rating: r
pairing: suho-centric, joonmyun/suho
wordcount: 1900
warnings: depression, selfcest
summary: joonmyun dreams, and learns.
a/n: take the depression warning seriously. not meant to be a representation of all forms of depression, is essentially situational and based on a lack of personal fulfillment and stress. timeline is spread out over the course of a school year, and there are probably plenty of things i glossed over, just kind of needed to write this now.
Between the Lines
There are, Joonmyun supposes when he wakes up, worse dreams to have than ones in which you make out with yourself. Stranger ones, even, probably, but definitely worse ones. It’s 10:30 in the morning and it’s Tuesday, which means he’s missed his 9am class. Again. He expects an email from his professor, and sure enough there’s one waiting for him when he pulls his phone out of its charger on his nightstand.
You weren’t in class for the second week in a row today, is everything okay? You’ve used all your unexcused absences for the semester, and I will have to start docking points from your grade for every day you’re absent after this. If you need a dean’s excuse in the future, I will accept those, but I can’t just let you miss a small seminar-class participation is the most important part of the course, as you know, and it would be unfair to all the other students to let anyone off. Let me know if you have any questions. We can discuss possible make-up work after class on Thursday.
Joonmyun sighs and rolls over. He has another class at 11, which he supposes he could go to. It’s a lecture though, statistics class for his math requirement, and it’s utterly useless. He goes back to sleep instead of getting up.
He doesn’t usually dream when he falls asleep after he’s already fully woken up, but this time he does. He dreams about himself again, or rather about the man named Suho who looks exactly like him but smiles and laughs and reminds him of the way he used to be before this semester happened and pushed him so far into himself he’s not sure he’ll ever come out again. Suho is also a good kisser, and he kisses him again, and Joonmyun wakes up at 10:55 very hard and very confused, which he figures is at least a little better than how he usually wakes up, which is tired and unhappy in a way he can never really shake, as if he’s got a permanent cold.
He jerks off in the shower, fast and dirty until he comes all over his stomach and hand, head thrown back, silent except for the long breath he lets out as he’s coming down. He cleans himself off and finishes showering, heading back to the stand alone single he lives in wrapped in his towel, flip-flop clad feet announcing his presence as he walks. He’s still confused, and the sadness is rising back to the surface, but he feels a little warmer, a little calmer than usual, and he supposes that’s good enough.
“Don’t you have class now?” Jongdae asks him when they’re sitting together at lunch half an hour later, and Joonmyun shrugs, shoving a piece of tofu into his mouth so he won’t have to respond. Jongdae, however, is not going to let him off easily, and just keeps staring at him.
“It’s just stats lecture. It’s useless.”
“Are you ok, hyung?”
“What do you mean?”
“When I met you, you were yelling at Chanyeol for skipping class and now you’re skipping class. Also you’ve just seemed really… out of it lately.” Jongdae says all of this without looking at him, eyes buried in the bowl of soup he’s eating instead.
“I’ve just been… stressed lately,” Joonmyun settles on after a moment. The lie hurts, the tip of his tongue burning and his throat tightening, and he thinks Jongdae knows, but Jongdae just switches the conversation topic. Joonmyun relaxes again, but he feels more tired than ever, as if he could fall asleep in his food even though he’s slept through at least 13 of the last 24 hours.
He goes to bed early, around ten, because he’s stared at his reading for an hour and all that’s done is make him feel frustrated and sad. Suho drifts in and out of the dreams he has, laughing with him and leading him running through hills until they’re both breathless, collapsing laughing on each other.
“You know,” Suho says to him as he weaves a flower crown to put in Joonmyun’s hair, “I think you’re great.”
“You’re me, though,” Joonmyun replies, and Suho’s hands stop moving.
“No I’m not. Have you seen me? Have you seen yourself?”
“Yes, of course.”
“No, no, not like that, have you really seen us?”
Joonmyun doesn’t quite understand what he’s getting at, so he lets Suho pull him up and drag him to a pond Joonmyun isn’t sure was there a minute ago. Their reflections are clear and smooth in it, and they look identical.
“See?” Suho asks, and Joonmyun shakes his hand.
“We look the same.”
“No we don’t, look Joonmyun, look at you. Look at me.”
And Joonmyun looks. He narrows his eyes and focuses and tries to see it but to no avail. They look the same.
“Maybe next time,” Suho says, taking his wrist and dragging him into a kiss, mouth hot and slick, leg sliding between Joonmyun’s.
Joonmyun doesn’t fail his statistics midterm, but he scores in the bottom ten percent. It’s the first time he’s ever done so poorly in anything. He thinks he won’t tell anyone but Jongdae asks him “what’s wrong?” again at lunch and Joonmyun lets it slip.
“I don’t think that’s what’s actually wrong.”
Joonmyun wonders when he got so wise, then thinks that maybe he just hasn’t been hiding things as well as he pretends he has been.
“That’s just… a symptom of what’s actually bothering you. Right, hyung? Are you ok?”
“I’m fine, it was just a test,” Joonmyun replies, and he doesn’t mean to sound angry, but he does, and Jongdae doesn’t push, just looks at him, eyes wide and sympathetic and Joonmyun wants to tell him, but he can’t, because that makes it real, that makes it a problem, and Joonmyun doesn’t want to be a problem, a burden. He just wants to slip through his life, making other peoples’ lives as easy as possible.
“How’s your composition going?” Joonmyun asks.
“Well…” Jongdae starts, and Joonmyun wants to cry, a little, but Jongdae just keeps talking, and Joonmyun pretends he doesn’t notice that Jongdae’s eyes don’t lose that glint of sympathy.
He doesn’t even bother trying to do homework that night, curling up in a ball in his bed instead.
“Let’s try this again,” Suho says, and leads him to the pond. They haven’t done this since the first time, and Joonmyun doesn’t really want to. He much prefers the way Suho knows exactly what he likes, knows how to suck cock and exactly what part of his neck is sensitive and how hard to teeth at his nipples.
“Look,” Suho tells him, pointing, “that’s me. That’s you. Don’t you see the difference?”
Joonmyun looks, again, and this time he notices. He notices the way his shoulders hunch forward, the way Suho’s don’t. He notices that Suho’s smiling even though he has no reason to, but Joonmyun looks sad even though he’s standing in the sun next to a man who looks like himself and likes to touch him. He notices how thin and pale his skin looks, how he has bags beneath his eyes even though he sleeps his days away, and he notices how alive Suho looks, how healthy.
“You see it, right?” Suho asks. Joonmyun nods, and Suho kisses him, and Joonmyun swears he can taste the happiness on Suho’s tongue this time, foreign and calming and all that he really wants.
“I like you just the same,” Suho tells him, “but I think I’m better-looking right now.” It’s strangely comforting, Joonmyun thinks, and kisses him again.
When Joonmyun wakes up it’s as if he can feel all of the melancholy that’s woven its way into his bones the last few months. He feels the way it’s settled in him, feels the points where it wormed in and feels the weight of it. He looks at himself in the mirror and he looks worse than he did in the dream, even, sickly and hollowed out, as if his bone marrow had been replaced with unhappiness. He sees himself and he doesn’t really understand, but when he sinks to the ground, crying, he knows that it’s a start.
The pieces don’t fall back into place easily. He tells Jongdae what’s wrong one night when they’re a little drunk, just before finals start, and Jongdae just lets him cry on his shoulder, patting his head and telling him that he’ll be ok, he’ll be ok, he’ll be ok, and Jongdae will be his friend no matter what. His grades are unsalvageable, but he manages to pass all his classes. His parents are confused more than anything, and he spends his break mostly holed up in his room, thinking about the things he likes, the things that make him unhappy, ways to balance his life, ways to change. He gets stuck, somewhere along the line though, and wishes someone could spell it out for him, but he’s not sure he knows, himself, if there is anything, anyway, so he lets it rest, hanging over his head and better than where he was, but far from good.
Suho doesn’t show up in his dreams again until the day before classes start again, when he’s moved back into his dorm and everything around him is dark and quiet.
“What do you want to do with yourself?” Suho asks.
“Are you my grandmother?”
“No, just wondering.”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to know what I want to do with myself?”
“What?”
“Make something beautiful, and important.”
Joonmyun mulls that directive over for the first week of classes. He knows Suho is just a figment of his imagination, but he also knows there’s something important about him, too. He is Joonmyun, after all, just happier, and he’s the only recurring dream Joonmyun’s had since he was small and used to dream every night of animals escaping the zoo and attacking his home. There’s something he knows, something that’s hiding behind the depression-he’s not so afraid of the word anymore, because he knows that’s what it is and he thinks maybe letting himself say it will make it better-and trying to get through, but he’s not sure what it is. It’s the thing he’s been caught on for most of break, the thing he wants to do, maybe needs to, but isn’t doing, and he wouldn’t be surprised if it’s that lack of fulfillment that’s driven all of this, all along.
He figures it out when he runs into an old acquaintance he hasn’t seen in ages, Baekhyun, who’s producing a show written by his friend and looking for people to audition.
“You used to act, right, before I got here? Do you think you have time to do it again?”
Joonmyun nods, and when he goes home he still feels tired, still doesn’t want to do his reading, but his chest is lighter and he feels something that he thinks might just be excitement.
The last time he dreams of Suho is before opening night. He’s surprised because it’s tech week and he’s exhausted, the good kind, but exhausted nonetheless, and he doesn’t usually dream when he’s exhausted.
They go to the pond, holding hands, and Suho points, and Joonmyun looks, and there are still too many creases between his eyebrows and his posture still leaves a little bit to be desired, but he looks good. They both look good, and almost identical, for real, this time.
“I like us,” Joonmyun says. Suho’s grinning. Joonmyun smiles back, and understands.