the big sleep
the big sleep
gdragon/top
pg-13
jiyong has a plan. based on this:
lovelyable : aw now i have top and gd sleeping for two days on top's bed in my head
lovelyable : how precious
whetstone : so qt :3 although lol @ top sleeping for two days too
lovelyable : he would like set an alarm
lovelyable : and gd would turn it off
lovelyable : and then top awakens like 36 hrs later hungry as shit like WHAT TIME IS IT
whetstone : LMFAO LIKE HE'S HIBERNATING
whetstone : lmfao gd finally wakes up and comes in to see 9324723 takeout boxes on the table
lovelyable : LOL TOP IS LIKE I CALCULATED IT
lovelyable : I CAN AFFORD THIS BECAUSE I HAVENT EATEN IN SO LONG
lovelyable : THANKS GD
whetstone : LMFAO GD LIKE DID YOU LEAVE ANYTHING FOR ME
whetstone : tops like yeah they gave me free eggrolls theyre cold now though
lovelyable : hes like well i ordered this for you
lovelyable : ..but then i ate it
for lego1016 and of course lovelyable . :D
Seunghyun doesn’t know how it happened or when or why, only that one day everything is normal and the next Jiyong is sprawled on top of him, little huffs sounding in the shell of his ear, a leg thrown haphazard against his side. The cap of his knee is flush with the bone of Seunghyun’s hip.
All he can think is he’d expected Jiyong to be a more graceful sleeper.
He tries extracting himself from his bedsheets (first time he’d ever cursed the giant mound of them he’d always kept swaddled there), but the rustle of cotton wakes Jiyong. Now there are arms tightening around him and the knee digs into his back almost painfully.
“Quit moving around,” he growls, shifting his head so his breaths hit the back of Seunghyun’s neck. “I’m trying to sleep.”
“Why are you--”
“Because we have the week off and I can stay in for once in my life.”
That’s not the question I was asking, Seunghyun wants to say, but the second knee is a little too close to a place it shouldn’t be when he’s trying to mouth off, so he says nothing.
It’s comfortable, at least: the comforter is warm and Jiyong is warm and the snow falls silent against the windowpane, slushy grey stuff that blurs when Seunghyun yawns and gives into his ever-present fatigue. He gropes blindly for his stuffed rabbit, squashing it between his side and the mattress underneath him.
“Why do you keep that thing?”
Jiyong’s voice is hoarse with sleep and almost an entire octave deeper; the words come out slower. Seunghyun finds that he likes it enough to respond. “I need something to hold onto when I’m laying on my side.”
More breaths. Then a gangly arm reaches over, and White Rabbit is bouncing against the desk, pinging back so it drops into the chair. There’s a flurry of activity, then: Jiyong untangles himself, not bothering to get up and instead rolling over him, smashing Seunghyun’s face into his pillow as he resettles himself. He elbows Seunghyun in the stomach until the man slings a careful arm around him.
Jiyong rolls over to face the window. Now all Seunghyun can see is his stupid haircut, too blond and too bright, all tangled and matted.
“There,” Jiyong says. “Can we fucking sleep now?”
---
When he wakes up again the room is still illuminated by the sun, sickly whites and yellows in the snow-filled sky. Seunghyun yawns and tastes sleep in his mouth, staring down at the figure still burrowed into his blankets. A tight feeling squirrels its way into his chest and sits there, so he slides his arm out from under Jiyong’s neck; this time he doesn’t move, his breathing still deep and regular. He can almost see the ridge of his spine through the thin t-shirt he’s sleeping in and it makes him frown even as he sits up, rubbing at his eyes with his fingertips.
6:01. That can’t be right. Seunghyun frowns and throws legs over the side of the bed, standing. One hand pulls down the left leg of his boxers, the other flipping open the cell phone on the nightstand.
“Holy shit,” he mouths. He squints, opening the calculator application in the menu system and adding until the number 60 is blinking up at him.
Sixty hours. Two and a half days of sleep.
He shoves his feet into slippers and shuts the door behind him, shuffling into the hallway. There are no sounds, just the crackle of the ice maker in the fridge and the dull roar of traffic somewhere around them. Seunghyun runs a hand through his hair and drags himself into the kitchen. Over a glass of water he reads the notes stuck to the refrigerator door:
family outing, be back later, daesung
back. i guess you’re both dead. hyung, i ate your strawberries. don’t haunt me, daesung
jiyong hyungnim fighting ^^ have a good rest!
----- LEE SEUNGHYUN aka SEUNGRI aka VICTORY -----
There’s food in the freezer if Seungri hasn’t eaten it. At the studio, call if you need me.
Youngbae
Seunghyun checks for dates (only Youngbae bothered; if he’s reading right, it was written only a few hours ago), pushing overlong bangs out of his eyes impatiently. He sets the glass down and reads once and again, rolling his eyes at the elaborate signature scrawled under Seungri’s three post-its taped together.
The freezer yields nothing but ice cubes and a bottle of soju that he eyes before the vicious grumbling in his stomach tells him it’s a Very Bad Idea. When he shuts the freezer’s door, the fluttering of the diet plan taped to its front catches his eye.
His heart leaps into his throat as he reads down the list of things he should have been eating, all the spinach and bananas and powdery fruit smoothies Master Hwang tacks recipes for on the insides of the pantry drawers. If he’s counting right, he’s got 6,000 extra calories to spare.
It’s blissfully easy, the trip from the kitchen to the phone book and the pile of delivery flyers that are stacked up next to it.
---
“It smells like Chinese.”
Seunghyun jumps. A glob of lo mein adheres itself to his chin, dangling from its edge to fleck brown sauce onto his old blue hoodie.
Jiyong snorts and eyes the containers scattered on the coffee table, cracking his knuckles as he rubs at his stomach, sitting down on the sofa. “Where is everyone?”
“Doing stuff.” He decides against slurping up the noodle, suddenly self-conscious with the way Jiyong’s eyes keep flicking towards him and the white takeout box cradled in his hand. Instead, he lets it drop back into the container. Jiyong wrinkles his nose anyway. “Seungri ate all the food.”
“Figures.” Jiyong sits back up, shaking some of the boxes. “Did you leave anything for me?”
“Um...” Seunghyun surveys the carnage in front of him before he holds out his half-finished noodles. “Lo mein?”
“No.” Jiyong frowns and scoots the takeout around until he fishes out a fortune cookie, which he breaks open. “‘Help the ones you love today,’” he reads before he crunches into the wafer. His eyes snap back to Seunghyun, who holds the carton out again. “No,” he grumbles, leaning forward. “But come here.”
He leans in, setting the chopsticks into the box and the box onto the table. Jiyong cups his chin between his fingers and swipes with his thumb until the skin’s free of brown sauce and Seunghyun is abnormally jittery under his palm, eyes blinking in confusion.
Jiyong holds up his hand. “Next time you ask for delivery, make sure they bring us napkins.” He pops his thumb into his mouth and licks, raising an eyebrow at the taste. “Okay, hand those over, I’m starving.”
---
“Seungri’s home now.”
“Yeah, I know, he wouldn’t stop bothering me about the new clothes he got last night.” Jiyong is stretched out on the bed, hands tucked behind his head. “I guess the shirts were from some girl, but you’d think if she liked him she wouldn’t get them in that color pink.”
Seunghyun nods, immersed in the swamp of questions he doesn’t want to ask and the strip of pale white above Jiyong’s boxer briefs that flashes when he moves.
“The shade’s like... it makes him look like he’s blushing all the time. Like you are now.”
“What?”
Jiyong laughs, but it isn’t a mean sound. Just amused. “Your face, hyung.” He straightens his t-shirt and sits up to face the desk, where Seunghyun is scrolling through his iTunes playlists, clicking through artist and then album and back again. “Hey.”
“I don’t like Passion Pit,” Seunghyun mumbles. “Stop trying to convince me they’re good.”
“I don’t like them either.”
Seunghyun frowns and swivels his chair around.
“I just like arguing with you.” Jiyong stares at him expectantly. Then he sighs. “About music, or... I don’t know, clothes. Cleaning the house. Whatever. Anything.”
“You get mad though.” Seunghyun sounds this out slowly. Jiyong can almost hear the cogs in his head turning.
“Think of it as foreplay,” he offers, and Seunghyun chokes.
“Foreplay?”
“Why are we...” Jiyong crosses his arms, pulling at his shirt sleeves. “You’re making this harder than it needs to be, hyung.”
“Don’t call me hyung.”
“What?”
“Just... we’re like the same age here, right?” Seunghyun taps a finger to his temple. “So just Seunghyun.”
“I might confuse you with Seungri.”
Seunghyun bristles.
“I mean, if anything, you’re like the maknae. You have all these weird toys, and you eat like you just learned how to use chopsticks, and you have those really big--” Jiyong stops, at a loss of words for once in his life. He clears his throat and coughs. “Dimples. I like those too.”
“This is weird.”
“Yeah, but you’re weird.” He makes an aborted move, standing up before he sinks down again. “It fits like that. So...”
Seunghyun watches him flap his arms around, all knobby elbows and big hands.
“My gesture. I made it. Your turn.”
“You want to hear more about yourself?”
Jiyong still laughs but there’s a tinge of something different in it, something closer to real embarrassment than Seunghyun’s seen in a long time. “Kind of. Unless you don’t actually like me. Then I’ll just go. But I think I’m pretty good at reading stuff like that, I’ve been collecting signs lately.”
“Signs?”
“Yeah.” Jiyong shrugs, and yeah, his ears are definitely red. “I can be a chickenshit too, okay? Plus the group and all of that, Hyun Suk would kill me--”
“I like how you think of things like that when you’re trying to be romantic.”
He scowls.
Seunghyun holds two hands up in surrender. “No, okay, fine, here.” He sucks in a breath and exhales, cheeks puffing out. “I don’t know if I really like you that way.”
Jiyong deflates. He stares into his hands before he gathers himself up again. “Well, I guess I need to learn how to read,” he jokes, but he’s already starting to stand, uncrossing his legs from under himself.
“Hey, hey, wait, listen.” Seunghyun grabs at his shoulder, but he’s still moving and its kind of making him dizzy, so he grips the back of his neck, grazing the smoothly shaved line where hair ends and skin begins.
It works. Jiyong shivers under the prick of physical contact. His eyes open and shut. Seunghyun thinks it shouldn’t be this easy to rattle him; it’s never been, before. He slides a hand down experimentally, thumb dipping into the hollow between his tensed shoulder and his collarbone. The skin there is surprisingly soft.
“So, um. Tell me about your signs.”
“I don’t...” Jiyong grabs him by the wrist, but his eyes are half closed. “This isn’t telling me you don’t like me.”
“Convince me I do.” The chair wobbles underneath him like Seunghyun’s legs do when he sits down on the bed. Jiyong swallows and Seunghyun watches his Adam’s apple bob, brain going to places it’s never honestly been before.
“You shouldn’t need convincing,” he mulls.
“Tell me anyway.”
“If you stop touching me,” he says, pulling away to sit against the headboard, “I could.”
Seunghyun tucks his hands under his thighs and sits on them, awkward again.
“I don’t know,” Jiyong starts. “It’s just a feeling. How you look at me. I’m not good at explaining this shit.”
“You were doing fine before -- ”
“Before you interrupted me,” he snaps.
“I didn’t interrupt you, you started talking about Hyun Suk --”
“That was relevant to the conversation, I don’t know why you can’t keep up with --”
Seunghyun watches his nostrils flare as he begins to rant. A prickle makes its way up his spine and he takes a deep breath. The room still smells like clean laundry and vinyl cleaner and now it smells like Jiyong, Jiyong sleeping in his bed and on his pillows, all tangled into his sheets, all tangled around him, and he’s thinking he’s kind of stupid, that that heavy squirrelly feeling is probably telling him something.
“It’s a killjoy.”
“What?” Jiyong’s eyes are narrowed. He pauses for a second, obviously thrown off. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I thought you wanted to hear about yourself.” Seunghyun looks and finds it, the gleam in Jiyong’s eye that has nothing to do with the argument at hand, that isn’t really pissed off at all. “I don’t care about Hyun Suk right now.”
He flounders. “I’m not even talking about that,” he spits out, finally.
“Come on,” Seunghyun cajoles. He exhales through his teeth, quiet so Jiyong doesn’t hear. “I’ll say more than ‘he’s a good leader’ for you.” Before Jiyong can respond, he’s leaning back in to cup the back of his head, finding that groove behind his ear, near his jaw. He keeps his voice low. “Snap back at me. I like that.”
Jiyong is silent.
“I know you like to boss me around. You trying to piss me off or something? That what you’re waiting for?” His fingers begin to roam, and Seunghyun wills them not to shake as they bounce over the hollow of Jiyong’s throat and down his chest, moving along his side. It’s flat; there’s no curve, no softness to cushion the ridges of his palm but he finds that he doesn’t mind, not when Jiyong is breathing like that, not when he slips under his shirt, feeling the bump of his spine as he braces a hand against his back, pushing until Jiyong’s flush against him, his breath curling in heaves against his face.
“Yeah,” he breathes, finally. “I’m waiting for it.”
“Too bad I’m not mad,” he admits, quiet. He hesitates before nudging at his cheek with his nose, stalling until Jiyong huffs and closes the distance for him, nipping until Seunghyun’s mouth opens against his, the arm slipped around him groping for traction. He finds the elastic of his sweatpants and pulls hard, until there’s a lapful of Jiyong against his legs, panting into his mouth. He tastes fortune cookie and mineral water but soon it’s all indistinguishable, sloppy like the way Jiyong pulls away only to take his lower lip between his teeth and bite before he moves back in, sloppy like the jerky sort of growl Seunghyun makes as he tugs at his shirt, maneuvering their bodies until they fall back, ripping the hem in his progress.
When he finally gets the shirt off he thinks about the soft spot he’d found with his thumb and goes over it again with his tongue, makes a trail up towards his throat, choking as Jiyong’s fingers grope down his stomach and into his pants. He bites into the sensitive skin, sucking as Jiyong finds his way in and squeezes.
“I thought you didn’t like me,” Jiyong murmurs over the noise Seunghyun makes against him. He palms at him roughly and Seunghyun’s head swims with how it makes him keen and shudder, hips rocking forward. “So what is this?” Jiyong moves his hand and spreads his legs a little, thrusting back up against him. “Do you even know what you’re doing?”
Seunghyun pulls back enough to prop himself against his elbows. The wet against Jiyong’s neck highlights the bruise he’s left behind, a splotch of red stark against the white skin. “I’m kind of slow,” he says. “You’ll have to explain it to me.”
---
“Why did I wake up to find you in here?” he asks.
Jiyong shrugs and Seunghyun’s starting to think he has a thing for collarbones, the way he watches Jiyong’s pop up against his skin as he moves. “I don’t know, I had this big plan I wanted to go through with but I came in and you were already fucking sleeping.”
“As usual,” Seunghyun grins.
“Yeah.” Jiyong ruffles fingers through Seunghyun’s hair and frowns. “You need a haircut.”
“My hair’s fine.”
“You can’t even see.”
“I can see you fine.”
Jiyong snorts. “Anyway. I had this big plan, but I was really tired and I couldn’t wake you up, so I thought I’d wait it out. But then I fell asleep. I woke up again and you were cuddling that dumb rabbit and I was just like, ‘why would you have all these creepy toys when you can have me?’”
Seunghyun groans and Jiyong begins to laugh, his smile going goofy as he knocks him in the chest.
“I’m just kidding.”
“No you’re not,” he says, reaching over to pinch at his cheek, but Jiyong ducks and Seunghyun aims for his nipple instead, twisting until he gets an undignified squeal. It gets laughter crackling out from his throat even as Jiyong slaps at his arms, hard enough to leave marks. “No, no, hey,” he grins, dodging the final smacks, “listen. About the not really liking you thing.”
“I thought we went over this already,” Jiyong says, and his smile fades a little. “If you just... I don’t know, if this was just a thing, and you really want me to convince you, I want--”
“Shut up and let me finish.” Seunghyun rolls over until he’s face down in between the pillows, breathing through the gap between them. “Sometimes I’m kind of oblivious,” he admits. “But I was thinking...”
“When?”
“When you were sleeping.”
“Why weren’t you sleeping? Weren’t you tired? If you weren’t tired, you could’ve woken me up and--”
“Jiyong, come on.”
“Alright, fine.” Seunghyun hears him clear his throat, feels the bed dip as he moves to face him. “Finish.”
“I was thinking,” he says into the pillows, “about the squirrel.”
Silence.
“Aren’t you going to ask?”
“I don’t know if I want to,” Jiyong confesses.
“It’s not literal,” Seunghyun says. “Sometimes when we hang out I get this creeping feeling. It’s good, but gets in my chest, really fast. Like a squirrel.”
“... Are you sure you weren't having a heart attack?”
“It was like this morning,” he says, “when I woke up and you were still there. You know what, never mind.” Seunghyun sighs and turns his head, hair all mussed with the effort of it, but Jiyong is smiling again, pushing bangs against his face, touch softer than Seunghyun thought he could be.
“Squirrels,” he says. “I’ll take that.”
gdragon/top
pg-13
jiyong has a plan. based on this:
lovelyable : aw now i have top and gd sleeping for two days on top's bed in my head
lovelyable : how precious
whetstone : so qt :3 although lol @ top sleeping for two days too
lovelyable : he would like set an alarm
lovelyable : and gd would turn it off
lovelyable : and then top awakens like 36 hrs later hungry as shit like WHAT TIME IS IT
whetstone : LMFAO LIKE HE'S HIBERNATING
whetstone : lmfao gd finally wakes up and comes in to see 9324723 takeout boxes on the table
lovelyable : LOL TOP IS LIKE I CALCULATED IT
lovelyable : I CAN AFFORD THIS BECAUSE I HAVENT EATEN IN SO LONG
lovelyable : THANKS GD
whetstone : LMFAO GD LIKE DID YOU LEAVE ANYTHING FOR ME
whetstone : tops like yeah they gave me free eggrolls theyre cold now though
lovelyable : hes like well i ordered this for you
lovelyable : ..but then i ate it
for lego1016 and of course lovelyable . :D
Seunghyun doesn’t know how it happened or when or why, only that one day everything is normal and the next Jiyong is sprawled on top of him, little huffs sounding in the shell of his ear, a leg thrown haphazard against his side. The cap of his knee is flush with the bone of Seunghyun’s hip.
All he can think is he’d expected Jiyong to be a more graceful sleeper.
He tries extracting himself from his bedsheets (first time he’d ever cursed the giant mound of them he’d always kept swaddled there), but the rustle of cotton wakes Jiyong. Now there are arms tightening around him and the knee digs into his back almost painfully.
“Quit moving around,” he growls, shifting his head so his breaths hit the back of Seunghyun’s neck. “I’m trying to sleep.”
“Why are you--”
“Because we have the week off and I can stay in for once in my life.”
That’s not the question I was asking, Seunghyun wants to say, but the second knee is a little too close to a place it shouldn’t be when he’s trying to mouth off, so he says nothing.
It’s comfortable, at least: the comforter is warm and Jiyong is warm and the snow falls silent against the windowpane, slushy grey stuff that blurs when Seunghyun yawns and gives into his ever-present fatigue. He gropes blindly for his stuffed rabbit, squashing it between his side and the mattress underneath him.
“Why do you keep that thing?”
Jiyong’s voice is hoarse with sleep and almost an entire octave deeper; the words come out slower. Seunghyun finds that he likes it enough to respond. “I need something to hold onto when I’m laying on my side.”
More breaths. Then a gangly arm reaches over, and White Rabbit is bouncing against the desk, pinging back so it drops into the chair. There’s a flurry of activity, then: Jiyong untangles himself, not bothering to get up and instead rolling over him, smashing Seunghyun’s face into his pillow as he resettles himself. He elbows Seunghyun in the stomach until the man slings a careful arm around him.
Jiyong rolls over to face the window. Now all Seunghyun can see is his stupid haircut, too blond and too bright, all tangled and matted.
“There,” Jiyong says. “Can we fucking sleep now?”
---
When he wakes up again the room is still illuminated by the sun, sickly whites and yellows in the snow-filled sky. Seunghyun yawns and tastes sleep in his mouth, staring down at the figure still burrowed into his blankets. A tight feeling squirrels its way into his chest and sits there, so he slides his arm out from under Jiyong’s neck; this time he doesn’t move, his breathing still deep and regular. He can almost see the ridge of his spine through the thin t-shirt he’s sleeping in and it makes him frown even as he sits up, rubbing at his eyes with his fingertips.
6:01. That can’t be right. Seunghyun frowns and throws legs over the side of the bed, standing. One hand pulls down the left leg of his boxers, the other flipping open the cell phone on the nightstand.
“Holy shit,” he mouths. He squints, opening the calculator application in the menu system and adding until the number 60 is blinking up at him.
Sixty hours. Two and a half days of sleep.
He shoves his feet into slippers and shuts the door behind him, shuffling into the hallway. There are no sounds, just the crackle of the ice maker in the fridge and the dull roar of traffic somewhere around them. Seunghyun runs a hand through his hair and drags himself into the kitchen. Over a glass of water he reads the notes stuck to the refrigerator door:
family outing, be back later, daesung
back. i guess you’re both dead. hyung, i ate your strawberries. don’t haunt me, daesung
jiyong hyungnim fighting ^^ have a good rest!
----- LEE SEUNGHYUN aka SEUNGRI aka VICTORY -----
There’s food in the freezer if Seungri hasn’t eaten it. At the studio, call if you need me.
Youngbae
Seunghyun checks for dates (only Youngbae bothered; if he’s reading right, it was written only a few hours ago), pushing overlong bangs out of his eyes impatiently. He sets the glass down and reads once and again, rolling his eyes at the elaborate signature scrawled under Seungri’s three post-its taped together.
The freezer yields nothing but ice cubes and a bottle of soju that he eyes before the vicious grumbling in his stomach tells him it’s a Very Bad Idea. When he shuts the freezer’s door, the fluttering of the diet plan taped to its front catches his eye.
His heart leaps into his throat as he reads down the list of things he should have been eating, all the spinach and bananas and powdery fruit smoothies Master Hwang tacks recipes for on the insides of the pantry drawers. If he’s counting right, he’s got 6,000 extra calories to spare.
It’s blissfully easy, the trip from the kitchen to the phone book and the pile of delivery flyers that are stacked up next to it.
---
“It smells like Chinese.”
Seunghyun jumps. A glob of lo mein adheres itself to his chin, dangling from its edge to fleck brown sauce onto his old blue hoodie.
Jiyong snorts and eyes the containers scattered on the coffee table, cracking his knuckles as he rubs at his stomach, sitting down on the sofa. “Where is everyone?”
“Doing stuff.” He decides against slurping up the noodle, suddenly self-conscious with the way Jiyong’s eyes keep flicking towards him and the white takeout box cradled in his hand. Instead, he lets it drop back into the container. Jiyong wrinkles his nose anyway. “Seungri ate all the food.”
“Figures.” Jiyong sits back up, shaking some of the boxes. “Did you leave anything for me?”
“Um...” Seunghyun surveys the carnage in front of him before he holds out his half-finished noodles. “Lo mein?”
“No.” Jiyong frowns and scoots the takeout around until he fishes out a fortune cookie, which he breaks open. “‘Help the ones you love today,’” he reads before he crunches into the wafer. His eyes snap back to Seunghyun, who holds the carton out again. “No,” he grumbles, leaning forward. “But come here.”
He leans in, setting the chopsticks into the box and the box onto the table. Jiyong cups his chin between his fingers and swipes with his thumb until the skin’s free of brown sauce and Seunghyun is abnormally jittery under his palm, eyes blinking in confusion.
Jiyong holds up his hand. “Next time you ask for delivery, make sure they bring us napkins.” He pops his thumb into his mouth and licks, raising an eyebrow at the taste. “Okay, hand those over, I’m starving.”
---
“Seungri’s home now.”
“Yeah, I know, he wouldn’t stop bothering me about the new clothes he got last night.” Jiyong is stretched out on the bed, hands tucked behind his head. “I guess the shirts were from some girl, but you’d think if she liked him she wouldn’t get them in that color pink.”
Seunghyun nods, immersed in the swamp of questions he doesn’t want to ask and the strip of pale white above Jiyong’s boxer briefs that flashes when he moves.
“The shade’s like... it makes him look like he’s blushing all the time. Like you are now.”
“What?”
Jiyong laughs, but it isn’t a mean sound. Just amused. “Your face, hyung.” He straightens his t-shirt and sits up to face the desk, where Seunghyun is scrolling through his iTunes playlists, clicking through artist and then album and back again. “Hey.”
“I don’t like Passion Pit,” Seunghyun mumbles. “Stop trying to convince me they’re good.”
“I don’t like them either.”
Seunghyun frowns and swivels his chair around.
“I just like arguing with you.” Jiyong stares at him expectantly. Then he sighs. “About music, or... I don’t know, clothes. Cleaning the house. Whatever. Anything.”
“You get mad though.” Seunghyun sounds this out slowly. Jiyong can almost hear the cogs in his head turning.
“Think of it as foreplay,” he offers, and Seunghyun chokes.
“Foreplay?”
“Why are we...” Jiyong crosses his arms, pulling at his shirt sleeves. “You’re making this harder than it needs to be, hyung.”
“Don’t call me hyung.”
“What?”
“Just... we’re like the same age here, right?” Seunghyun taps a finger to his temple. “So just Seunghyun.”
“I might confuse you with Seungri.”
Seunghyun bristles.
“I mean, if anything, you’re like the maknae. You have all these weird toys, and you eat like you just learned how to use chopsticks, and you have those really big--” Jiyong stops, at a loss of words for once in his life. He clears his throat and coughs. “Dimples. I like those too.”
“This is weird.”
“Yeah, but you’re weird.” He makes an aborted move, standing up before he sinks down again. “It fits like that. So...”
Seunghyun watches him flap his arms around, all knobby elbows and big hands.
“My gesture. I made it. Your turn.”
“You want to hear more about yourself?”
Jiyong still laughs but there’s a tinge of something different in it, something closer to real embarrassment than Seunghyun’s seen in a long time. “Kind of. Unless you don’t actually like me. Then I’ll just go. But I think I’m pretty good at reading stuff like that, I’ve been collecting signs lately.”
“Signs?”
“Yeah.” Jiyong shrugs, and yeah, his ears are definitely red. “I can be a chickenshit too, okay? Plus the group and all of that, Hyun Suk would kill me--”
“I like how you think of things like that when you’re trying to be romantic.”
He scowls.
Seunghyun holds two hands up in surrender. “No, okay, fine, here.” He sucks in a breath and exhales, cheeks puffing out. “I don’t know if I really like you that way.”
Jiyong deflates. He stares into his hands before he gathers himself up again. “Well, I guess I need to learn how to read,” he jokes, but he’s already starting to stand, uncrossing his legs from under himself.
“Hey, hey, wait, listen.” Seunghyun grabs at his shoulder, but he’s still moving and its kind of making him dizzy, so he grips the back of his neck, grazing the smoothly shaved line where hair ends and skin begins.
It works. Jiyong shivers under the prick of physical contact. His eyes open and shut. Seunghyun thinks it shouldn’t be this easy to rattle him; it’s never been, before. He slides a hand down experimentally, thumb dipping into the hollow between his tensed shoulder and his collarbone. The skin there is surprisingly soft.
“So, um. Tell me about your signs.”
“I don’t...” Jiyong grabs him by the wrist, but his eyes are half closed. “This isn’t telling me you don’t like me.”
“Convince me I do.” The chair wobbles underneath him like Seunghyun’s legs do when he sits down on the bed. Jiyong swallows and Seunghyun watches his Adam’s apple bob, brain going to places it’s never honestly been before.
“You shouldn’t need convincing,” he mulls.
“Tell me anyway.”
“If you stop touching me,” he says, pulling away to sit against the headboard, “I could.”
Seunghyun tucks his hands under his thighs and sits on them, awkward again.
“I don’t know,” Jiyong starts. “It’s just a feeling. How you look at me. I’m not good at explaining this shit.”
“You were doing fine before -- ”
“Before you interrupted me,” he snaps.
“I didn’t interrupt you, you started talking about Hyun Suk --”
“That was relevant to the conversation, I don’t know why you can’t keep up with --”
Seunghyun watches his nostrils flare as he begins to rant. A prickle makes its way up his spine and he takes a deep breath. The room still smells like clean laundry and vinyl cleaner and now it smells like Jiyong, Jiyong sleeping in his bed and on his pillows, all tangled into his sheets, all tangled around him, and he’s thinking he’s kind of stupid, that that heavy squirrelly feeling is probably telling him something.
“It’s a killjoy.”
“What?” Jiyong’s eyes are narrowed. He pauses for a second, obviously thrown off. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I thought you wanted to hear about yourself.” Seunghyun looks and finds it, the gleam in Jiyong’s eye that has nothing to do with the argument at hand, that isn’t really pissed off at all. “I don’t care about Hyun Suk right now.”
He flounders. “I’m not even talking about that,” he spits out, finally.
“Come on,” Seunghyun cajoles. He exhales through his teeth, quiet so Jiyong doesn’t hear. “I’ll say more than ‘he’s a good leader’ for you.” Before Jiyong can respond, he’s leaning back in to cup the back of his head, finding that groove behind his ear, near his jaw. He keeps his voice low. “Snap back at me. I like that.”
Jiyong is silent.
“I know you like to boss me around. You trying to piss me off or something? That what you’re waiting for?” His fingers begin to roam, and Seunghyun wills them not to shake as they bounce over the hollow of Jiyong’s throat and down his chest, moving along his side. It’s flat; there’s no curve, no softness to cushion the ridges of his palm but he finds that he doesn’t mind, not when Jiyong is breathing like that, not when he slips under his shirt, feeling the bump of his spine as he braces a hand against his back, pushing until Jiyong’s flush against him, his breath curling in heaves against his face.
“Yeah,” he breathes, finally. “I’m waiting for it.”
“Too bad I’m not mad,” he admits, quiet. He hesitates before nudging at his cheek with his nose, stalling until Jiyong huffs and closes the distance for him, nipping until Seunghyun’s mouth opens against his, the arm slipped around him groping for traction. He finds the elastic of his sweatpants and pulls hard, until there’s a lapful of Jiyong against his legs, panting into his mouth. He tastes fortune cookie and mineral water but soon it’s all indistinguishable, sloppy like the way Jiyong pulls away only to take his lower lip between his teeth and bite before he moves back in, sloppy like the jerky sort of growl Seunghyun makes as he tugs at his shirt, maneuvering their bodies until they fall back, ripping the hem in his progress.
When he finally gets the shirt off he thinks about the soft spot he’d found with his thumb and goes over it again with his tongue, makes a trail up towards his throat, choking as Jiyong’s fingers grope down his stomach and into his pants. He bites into the sensitive skin, sucking as Jiyong finds his way in and squeezes.
“I thought you didn’t like me,” Jiyong murmurs over the noise Seunghyun makes against him. He palms at him roughly and Seunghyun’s head swims with how it makes him keen and shudder, hips rocking forward. “So what is this?” Jiyong moves his hand and spreads his legs a little, thrusting back up against him. “Do you even know what you’re doing?”
Seunghyun pulls back enough to prop himself against his elbows. The wet against Jiyong’s neck highlights the bruise he’s left behind, a splotch of red stark against the white skin. “I’m kind of slow,” he says. “You’ll have to explain it to me.”
---
“Why did I wake up to find you in here?” he asks.
Jiyong shrugs and Seunghyun’s starting to think he has a thing for collarbones, the way he watches Jiyong’s pop up against his skin as he moves. “I don’t know, I had this big plan I wanted to go through with but I came in and you were already fucking sleeping.”
“As usual,” Seunghyun grins.
“Yeah.” Jiyong ruffles fingers through Seunghyun’s hair and frowns. “You need a haircut.”
“My hair’s fine.”
“You can’t even see.”
“I can see you fine.”
Jiyong snorts. “Anyway. I had this big plan, but I was really tired and I couldn’t wake you up, so I thought I’d wait it out. But then I fell asleep. I woke up again and you were cuddling that dumb rabbit and I was just like, ‘why would you have all these creepy toys when you can have me?’”
Seunghyun groans and Jiyong begins to laugh, his smile going goofy as he knocks him in the chest.
“I’m just kidding.”
“No you’re not,” he says, reaching over to pinch at his cheek, but Jiyong ducks and Seunghyun aims for his nipple instead, twisting until he gets an undignified squeal. It gets laughter crackling out from his throat even as Jiyong slaps at his arms, hard enough to leave marks. “No, no, hey,” he grins, dodging the final smacks, “listen. About the not really liking you thing.”
“I thought we went over this already,” Jiyong says, and his smile fades a little. “If you just... I don’t know, if this was just a thing, and you really want me to convince you, I want--”
“Shut up and let me finish.” Seunghyun rolls over until he’s face down in between the pillows, breathing through the gap between them. “Sometimes I’m kind of oblivious,” he admits. “But I was thinking...”
“When?”
“When you were sleeping.”
“Why weren’t you sleeping? Weren’t you tired? If you weren’t tired, you could’ve woken me up and--”
“Jiyong, come on.”
“Alright, fine.” Seunghyun hears him clear his throat, feels the bed dip as he moves to face him. “Finish.”
“I was thinking,” he says into the pillows, “about the squirrel.”
Silence.
“Aren’t you going to ask?”
“I don’t know if I want to,” Jiyong confesses.
“It’s not literal,” Seunghyun says. “Sometimes when we hang out I get this creeping feeling. It’s good, but gets in my chest, really fast. Like a squirrel.”
“... Are you sure you weren't having a heart attack?”
“It was like this morning,” he says, “when I woke up and you were still there. You know what, never mind.” Seunghyun sighs and turns his head, hair all mussed with the effort of it, but Jiyong is smiling again, pushing bangs against his face, touch softer than Seunghyun thought he could be.
“Squirrels,” he says. “I’ll take that.”