spectrum yet. It changes day to day, depending on if he wants to find someone to blame other than himself.
The sheets are soft, the blanket weighty where it lies on top of his sleep-sore limbs. Sunlight filters through the curtains, sea salt air wafting in through the screen of the window. As his senses awaken, he registers the sound of ocean waves, seagull calls—he’d woken up somewhere new again, always ripped away before he gets the chance to settle into what came before. Youngjae wakes up in a new bed again today, this room considerably larger than the last, and he can hear the soft breathing from another body beside him, curled under the sheets.
Youngjae knows that it’s Dohoon, even before he turns onto his side to look.
It’s not his Dohoon, or even the Dohoon that Youngjae had fallen asleep next to last night—but it’s still Dohoon. It always is.
Youngjae’s only been able to piece together parts of this from what’s left of his own sanity—but for god knows how long, Youngjae has been waking up in different bedrooms, different places, different lives—never staying in one for too long a time. He has no way of knowing how long he’ll be in one place, no way to figure out how to get back to his own reality, no way to figure out if he’d even be able to remember what his own reality even is at all.
Youngjae is always still… well, Youngjae. He’s twenty-seven years old, a man, has the same face when he looks in the mirror—but everything else is different, every time. He lives in a different place, has a different job, has a whole, entire life, though it never feels like his own.
The only other thing that stays the same is Kim Dohoon.
Dohoon is always there. They aren’t always in love, and Youngjae doesn’t always wake up next to him—but Youngjae never leaves a life without knowing how Dohoon is woven into it, present in every nook and corner.
Youngjae vaguely remembers the first time he’d found himself stuck in the seemingly-endless loop, waking up in something completely different from what he’d known to be reality all his life. He remembers Dohoon—his Dohoon—how the two of them had argued over something that Youngjae can’t even recall now, raised voices and frustrated words and crossed arms. Youngjae still regrets how long he’d let them stay in this particular rough patch, how he’d lost sight of all the highs of their relationship at the deepest of their lows. Youngjae remembers crying, both of them saying some things that they didn’t mean. He remembers saying something like, I’m so sick of you, and then kicking Dohoon out of their bedroom, making him sleep on the couch.
And then he remembers waking up the next day with Dohoon next to him in bed anyway, with no recollection of the fight they’d had last night.
That was how it started. Youngjae’s not sure how long it took him to understand what this was, but the thought that it was some kind of punishment didn’t take long to root itself into his mind. He’d told Dohoon, his Dohoon, that he was sick of him, and now he gets new versions of Dohoon over and over again, before he can ever get sick of the last.
It surprises him a little bit, how quickly he’d gotten used to it.
Youngjae has never really thought of things like parallel universes too much—not in his real life, at least. This whole ordeal has made him think about a lot of things that he probably should have thought about in his real life, apparently. For someone who’d spent four years of that life studying Philosophy, one would think Youngjae would have more insight on—or, at the very least, fascination with—these theories of existence, but in the universe that he exists in, Choi Youngjae has always known himself to be a pragmatic guy. Youngjae doesn’t approach the fact that he’s suddenly living inside of a thought experiment with anything other than the instinct to survive it, to preserve his fraying grip on everything he’s known to be true, while hoping that he’ll eventually wake up one day and realize it was all just some twisted, elaborate nightmare.
And, of course—as in all of the times that Youngjae finds himself in pure, instinctual, survival mode—the way he maintains any semblance of control is through a constant, well-established routine.
He’s contented himself with getting used to the motions of this, instead of making any more in-vain attempts to make sense of something so utterly absurd. Youngjae wakes up, figures out who he is, figures out who Dohoon is, and then figures out what they are to each other. They’re not always together, but they’re never nothing—and especially on the days when not-nothing seems to be the case, Youngjae relies on whatever little traces Dohoon has left around his life: texts on his phone, pictures on the mantle, a note on the nightstand that tells Youngjae why he wasn’t in bed. It’s amusingly easy, a lot of the time; even in all of these parallel lives, it’s still Dohoon who wears his heart on his sleeve between the two of them—calling Youngjae baby or sending him kissy emoticons or sometimes even suggestive, flirtatious little remarks—and it baffles Youngjae a little bit to start noticing the things about Dohoon that persist in every reality, the apparently infinite number of lives that they live together, all at once.
It’s almost funny, really; Youngjae wills himself to stick to this semblance of constancy, has now gotten used to always discovering something new. Or perhaps it’s by this twisted punishment’s design, allowing him to look with new eyes at everything he’d taken for granted for far too long. That one time, when he’d woken up in the beach house with Dohoon in bed next to him, Youngjae had checked his phone and gathered that they were just hooking up—Dohoon a sun-tanned vacationer and Youngjae some kind of wildlife researcher on assignment—and he’d discovered that Dohoon says good morning in the same way in every single universe. Another time, he’d woken up in a shitty studio apartment in a city that definitely wasn’t Seoul, and the collection of little post-it notes on the fridge told Youngjae that he and Dohoon ran some sort of restaurant in New York, and he’d learned that Dohoon wasn’t shitty at cooking in every universe, but that his handwriting was the same, bubbly scrawl in English as it always was in Hangul. Youngjae’s been through all sorts of different scenarios with Kim Dohoon—and amidst everything that’s different, there’s always still so much that’s the same.
And so many of those universes are ordinary, not unlike the original life that Youngjae was living with Dohoon, his Dohoon, in the bustling heart of Seoul. It doesn’t surprise Youngjae that his own life is one of many, where they both have normal jobs and a normal love story, where the only thing he really has to figure out is if they’ve been together for days or months or years. And of course, seeing Dohoon every day, in every universe, only makes Youngjae miss Dohoon even more; every new iteration makes Youngjae ache for the Dohoon that he’d argued with before this all started, the one he thought he’d banished to their couch, not out of existence. It makes him wonder what every Youngjae is like in all of these universes, too—if Dohoon ever notices anything’s different whenever Youngjae wakes up in a new life, leaving the last one behind.
It’s an uncomfortable thing to dwell on. Youngjae tries not to think too hard about if in every life, he’s the same kind of cold, complacent asshole that he was on the last night he’d spent with the Dohoon that was already his. In place of that rabbit hole of thought, Youngjae sticks to his routine: he learns what they are or what they aren’t, tries his best to inhabit a life that isn’t his own, and leave it the same, if not better, than it was, before he’s inevitably dropped into a new reality once again. He figures it’s the least he can do, some kind of penance for his shortcomings. There must be something he has to make up for in all of these parallel existences. He can only hope that he eventually picks up enough pieces to be able to return and fix what he’d broken in his own.
There is one part of the routine that Youngjae had only started after the first time he’d woken up somewhere new, and realized that Dohoon wasn’t his.
They were going to go out for samgyeopsal that night, after work to catch up over drinks and meat with their friends. Youngjae had checked his phone and put it together fairly quickly: Han Jihoon had suggested they hang out, Shin Junghwan was teasing Dohoon gently about yet another failed relationship, telling him they’d wash away the breakup with some good, old-fashioned shots of soju. It was maybe the seventh or eighth life that Youngjae had found himself dropped into, and by then, he’d already gotten used to simply existing in Kim Dohoon’s life, never stirring the pot or dipping his fingers into things he’s not fully sure are his. He’d been keeping his distance, because these versions of Dohoon never felt like Dohoon to him—just some mirage of his imagination, a stand-in for the person that Youngjae loved.
And then they’d gotten drunk at the samgyeopsal restaurant—Youngjae and Dohoon and four of their friends red-faced and mumbling at half past twelve—and maybe it was the alcohol, but when Youngjae realized that Dohoon wouldn’t be going home with him, something inside of his heart nearly snapped in half.
“I love you,” Youngjae had blurted out of nowhere, blinking slowly as he stared straight into Dohoon’s half-open eyes. “I’ve loved you for a long time.”
Dohoon had just squinted at him, rightfully confused, asking, “...What?”
“I love you.”
“...Why?”
“Why do I love you?”
“Why are you saying that, all of a sudden?”
Youngjae remembers all the exact thoughts that had run through his head in that moment. Because you deserve to hear it. Because it’s true, in every universe. Every version of me is connected to every version of you.
What he actually ended up saying was, “Because I should have told you, when I still could.”
Dohoon had laughed, eyes darting around nervously under the weight of Youngjae's stare, “Yah, you’re drunk, aren’t you?”
To be fair, he was—though Youngjae was still sober enough to use that fact as an excuse to say, as if the real Dohoon, his Dohoon would hear, “I miss you.”
Youngjae has been missing Dohoon ever since.
Youngjae finds himself in a classroom one day, empty except for himself and Dohoon, autumn sun shining through the windows as they work on their laptops in silence. They’re in a Master’s program together, have matching rings on their fingers. Engaged, not married, as far as Youngjae can tell. It’s one of the more peaceful lives within the multiverse of them, birdsong and swaying branches, far away from city noise.
But Dohoon is still the same. He’s playful where Youngjae is serious, gets bored easily when Youngjae is only starting to get focused—and soon enough, there’s the sound of a chair being pulled up behind him, a head laying down sideways beside Youngjae’s laptop, two doe eyes staring right into Youngjae’s soul.
It’s interesting, maybe a little sad, how Youngjae knows he would usually tell him to go away, not bother him until they were both done with their work. Dohoon rests his cheek atop the hand that he wears all of his rings on, and he’s looking at Youngjae quietly, not saying a word. Youngjae doesn’t know why his brain chooses this exact moment to think about how this Dohoon has a whole, full, complex life of his own, too. He has hopes and dreams, things that make him smile, cry, things that break his heart. He doesn’t know that the Youngjae he’s looking at right now isn’t his Youngjae—he has no reason to. He searches Youngjae’s eyes in the way he always does whenever he thinks Youngjae isn’t present enough to tell him what’s on his mind, and it makes Youngjae question why he’d found all of this to be so daunting before.
“I love you,” Youngjae tells Dohoon quietly, bringing his hands away from his keyboard, lifting Dohoon’s cheek up before it gets indented with all of his rings.
A visible blush creeps up Dohoon’s neck, to his cheeks, all the way to the tips of his ears as he asks, “...Why are you saying that out of nowhere?”
It stings a little bit every time. Youngjae realizes how little he really says it, because another thing that’s the same across every universe is that Dohoon doesn’t seem to be used to hearing it, one way or another.
“I might not get to say it again tomorrow.”
Youngjae turns away to look out the window, and Dohoon makes a noise half between a laugh and a scoff. “You’re so silly, sometimes.”
“You think so?” Youngjae chuckles, watching two crows outside the window, jumping between tree branches, never perched on one for too long.
Dohoon nods, hooks his head onto Youngjae’s shoulder. He’s a little warmer than Youngjae remembers his Dohoon to be. Youngjae looks at him with affection in his eyes anyway.
“Dohoon-ah,” Youngjae starts, “can I ask you something crazy?”
Dohoon shrugs, intrigued. “Yeah?”
Youngjae looks back out of the window, finds one crow instead of two. He swallows before darting his eyes back to his boyfriend—no, fiancé—his throat suddenly thick.
“If I was suddenly replaced by a different me, from a different, parallel universe,” Youngjae throws out there, “do you think you’d be able to tell?”
Dohoon makes a face at him, a mix of intrigue and the beginnings of an amused smile. He unhooks his chin from Youngjae’s shoulder to give him a proper answer. “That depends. How different is the Youngjae from the parallel universe?”
Youngjae freezes, realizing that he hasn’t actually thought this line of questioning through. “Different enough.”
“Hmm…” Dohoon hums, puzzled. “I don’t know. Who’s to say we don’t wake up in a parallel universe after every time we fall asleep, right? Everything could be the same except for one small thing that we might not even see, and that would still be a parallel universe.”
Youngjae huffs. He has a point. “That’s not what I’m talking about. Let’s say I was completely different—Choi Youngjae from a completely different life, and I had no way of proving it to you. What would you do?”
“Hmm,” Dohoon tilts his head, actually, carefully considering the question. “Then… wouldn’t the better question be: if a Choi Youngjae from a completely different universe suddenly came and replaced you, would I notice enough to think of him as a different person?”
Youngjae laughs. “What do you mean?”
“I mean—” Dohoon smiles, “—what is it that makes Choi Youngjae, Choi Youngjae? What are the things about you that—if they were suddenly gone—would make me suspect you aren’t the Youngjae I know?”
Youngjae nods, lips formed into an interested, sort of impressed ‘o’. He turns his body toward Dohoon to ask, “Well, do you have an answer to that?”
Dohoon smirks. “Fishing for compliments, Youngjae-yah?”
Youngjae shakes his head, chuckling softly. “I’m curious! What do you think is the same about me in every universe?”
Dohoon purses his lips, looks up in thought. Youngjae just sits there, waiting patiently, not quite knowing what he’s hoping Dohoon will say.
“You’re extremely thoughtful, for one,” Dohoon starts. “Even this conversation we’re having now, don’t you think? You think about things deeply. You’re not always expressive, but nothing that you do is careless. You worry about that a lot. You don’t want to come off as cold.”
Youngjae listens intently, an interesting cocktail of emotions brewing inside of him. It feels so foreign, ironically, hearing Dohoon say all of these things about him. It almost feels wrong, hearing it from this strange echo of the Kim Dohoon that he knows, saying these things about the Choi Youngjae that he thinks is in front of him, but isn’t. All of these things, Youngjae believes about himself—they’re all so achingly similar to the reality he so desperately wants to go back to—and yet they aren’t really his to claim. He’s taking a borrowed spot in a fixed life, trapped in the peripheries of the path he’d strayed away from the moment he’d told Dohoon that he couldn’t keep living the way they did, that they should rethink why they were together in the first place.
“You know what,” Youngjae just sighs, stopping Dohoon before he can hear more, “I don’t know about all that—but there’s one thing I know for sure about Choi Youngjae in every single universe.”
Dohoon pouts. “Which is?”
“He loves Kim Dohoon,” Youngjae admits simply, as if it’s the most casual thing to say in the world, “even if he doesn’t really do it that well.”
Youngjae doesn’t expect Dohoon to perk up, scrunch his nose into a big smile, slap his shoulder and say, “Aww, you think that you love me in every universe?”
Youngjae huffs, curls in on himself exaggeratedly, and quips. “Yah, that’s what you got from that? I just said I think I suck at loving you, in every universe.”
“Well, how about you?” Dohoon continues, excited and undeterred, “If I was replaced with an alternate version of myself from a different universe, and the only things that were the same were my name, my face, and the fact that I love Choi Youngjae—what would you do?”
Youngjae laughs at that, tries to hide the sadness in his smile. He has half a mind to tell Dohoon he’s experienced it so many times over by now, so real and visceral that the answer had cemented itself into his muddled mind long ago.
“I’d still love you,” Youngjae says softly, reaching up to brush Dohoon’s hair out of his sun-sparkling eyes, “but I’d still want my real Dohoon back, I think.”
“Well, yeah, I would hope so,” Dohoon laughs, faux sternness in his tone. He lifts his hand up to tilt Youngjae’s chin toward him, and Youngjae goes with no resistance, blushing when Dohoon says, “I would only want my real Youngjae back, too.”
Youngjae smiles at him tenderly, allows Dohoon his moment of pure, oblivious bliss. Dohoon leans in, and Youngjae lets his eyes flutter shut as they meet in a chaste kiss. Youngjae whispers to him, “I love you.” The birds continue to sing.
He’s been having these moments of weakness more often lately, now almost some kind of fixed checkpoint sprinkled throughout his usual routine.
Youngjae wakes up in a reality where they’re celebrities, 7 year-old idols releasing chart-topping albums and putting on sold-out stadium shows and packed schedules with early morning call-times and never a minute to spare. It’s so, completely different from Youngjae’s real life, so much more high-stakes than even the New York restaurant and all the other crazy timelines where they aren’t just normal people struggling to make a life for themselves in Seoul. This time, Youngjae is in a K-pop group with Dohoon—and Junghwan and Jihoon and Hanjin and Kyungmin—and he knows for a fact that Dohoon is not his, nor could he ever be.
It’s more difficult this time around, of course, for Youngjae to try and keep his head down, not mess up this iteration of his and Dohoon’s life for the time that the forces of the universe decide to drop him into it. It’s hard when he’s in front of cameras for what feels like twenty-four hours a day, experiencing things he’s only ever dreamed of, things that he would never have thought in a million years would be well within reach for people like himself and Kim Dohoon.
It makes Youngjae think back to the fight they had, god knows how long ago. He thinks he remembers arguing with Dohoon, his Dohoon, about such little-big things. Worries about the future, about feeling so hopeless and small in such a big world. All of it feels so trivial, when he’s living this kind of life, where there’s always too much to attend to in the present to even worry about the distant future; there’s always too much to be grateful for to even worry about what isn’t enough. Youngjae meets Dohoon in practice rooms and backstage waiting areas and briefly in the living room of their dorm before they all shower and pass out—and he wonders if this Youngjae, when his life isn’t being stolen from him, loves KIm Dohoon, too. If he even has the time to think about doing so.
Most of all, Youngjae wonders if he has the right to start doing so, as he’s gotten so used to—if only to soothe his own, selfish regrets.
“Dohoon-ah,” Youngjae calls out to him on one of their too-early mornings, when they’re passing ships in the dorm hallway and Youngjae’s the only one awake enough for the both of them, Dohoon walking like a zombie toward the bathroom with a towel slung over his shoulder.
Dohoon blinks sleepily before he turns to look at him, furrowed brow softening into something curious. “...Mm?”
Before Youngjae can think any better of it, he says, “Can I ask you something crazy?”
Dohoon squints. For a moment, Youngjae thinks he’s about to walk past him, chalk it up to some weird, early-morning funk—but then, by some twist of fate, Dohoon actually entertains him. “Sure. Why not?”
Youngjae laughs. “Do you think we’d still have become friends if we weren’t idols?”
“What?” Dohoon laughs in return, his face only shifting when he realizes that Youngjae must look a little too serious. “Practicing for the magazine interviews, or something?”
“You have answered it before. In one of those interviews.” Youngjae looks down at the floor, sheepish. It’s something he’d found on one of his routine investigations, a few days ago when he’d first been dropped into this life. “You said that you thought we wouldn’t.”
Dohoon, seemingly amused, just shrugs. “Well… you did live in Gimhae. Would you have come to Seoul if you never planned on being an idol?”
Youngjae nods, understanding. The inner part of him screams at him to tell Dohoon of all the other lives they’ve lived, where Youngjae had done just that. Part of him longs to tell Dohoon about that other life he’s never imagined, lay it all out on the floor in vivid detail like it was just some dream he’d had the night before. “I think we would have met, one way or another.”
Dohoon just stares at him, confused but patient. Youngjae can fathom that they probably don’t have conversations like this on the regular, or at all, especially not early in the morning in the liminal space between the bathroom and their living space—but, eventually, all that Dohoon ends up saying with a teasing smile is, “If you feel that strongly about it, I’ll tell the next interviewer that my answer’s changed.”
Youngjae nods at him, feeling a little bit ridiculous now. Dohoon starts walking again slowly, so slowly, looking back every second to see if Youngjae’s started walking in the other direction, too. Youngjae doesn’t.
Dohoon eventually stops in his tracks, asks Youngjae softly with all of this distance between them, “Is everything okay?”
“Mm. I…” Youngjae hesitates, the words almost a physical sensation as they fight against everything pushing to keep them down, “love… you.”
Dohoon blinks, incredulous. Suddenly, time that felt imperceptible starts to feel like an eternity. Youngjae has lived the life of a 7-year idol for all of five days, and even he knows that this isn’t something that they would say to each other—at least not without bright spotlights or screaming crowds. Dohoon’s face is lit up by the unrisen sun through the windows, and all that can be heard is the low hum of their refrigerator in the other room.
Then, like a break of sunlight through swaying tree branches, Dohoon laughs—a little nervous, but somehow comfortable—and jokes, “Are you crazy?”
Youngjae has no choice but to laugh. It’s not the usual kind of shock that he gets, not even the rare bout of quiet but delighted surprise—and in its rarity Youngjae finds that it doesn’t ache in the same way, either. “Maybe.”
“I love you, too,” Dohoon replies, surprisingly easily.
And Youngjae can feel that Dohoon means it—even if he can tell that the affection behind it is different from what he’s used to. There’s a comforting familiarity in the way Dohoon says those three words, more a statement of fact than some daunting confession. Youngjae thinks it’s the first time he’s felt a kind of love so distinctly its own, across all of the lives he’s lived by Dohoon’s side—the kind that stems from the deep respect that comes with someone you’ve shared your dreams with, so fully and so deeply, and for so long, too. It’s the kind of love that’s stood the test of time even without drunken confessions or matching rings or wanting to hold and be held. Dohoon says I love you with the conviction of someone who sees that a part of his own life is Youngjae’s, as much as Youngjae’s is his.
Youngjae tells himself to save that sentiment for when he returns to his own life, his own Dohoon. Maybe he should have learned sooner how simple it could be, to walk the rockier path with someone else, instead of the sailing a smooth, but lonely river on his own.
Dohoon gives him another small, gentle smile, before going to turn on his heel and walk away. Youngjae’s heart aches as he stares at his back, a hazy afterimage of the last time he’d seen him—really seen him—and tears sting the back of his eyes as he thinks of coming home to him, of returning to the life he’d once said he was sick of living.
“Dohoon-ah,” Youngjae calls out into the hall, just before Dohoon’s hand can land on the knob of their bathroom door.
Dohoon turns to look at him again, faux exasperation on his face, “What is it this time?”
Youngjae chuckles, shakes his head. Everything about it is so, deceptively familiar; every Dohoon feels more and more like his own, the longer Youngjae is away from him. “I miss you.”
“Youngjae-yah, we see each other every day.”
“I know.” Youngjae smiles sadly, exhales a deep sigh. He adds on in a barely-there whisper, “It just doesn’t feel the same.”
He doesn’t expect Dohoon to understand—but somehow, in his own way, Dohoon seems to, regardless.
“I know what you mean,” Dohoon says back—and it must carry so many different meanings, so much unknowable weight. Youngjae finds it jarring, the way they manage to reach each other, even in ways they don’t fully understand. “We should spend some time together soon, just the two of us. Before we have to go on tour.”
Youngjae nods. He doubts that he’ll still be there for that; he tells himself it doesn’t matter. He’s here now. “I think I’d like that very much.”
Youngjae wakes up the next day with blurry eyes and a tear-streaked cheek, in a different bed than the one he’d fallen asleep in the night before.
There are no more early-morning alarms, no distant echoes of screaming crowds. Youngjae wakes up in a spacious bedroom, just enough sunlight coming through the blinds—and there’s an unexplainable, unnameable sadness that builds right behind his eyes, residuals from a dream he must have already forgotten.
Youngjae feels around beside him, only to find another empty space. He sits up in the empty bed, alone, digging the heels of his palms into his tired eyes. He lets out a heavy sigh as he resigns himself more and more to his fate, sparing only one moment of defeat before he has to get up, steel himself, and start all over again. He’d barely just gotten used to being an idol, just barely scratched the surface of the Dohoon he’d met in that fleeting lifetime—but that’s how it’s always gone. It always breaks Youngjae’s heart a little, whenever he starts to think about every version of Dohoon that he’d gotten to know, learned to love, and then left behind. He wonders how every version of himself compared. He wishes that they treat Dohoon well.
In the end, Youngjae still seems to be stuck in this endless loop. He’s in an apartment he knows is not his, no matter how strangely familiar it all feels. When he walks out of the bedroom to the smell of brewing coffee, there’s that same pang in his chest that there always is when Youngjae is tempted to feel like he’s being welcomed home. Dohoon is at the kitchen counter, spreading jam on a slice of bread next to the coffee maker, and it’s all so… nice. Comfortable. It feels like their real apartment—only bigger, cleaner, more. More of everything, for the same two people, Kim Dohoon and Choi Youngjae.
Youngjae shuffles over and wraps his arms around Dohoon’s torso from behind, socked feet warm against the heated floor.
Dohoon stiffens up for a moment under his touch.
Come to think of it—there was a time when Youngjae thought that maybe a house like this could fix all of their problems. Make them happier, more stable, more fulfilled. Yes, more of everything.
Dohoon still doesn’t say anything. Youngjae is resting his cheek behind Dohoon’s shoulder blades when he sees the mess of blankets and throw pillows on the couch and puts two and two together, clutching tighter around Dohoon’s waist. “Dohoon-ah?”
Dohoon’s breathing is shallow, his bread knife still held in the air, jam dripping onto the perfect, granite countertop. “...Mhm?”
“I love you.” Youngjae doesn’t hesitate this time, just presses his cheek further into the warmth of Dohoon’s back.
“...All of a sudden?” Dohoon asks, wiggling out of his hold. He turns around to face him, a confused smile on his face—but a smile nonetheless. Youngjae will take that. “What’s gotten into you?”
Youngjae pouts. “Do I not say it often?”
“It’s not…” Dohoon trails off, tilting his head to the side as he measures his words, “…well, no. But it’s not like I say it that often, either.”
Youngjae can’t stop himself from getting more teary-eyed, but the sentiment makes him laugh, too. Youngjae’s a little surprised that he hadn’t thought about that before. Maybe he’d been wanting to hear it, too. “I’m sorry.”
Dohoon shakes his head. “It’s okay.”
Youngjae turns his head toward the living room again, wipes away a tear that had fallen out of his eye and hopes Dohoon chalks it up to the sleepiness. He points to the sofa and asks, “Why did you sleep on the couch?”
“What do you mean?” Dohoon raises an eyebrow at him, an awkward chuckle escaping his lips when he sees that Youngjae’s asking earnestly, all serious. “‘Cause we fought last night?”
Youngjae freezes; it sounds all too familiar. His voice is tentative, cautious, when he asks, “About…?”
Dohoon looks at him questioningly, shrugs his shoulders in defense. “I don’t know. Money. Priorities. The usual things we fight about.”
“Oh…” Youngjae swallows, hard. “We still fight about money even when we live in a place like this, huh…”
“What do you mean?” Dohoon asks, and Youngjae is quick to shake himself out of voicing all of his thoughts.
“Nothing, just…” Youngjae trails off, recalling the way he’d kicked Dohoon, his Dohoon, out of their bedroom, the last time he saw him. Youngjae recalls the tears they cried, the things they said. Dohoon always wanted more of Youngjae’s time, Youngjae always said they’d have time enough to spend after working harder and harder for a better life. That’s just the type of people that they were; Dohoon always lived for the present, but Youngjae always had his head turned toward the future, toward every next thing. “I’m sorry for what I said, Dohoon-ah.”
Youngjae shrinks under Dohoon’s scrutinizing gaze. It feels so futile, somehow. Feels a little dumb how easy those words were to say, after everything he’s been through. The selfish part of Youngjae wants to save all of these apologies for the real Dohoon—the one that he’d driven away with his own words and spur-of-the-moment actions—and yet he always still feels like it’s his responsibility, somehow, to soothe whatever wounds he’d caused in whatever reality, whether it’s his or not.
“I know that you want us to live a good, comfortable life together,” Dohoon sighs after a while, his expression softening as he places one hand each on Youngjae’s shoulders, looks right into his eyes. “I’m not saying you were wrong for that, Youngjae-yah. I’m grateful for it, even. I just wish you’d pause for a while and enjoy what we have right now, too. ‘Cause I can’t compete if you’re living our life in the future. It would be impossible for me to catch up.”
Youngjae nods, understanding. He wonders just what he’d said to Dohoon last night to prompt all of this, but if there are things about the two of them that are the same in every universe, he supposes he could take a pretty good guess.
“I know that I said a lot of things that must’ve hurt,” Dohoon adds, “but I think… all of it just came out wrong. When I said that being with you didn’t feel like being with you anymore—I do regret saying that. Of course I’m grateful that I get to be with you every day. I just… I just wish we’d—”
“I know,” Youngjae interrupts, pressing a finger to Dohoon’s lips, his eyes filling with unshed tears. It’s sounds so familiar—so eerily similar to the argument Youngjae knows he’s experienced before—that this Dohoon almost feels real. His forgiveness almost feels paramount to what Youngjae’s been hoping for, all this time. Almost. “I’m sorry I made you sleep on the couch.”
Almost. Youngjae wishes it felt like a weight off his chest, but it doesn’t. Not completely, at least.
There is a part of him that relaxes when he realizes he’s started crying, and Dohoon pulls him back into his chest, rubbing a soothing hand up and down his back. “It’s alright. You picked a pretty comfortable couch, you know? I’ll make you sleep on it the next time we fight, so you can try it out.”
For some reason, that only makes Youngjae cry even more, the fabric of Dohoon’s shirt now balled up into Youngjae’s fists behind his back. Youngjae allows himself to melt into the embrace, to give in for just this moment to the comfort of being in the arms of the person he loves, without fail, in every single universe. This Dohoon is just as warm as Youngjae remembers him, hugs just as tight, breathes just as deeply when his nose is stuck in Youngjae’s hair. This is the closest Youngjae has come—since this whole, absurd thing had started—to waking up in the place where he belongs, to the person who he belongs with.
“It’s okay,” Dohoon soothes, trying gently, slowly, to pull away. “Youngjae-yah—”
“Stay like this with me a little longer,” Youngjae mumbles into Dohoon’s chest, pushing past the guilt that bubbles up inside of him. He holds him tighter, allows himself—just for this moment—to think that if he could never return to the life he came from, the forces of the universe would have enough mercy to leave him here, frozen in this one, single moment in time. “I missed you so much.”
Above him, Dohoon laughs. He sounds… so much like him. Youngjae clings onto him tighter, and Dohoon playfully says, “I guess that means I get to sleep in the bed tonight?”
Youngjae nods quietly into Dohoon’s tear-soaked shirt.
The next few days feel… different.
They spend the weekend together. They watch movies on their couch in the afternoon, and go out for dinner in the evening.
Youngjae still follows his routine, tries not to think too much about the amount of time passing, the fact that eventually, he’ll be ripped away from this life, too.
He tells Dohoon that he loves him every day. He’s never lived in a single life for any more than a week, he thinks—and it saddens him for them to both go to a 9-to-5 on every next day, only greeting each other with tired hello’s when they return home in the evenings.
And despite every rule he’d made for himself—Youngjae, foolishly, allows himself to get used to it.
Youngjae and Dohoon talk about their day, on some nights they share a can of beer together on their balcony, and at the end of the day, they fall asleep in a queen bed in their nice apartment—and it’s wonderful. It’s easy, and comfortable, and almost normal. Youngjae allows himself the small solace of getting to live a life like this, even if it’s just for some arbitrary, limited amount of time. Just this once, he deludes himself into thinking that if he lets himself drift off far enough while laying on Dohoon’s chest, he could almost believe it was his Dohoon, and his life. He tries not to blame himself too much for enjoying some fantasy life that someone else built. He was here, after all. And by no will of his own. He doesn’t regret whispering softly, “I love you,” every night that he falls asleep in Dohoon’s arms, even if he knows he’s taking someone else’s place, and abandoning his own.
(He allows himself to bask in the warm, soothing comfort it brings to hear Dohoon say, every time without fail, “I love you, too.”)
But then Youngjae wakes up on a Saturday morning to the same bed, the same sheets, the same warmth wrapped around him from the night before.
He’s still in the nice apartment, still basking in the glow of another morning that he gets to wake up next to his love. Absurdly, for a second, he wonders if he’s dreaming—and then it feels like the first time he’d woken up in a different place at all, except this time, he’s shocked that he gets to stay.
He wonders if there’s a god in the sky that had somehow heard his guilty, unvoiced plea. Youngjae hadn’t been expecting to make it to the next weekend in this same life. Perhaps he was being granted just this small mercy. He shouldn’t get used to it, either way.
“...Youngjae?” Dohoon mumbles as he stirs awake, voice still raspy with sleep, wrapping his arm tighter around Youngjae’s waist. He burrows his head into the fabric of Youngjae’s shirt, against the planes of his back, shielding himself from the light of the sun.
Youngjae holds him closer, resolve crumbling in his chest. Dohoon is so warm, so present, so real—and he could be ripped away from Youngjae at any moment.
But then, before Youngjae knows it—another weekend arrives.
He’s never been in any single, one life for this long before, and it leaves his heart anxious and messy, leaves him caught between staying grounded and not grasping onto anything too tight.
Youngjae worries. With every touch, every kiss, every heartfelt I love you, he wonders if Dohoon catches on to Youngjae’s charade, or if he’s just as similar to his Youngjae as this Dohoon is to his Dohoon. Selfishly, he worries about what will happen if things return to normal—if Dohoon will be stuck again with the Youngjae that had fought with him, made him sleep on the couch, told him all of those nonsense things about keeping their eyes fixed only on the future. He wonders if all of the versions of Kim Dohoon that he’s met were stuck with a Choi Youngjae that didn’t know how to see that he had something good right in front of him; he wonders if his concerted attempts at telling Dohoon I love you had made any sort of difference. The longer he stays, the more Youngjae worries. He worries about the Dohoon that he’s with now, and the Dohoon he’d met on the beach, and the Dohoon who was a beloved idol, and the Dohoon that he was going to marry—and most of all, of course, he worries about Dohoon, his Dohoon, the person he so helplessly wishes he could come home to, at the end of whatever all of this is.
And when yet another weekend arrives in this same universe, this same life—Youngjae feels himself getting caught between wanting to leave and wanting to stay, part of him already attached to this version of Dohoon that he wakes up to every morning, falls asleep with every single night. The more days he gets to spend within this existence, the more it starts to feel like it could last forever—like as long as Youngjae wishes hard enough, hopes earnestly enough for just one more day—he won’t have to wake up somewhere else and start all over again from scratch.
Every single night, Youngjae has been taking to lying in Dohoon’s arms in their bed, basking in the soft glow of their lampshade lights. They talk about anything they can think of: how their day’s gone at work, their opinions on grocery store desserts, the things they do or don’t believe about parallel universes or past lives. Youngjae starts more and more often with, Can I ask you something crazy?, and Dohoon lets him ramble on and on about all of the things he ‘imagines’ they could be in a peripheral timeline where one butterfly had flapped its wings one degree too far or one second too early. Summer flings on a beach, pining idiots confessing only after too much alcohol, K-pop idols selling out stadiums, two crows jumping across tree branches, restaurant owners in New York. Or perhaps all of the millions of variations of this same, normal life—two people whose love protects them both from being eaten alive by a city like Seoul, trying and fumbling and then trying again.
“Dohoon-ah,” Youngjae whispers into the warmth of Dohoon’s chest, struggling to keep his eyes open, the way he’s been doing a lot lately, for fear that everything will fall away again once he wakes up. “Did you fall asleep?”
There’s a pause. Youngjae holds his breath, debates if waking him up is a good idea, wonders if he’ll regret it if he doesn’t. After all, any time could be the last time.
But, after just a few more seconds, Dohoon eventually hums, “...Mm. You should try to go to sleep, too.”
“Don’t want to,” Youngjae says stubbornly, giving in to his selfish desires, the way that’s come so scarily easily, over these past weeks. “Stay awake for a bit longer, too, mm?”
Dohoon groans softly, his arm wrapping tighter around Youngjae’s waist. “I’m tired, baby.”
Youngjae chuckles, nodding against Dohoon’s chest. A lump forms in his throat, his heart aches. Tears fall out of both his eyes, and he tries but fails to muffle his sniffle the next time he breathes. “Okay. Then just hold me. Please.”
The shakiness of Youngjae’s voice seems to give Dohoon some pause. He moves to sit up a bit straighter, to get Youngjae to look into his eyes, and get a real, proper look at him. “Hey, what’s wrong? Did something happen?”
“I love you,” Youngjae sniffles, nuzzling into Dohoon’s warmth. “Just wanted to remind you again.”
In case I won’t be able to tomorrow, Youngjae leaves out.
In his own way, Dohoon seems to read his mind. “You know, I’ll still be here tomorrow. I’m not going anywhere. I love you, too.”
“Is it wrong that I want to stay here forever, sometimes?” Youngjae asks, fighting against heavy eyelids.
Dohoon sighs softly, and asks, “...With me?”
“...Mhm,” Youngjae hums, clutching tightly at Dohoon’s shirt. “But I know you aren’t mine.”
Silence. Youngjae wonders if Dohoon’s fallen asleep again.
Surprisingly, it’s Dohoon who asks, hesitant and quiet, “...Are you talking in your sleep again?”
“What…” Youngjae mumbles, just barely lucid, “I talk in my…?”
“You talk to me like you miss me,” Dohoon says, his words a slow, soothing lull. “You know that I won’t leave you, right?”
Youngjae exhales, another tear falling out onto his cheek, soaking into Dohoon’s shirt.
The last thing that Youngjae manages to mumble out is, “If I wake up tomorrow and I don’t tell you that I love you… promise me you’ll knock some sense into me, okay?”
Youngjae doesn’t hear Dohoon’s answer.
Youngjae opens his eyes and finds himself in the same room, only with all of the lights turned off. Dohoon is beside him, eyes peacefully shut—and Youngjae shakes him awake.
“Dohoon-ah?” Youngjae panics, suddenly wide awake. “Dohoon-ah, promise me. Okay?”
Dohoon stirs, a furrow in his brow as he blinks himself awake—and then he stares right into Youngjae’s eyes, knowing and kind.
“Youngjae,” Dohoon whispers, swiping away Youngjae’s tears with his thumb. “You’re here again.”
Youngjae frowns, confused, reaching up to lay his palm on the back of Dohoon’s hand. “What? What do you mean, I’m… What?”
Dohoon’s expression stays placid, and Youngjae’s lip quivers as he looks around the room.
“It’s okay,” Dohoon soothes, cupping his cheek. “Take your time.”
Only then does Youngjae notice that the room around them is drained of color, the room he was just in now bathed in faded hues. It’s vaguely familiar, and deeply unsettling—but Dohoon is the anchor point that keeps him from floating away into madness, even as he’s overwhelmed by the onslaught of vague but visceral memories, flooding his mind.
“What is this?” Youngjae finally gains the nerve to ask, desperately searching Dohoon’s eyes for an answer. “Am I dreaming?”
“Something like that,” Dohoon whispers, gentle as Youngjae continues to cry. “We’ve been here before. Remember?”
Youngjae hiccups through a laugh, shakes his head in confusion. “I— I can’t— I don’t know. What… Dohoon-ah…”
“Shh.” Dohoon sits up straighter on the bed, scoots over until they’re closer, almost face to face. “Are you ready this time?”
Youngjae shakes his head, a reaction more than an answer, the ache in his chest overwhelming, though he can’t bring himself to remember the source. “Ready? Ready for what?”
“To walk through that door,” Dohoon explains, looking toward the bedroom door behind them, soft light glowing through the gap at the floor. “You have to move forward. It’s the only way to go back.”
Youngjae’s gaze flits back and forth, from that door to the man in front of him, memories slowly flooding back. A series of so many choices, just like this one, in rooms just as dull and faded as the ones he keeps vivid in his mind’s eye. He’s walked through so many doors, so many different times—all in hopes of waking up in the room where he belongs, and all in vain.
Youngjae looks back at the Dohoon in front of him, and he understands now what the words mean. He has to move forward.
There’s no guarantee he’ll return to the place he wants to be in the most—but if he wants to keep having that chance, then he needs to keep making that choice.
“It’s okay if you’re not ready,” Dohoon tells him after a while, his thumb still swiping tears away from Youngjae’s cheek. “This was the first life where you decided to stay.”
Youngjae looks at him, eyes watery and lip quivering. It turns out, maybe he had been wishing hard enough. Perhaps it was his own selfishness keeping him here—perhaps it’s still what’s tempting him to give in again.
“You’re so much like him,” Youngjae says, the words coming out in a shaky whisper. “Will you— Are you going to remember this when you wake up?”
Dohoon shakes his head. He leans forward to press a kiss to Youngjae’s forehead, a calm, loving smile on his face. “Do you want me to remember?”
Youngjae shuts his eyes tight, more tears coming out as he cries quietly, unable to even look Dohoon in the eye. Even now, Youngjae knows that the Dohoon in front of him is one of many, and certainly not his own, and yet—
“I want you to remember that I love you,” Youngjae says, hiccuping on the last word before he adds, “in every universe.”
A multitude of expressions flashes across Dohoon’s face—and in that moment, it’s as if Youngjae can see all faces of him merging into one. In the end, Youngjae sees every Kim Dohoon from every reality they’ve spent together, and his heart feels both heavy and full when eventually, he hears what Dohoon says to him in reply: “I do remember. I love you, too.”
Youngjae crawls forward, fits himself into the embrace of Dohoon’s arms. This warmth has grown familiar—but Youngjae knows, as he lets himself indulge in it one last time, that it isn’t the embrace he’ll want to choose in the end.
“All of these lives have been yours, Choi Youngjae,” Dohoon says, rubbing a soothing hand up and down his back. “Ultimately, you get to choose which one you want to live.”
Ultimately, Youngjae pulls away from him, nods in understanding, and is met with Dohoon’s soft, soothing smile.
Youngjae’s feet make contact with the soft carpet as he leaves the bed, still not letting go of Dohoon’s hand.
He doesn’t let go until he absolutely has to part with him—and by then, Dohoon gives him a final squeeze, a small nod, and says before Youngjae walks out of their bedroom door, “I’ll see you again soon, Choi Youngjae.”
And Youngjae forces a smile, turns the knob, and walks out into the darkness.
Youngjae wakes up in a cold sweat, his face wet with tears again—and just as he’d feared, he’s met with a cold, empty space when he reaches beside him on the bed.
It’s still dark outside, and Youngjae doesn’t recall what he’d been dreaming about before that’s caused such a sharp hollow in his chest. He throws an arm over his eyes as he continues to cry, desperate breaths escaping his mouth in shaky, pained exhales, everything fuzzy at the edges except for the faint memory of Dohoon holding him, both of them dozing off, safe in each other’s arms.
When Youngjae takes away the arm over his eyes, he’s met with the sight of his moonlit ceiling, still blurred by the remnants of his tears. When he sits up and looks at the nightstand, the clock reads 3:43 AM. Idle city noise comes through the open window, strangely comforting even with the hollow in his chest—and then Youngjae realizes.
Suddenly, he’s wide awake.
Youngjae jumps out of bed—his bed. He doesn’t even bother to put his slippers on or turn on any lights; he simply rushes out into the hallway that he knows, heart beating a mile a minute at the thought of seeing Dohoon—his Dohoon, this time—after so long. When Youngjae gets out into the living room, he sees the pillows and blankets strewn out messily on the couch, no Dohoon in sight—and he looks frantically around the apartment like a man crazed.
The edges of his memory are all fuzzy in his sleep-addled haze, but Youngjae is a man on a mission when he checks their doorway, finds that Dohoon’s shoes and coat are gone. He rushes out into their apartment building’s hallway, wearing nothing but some sandals and his pajamas, and runs down the stairs instead of taking his chances with their shitty elevator. When the cold, winter air sends a chill down his spine, Youngjae simply could not care less—all he can do is look back and forth, frantic and desperate as he searches for Dohoon, wanting nothing more than to bring him back home.
And when Dohoon finally appears—real and right in front of him—something inside of Youngjae’s heart bursts into flames.
Dohoon is there when Youngjae turns his head, illuminated by convenience store light, wearing his coat over that same, tattered, white t-shirt that he was wearing when Youngjae had banished him to the couch—and Youngjae can’t help but run to him, jump at the chance to hold him in his arms.
“Youngjae? Wha— Oh.”
Dohoon stands there, stunned, plastic bags hanging off of his arms as Youngjae throws his arms around his neck, inches his hands forward to hold his face, look right into his eyes.
“Dohoon-ah,” Youngjae says—and he knows it comes out like a sigh of relief, filled with so much longing and awe, a testament to finally-fulfilled hope. “I thought you were gone, I—”
“Hey,” Dohoon looks at him, all soft and concerned, leaning forward to look right into Youngjae’s glassy eyes, “I’ve got you. Come here. Why aren’t you wearing your coat? Come here—”
Dohoon takes Youngjae’s arms away from around his neck, pulls them around his waist so he can wrap him in his coat instead—and this time, Youngjae stops hesitating.
He shakes himself out of Dohoon’s hold, pulls him down by the back of his neck, and kisses him like it’s the last time he’ll ever get to.
“I love you,” Youngjae breathes out every time that Dohoon pulls away to catch his breath, loud and clear and over and over, as if doing so will push the words straight into Dohoon’s heart, imprint them as deep as possible into his soul. “I love you, Dohoon-ah. I’m sorry.”
Both of them are breathless when they pull away. Dohoon reaches up to push Youngjae’s messy bed hair out of his face, sighing when he sees the tear tracks and swollen eyes. “What’s got you like this, baby? Hmm? I’m sorry if what I said hurt you, too.”
Youngjae shakes his head immediately. “No, I just—” he sniffles, “—for a second, I thought I lost you forever.”
Dohoon’s gaze softens, and he pulls Youngjae back into his coat, rubs his hand up and down his back.
“I’m not going to leave after one fight, Youngjae,” he soothes, leaning forward to kiss the top of his head. “I love you. I know we don’t say it often—but I love you, too.”
Youngjae breathes out, holds him closer to his chest. A multitude of lives flashes through his mind’s eye—a tapestry of this warmth, this love, this Dohoon that he knows so well—and despite everything he’d said earlier in the night, he wants them both to know, “I’ll love you in every universe, Dohoon-ah—but I’ll love you the most in this one. ‘Cause it’s ours.”
Dohoon pulls away to tilt his head at him, amused. It’s fine. Youngjae doesn’t expect him to know what he means. “Are you still half-asleep, Youngjae-yah?”
Youngjae shrugs, his resounding, soft chuckle making white clouds in the winter air. He decides to tell Dohoon all he wants to say, in a language he’ll understand. “Come back to bed, Dohoon-ah.”
So Dohoon drapes his coat around Youngjae’s shoulders, and brings him back home.