Archive of Our Own

He’s standing in the middle of a hallway made out of fish. The hallway is still pretty square — the fish undulate in place in flat panes, caught in cold laminar flow. He makes eye contact with one next to his big toe.

‘Weren’t you going to the kitchen?’ the fish says. 

It occurs to him to wonder how the fish knew that, but he’s already started walking again and the fish are melting away into the distance, so it doesn’t really matter. A bend in the hallway appears and he follows it to see a small kitchen, with a table and a woman sitting at it. 

She is so beautiful. His wife. 

He smiles dopily, and the walls beat with fish again. 

“What are you doing standing there like that?” his wife asks. “You look creepy.”

She’s always been blunt. That’s one of the things he likes about her. 

“Pretty,” he says, because talking is a little hard right now, and that’s the main thing he wants to say. 

She laughs a little, which makes her even more pretty. “What?”

“There’s too many fish,” he informs her. It’s true. The walls are losing their stability by the second. Of course, the fish would never hurt his wife, but he should maybe go back to his room to make sure the coral reef is still there. “Come back to bed soon to help stop the fish.”

“What?” she says again, but he’s already heading back down the hall. At the end, there’s no doorway to his room, just a yawning mouth. He steps over the lip and dissolves. 

-

It’s been a relatively steady day at work, the rare kind where the surgeries don’t have any surprises, the paperwork isn’t too heavy, and no interns have asked Do-won a question they should have brought to one of the first year residents instead. It tricks him into letting his guard down — when Oh Yi-Young materializes around the corner of the hallway to OR 10, he’s too sluggish to duck out of view before she can spot him. 

She gives him a little wave and starts heading towards him. He makes his face go as smooth and professional as possible. 

“Dr. Oh,” he says.

“I was stepping down to the cafeteria for a minute,” she says. “You want to come?” Her mouth twitches; there’s a playful look on her face, which makes him nervous. “I thought you might be craving some spicy tuna? Fish cakes?”

“They don’t have fish cakes in the cafeteria,” he says. “And I’m assisting on Professor Seo’s c-section at 2 p.m., so I have to head over there now.”

He knows he sounds a little too stilted. It’s been awkward between them ever since that moment in the elevator when she asked if she could like him. He doesn’t think of it as a true confession. Yi-young is going through a strange time right now, off-kilter and in-debt and grasping at straws. He’s clearly just one of those straws. She sees him all the time, that’s the problem. It’s crossed her wires. He can’t afford to let it cross his. He may be a pushover at work when it comes to stepping in to help colleagues, but he’s also a man of strict schedule and discipline who avoids change and likes his life as it is. 

It would be comical. It would be disastrous. It would leave him far more empty than it would her if he made the mistake of considering it seriously. 

Which is why he isn’t. Not for a second. 

Yi-young hums. “I’ll walk with you.”

There’s no reason for him to say no, so they set off down the hallway. He can feel her gaze on him, can feel that he’s starting to sweat under his scrubs. 

“Do you sleepwalk?” she asks suddenly. 

“I used to,” he says, thrown. Huh. He’d forgotten about that. “I used to all the time when I was a kid, actually. For a while there it was almost every night. My mother said that she could have full conversations with me and I would respond as if I was fully awake, but I could never remember it.”

“Ah. So you can’t remember what you did when you were sleepwalking once you wake up.”

“Sometimes I could get tiny bits and pieces if I tried really hard, but they never made any sense. I stopped doing it around age 18 or so, once I got to know how to keep my body better regulated. I think it was a stress response.” 

Her smile dips. “But you haven’t done it in years, even with a job like this?”

“I think it’s because the kind of stress I get from work is predictable,” he says. “Or maybe it was just a childhood thing.”

“Maybe,” she says. 

-

The OR has become overgrown with plants, and it’s making it very difficult to find all of the supplies he thought he left behind here. He unwraps vines from around gauze packages and plucks scalpels out of tree trunks. Heat beats down on his back. 

“If you don’t get the right type of sutures, the metamorphosis won’t be possible,” a familiar voice calls. 

His wife is standing in a glowing yellow opening in the side of a massive tree. He knows she is relying on him to retrieve the sutures. The deer creature they’re set to operate on will need its new flesh tightly bound in order to reach the right shape to make it through the portal safely to the next world.

“It’s just hard to find them in here,” he says. “We need to schedule the landscaper to come in and hack back some of these weeds.”

“Plants love medicine,” she says, because she’s very wise.  

He opens a panel of bark and finds a box sitting inside a hollowed-out section of the tree. Somehow he knows this is what he’s looking for, even though he can’t really read the text on the surface of it. He grabs the box of sutures. 

“You’re up late again,” his wife says, suddenly standing by his shoulder. Her voice sounds a little different than it did a moment ago, more echoey. The trees twist. A whole wall to his left morphs into a flat pane of white paint and then morphs back into foliage. 

“Here are the sutures,” he says, and holds them out to her. She looks down and takes them slowly from him. 

“Thank you,” she says slowly. “You know, this is an unexpectedly cute side to you.”

“That’s why you married me, honey.” He closes the bark panel and the tree disappears. 

His wife says something else, but his ears do something funny and he doesn’t quite catch it. Time shifts, and she’s abruptly much closer — he must have stepped towards her. That’s okay because it’s what he wanted. It’s what he always wants. To be by her side. 

He goes to kiss her, but only gets as far as his hand on her cheek before she’s lurching backwards out of reach. Her eyes are really wide all of a sudden. 

“You’re dreaming,” she tells him. “You’re just dreaming.”

That’s absurd, but he doesn’t have time to tell her that. The deer is screaming somewhere in the distance, an unearthly wail of sound — the surgery must have already started. His wife is gone. The trees are gone. He shambles forward, searching the source of the sound, for the problem to solve. 

-

There’s a high-risk delivery early in the day, and Do-won is nowhere near awake enough. His head is pounding, even though he got up early and exercised like he always does this time of the week. 

The worst part of the surgery isn’t the patient’s fear. Park Eun-bin had been stoic up until her vitals plummeted and she was rushed to the OR, spending the morning chewing on ice chips and looking out the window. It’s the boyfriend, Chae Si-woo, that is the problem.  

He hasn’t left his girlfriend’s side since she was admitted, and when she’s taken for surgery he bursts into horrible, body-shaking sobs, clutching at her on the bed even as staff are trying to wheel her away as fast as possible. Do-won has to pry him off. Luckily, he’s not slated to assist, so he stays with Si-woo in the hallway outside the operating wing for a few minutes to help him calm down, mostly so he doesn’t charge in looking for her. 

After the seventeenth time he asks if she’s going to be okay, and Do-won reassures him, Si-woo quiets into a stupor, slumped forward like a zombie. 

“We’ve known each other our whole lives, but it took so long for us to get together,” he says eventually.  “She told me she had feelings for me in college, but I turned her down, and it wasn’t until I did my military service and I missed her so much that I realized what she meant to me.” He’s staring vacantly at the opposite wall of the hallway as he talks, seemingly barely aware anymore that Do-won’s still standing there. “And this pregnancy happened so fast, and it’s been so difficult — what if our story ends before it even really begins? We haven’t even been able to get married yet.”

“Your fiancee is in good hands. Professor Ryu is one of our most skilled surgeons,” Do-won says. “They’ll do their best to keep her and the baby safe.”

Si-woo looks at him then. Despite how pale his face is, his eyes are fierce. “I don’t care about the baby right now. If you have to sacrifice the baby to save her, do it. We can try again for a child if she wants to. But she’s everything to me.” 

Do-won thinks of Park Eun-bin’s face the day before as they explained the surgery, her features pinching smaller and smaller as she registered the weight upon her, the betrayal of her own body. It wasn’t until later that she cried though, after her boyfriend had stepped out to grab some food and she had a moment to be scared without the fear of scaring him too. Do-won had watched from the doorway as Yi-young spoke to her at her bedside in a firm, quiet voice, one hand on Eun-bin's on the top of the bedspread. He’d meant to go over and help comfort the patient, especially since Yi-young hadn’t originally been assigned her, but something about Yi-young’s focused expression made him stay where he was. It felt like he was standing there for hours, just looking at her, even though it could only have been a minute. 

Yi-young doesn’t make much sense to him. She can be callous and immature at times, but then occasionally she looks so much like a doctor that it kind of takes his breath away.

“There just wouldn’t be any point without her,” Si-woo says, and Do-won’s attention jumps back to him. “I don’t know why it took me so long to figure it out. We should’ve had more time.”

“What matters is that you’re here with her now. And you’ll have that time,” Do-won says. “I promise.”

When Eun-bin wakes up from surgery, Si-woo cries again, so loudly that everyone within fifty feet of the room can hear it. Do-won is filling out paperwork at the nurse’s station within that bubble of audible sobbing, but he pauses to shoot a text to Yi-young. She’d want to know, he figures. And he can’t keep avoiding her. It’s eating him up as it is. 

-

Never-ending floors spiral up and up and up away from him, doors branching off of them. He’s looking for his wife. Evil forces are coming to capture her, and she’ll only be safe if he finds her first. He climbs and climbs, tremors shaking the tower as he goes, making him unsteady on his feet. 

He’s lost track of the floors by the time he opens a door and finds her there. She’s sitting at a small table, her back to him. As he approaches, she starts to look up, but not before he bends down and wraps his arms around her from behind, resting his chin on her shoulder. 

She goes stiff. He snuggles into her anyway. 

“I found you,” he says.

“Do you know who I am right now?” she says slowly. 

“My wife.”

She swallows hard enough that he can hear it. 

“Do you know my name?”

“Of course I do,” he murmurs into her neck. “Yi-young-ah.”

She makes a sound he’s never heard before, some sort of laugh, sigh, and whine all at the same time. Her hands rise and flutter near his where they wrap around her biceps.

“You should probably let go.”

He doesn’t want to — now that he’s found her again, he just wants to cling on forever and forget the tower and the floors and the impending approach of the army down below. But he’ll do anything she asks, even if it feels like losing the sun to uncoil his arms and step back.

As he does so, she turns her head to look up at him. There’s a strange moment of displacement — the red hanbok she’s wearing blurs, turning into a blue set of scrubs, then into an old t-shirt and sweatpants. There’s something he knows, but can’t find right now. It’s scratching in the back of his mind, screaming at him. 

“You know, you’re really very confusing,” she says. 

Her hanbok reasserts itself, and the world makes sense again. 

“I’ll hold them off,” he tells her, and turns to head towards the oncoming threat. 

-

Do-won is running behind schedule, and shouldn’t be having to hunt down first years for patient info, but Kim Sa-bi is not answering her phone. He’s just about to go into the first year resident lounge to find her when he hears Yi-young’s voice through the door. For some reason, he stops, hand on the doorknob, and presses close to listen. 

“Do you think our dreams reflect things we secretly want to do?”

A male voice answers — Um Jae-il. 

“I never remember any of my dreams. I wake up hungry sometimes though.”

“That’s because you’re simple-minded.” Definitely Pyo Nam-Kyung. “I think that dreams are absolutely prophetic. In my mother’s conception dream for me, a dragon ate an apple and then grew a giant tree out of its mouth. And she ended up with a daughter that became a doctor, so.”

The whine of Kim Sa-bi cuts in briefly (“What do apples have to do with—”) before Yi-young is continuing. 

“I’m not talking about symbolism or metaphors, I just — if the same topic keeps coming up in your dreams, could it be a sign that that’s something you want in real life? Like, if I kept dreaming about eating cream buns, but I recently told someone that cream buns aren’t for me.”

“I don’t think you can put that much stake in it,” Sa-bi says. “I frequently dream that I am fighting a hippo, and I don't think I ever want to do that.”

“That has got to mean something in dream interpretation,” Nam-Kyung says. 

“You guys are useless,” Yi-young declares, and there’s the scraping sound of chairs moving. Do-won only just backs away from the door in time before it flies open and Yi-young careens out into the hallway. 

“Oh,” she says when she sees him. “You’re here.”

“Are you having trouble sleeping?” Do-won blurts. 

“What?”

“I heard you asking the other residents about bad dreams. And you were asking about sleepwalking the other day.”

She stares at him. Do-won feels prickly all over. Why is he even asking this? Why is he fussing about her problems like it’s any of his business? He thought he’d successfully put it out of his mind, but suddenly he’s remembering the moment in the elevator from weeks ago, waves of hot adrenaline and confusion coursing through him, her words hanging in the air. Can I like you?

“Never mind,” he says, and turns to go. 

“You’re sure you never remember your dreams?” she calls after him. 

It’s not until he’s gotten five minutes away that he remembers he was supposed to talk to Sa-bi.

-

He keeps forgetting what he's doing. His hands are stretched out in front of him, gripping the edge of the open kitchen cupboards, but beyond them there's just a yawning pit of space, stretching into the distance way beyond where the back of the cupboard should be. When he puts his hand inside, darkness swallows his arm up to the elbow, and he can't do anything about it except flail about in the darkness, hoping to find what he's searching for by touch alone. 

He's only been looking for a few minutes when he hears a voice behind him. 

“Are you awake, or are you sleepwalking again?”

“I’m awake,” he says, slightly irritated. When he sees her face, the feeling melts away. She’s just so pretty. 

She points at him. “You’re definitely sleepwalking if you’re smiling at me like that.”

He hums and turns back to the cupboards. What was he doing? He’s not sure. There’s something wrong with the basement, something big. He can’t remember what it is. Now that she’s in the room, his attention keeps skipping to her. 

“I can’t help but want to smile at my wife,” he tells her.

“I wonder if you’d call my sister that if she was the one who caught you wandering around the kitchen like this.”

As if he could mistake her sister for her. He tries to tell her this, but the words seem to fall out of his head as they enter it. The cupboard has gotten angry with him and forced his arms out of it, but the upside is that he can turn and look at her properly. 

He’s so happy to see her. They’ve been married for a year now. They’re trying for a child. It’s pure muscle memory that when she steps in next to him at the counter to reach for something in the cupboard, he ducks down and kisses her. 

His aim is off, and he hits the side of her mouth. She gasps, lips popping open. The bubble of ‘wife’ almost bursts, but it doesn’t — he’s still in the story, he’s underwater, her as the only lifeline. He slides over, lines their mouths up better and kisses her again, sinking into it. 

I should’ve done this in the elevator. 

He pulls away, confused, but as soon as he tries to chase the thought, it’s vanished. And there’s his wife in front of him, frozen like a statue, her lips looking pink and well-kissed. He smiles at her and goes to lean in again, but she transforms into a whirlwind and dances around to his other shoulder before he can get close. 

“I know you’re not supposed to challenge sleepwalkers, but I’m not your wife,” she tells him, in a mild, even tone. “You turned me down.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he says. There’s something he’s forgotten. What is it? “I need to fix the basement.”

“That just proves my point. We live in an apartment with my sister and her husband, who is your brother. There is no basement.”

He wants to tell her that her story makes absolutely no sense — he never would’ve pursued her if he lived with his brother and sister-in-law in the same house as her, it would’ve been far too complicated and would’ve forced him to live in denial of his attraction for as long as humanly possible — but he can’t quite remember what they’re talking about long enough to string the words together. She’s so funny, his wife. With her serious face and her pout and her silky hair. 

She’s talking again, and he struggles to refocus. The whirlwind hasn’t fully dissipated, and it keeps stirring a cloud of dust around her feet. “If we’re married, how did we get together?”

“We met at the hospital, and I asked you out,” he says. “But you confessed first. I’m not good with taking risks."

She laughs. She’s beginning to sink into the floor a little, gone up to the ankles, wind still fretting at her legs. The gusts rattle the kitchen chairs behind her, but they don’t seem to affect him at all. 

“That’s pretty believable, for a dream,” she says. 

“Okay, Dr. Oh,” he says, playing along. “If you’re not my wife, why are you letting me do this?”

He kisses her again. For a split second, her mouth is pliant under his, but then she sucks in a sharp breath and draws back, just enough to break the contact. “Because I like you so much,” she says quietly. “So it’s hard not to. But I shouldn’t let you. You wouldn’t do this if you were awake.”

He’s trying to pay attention to her, but it’s an undeniable fact that he needs to leave to plug up the hole in the basement, or the entire house will get sucked down into the underworld. He can already feel the pull of it at his own feet, the spaghettification taking over. 

He tries to touch her face one last time, but his arm just kind of twitches at his side, unresponsive. Frustration leaks through him. He’s going to forget this. He always forgets. He always loses her. 

“I love you,” he tries to say, but it comes out more like “linguini.”

She says something else, but he’s already sinking into another layer of the universe, one where she isn’t there. Only the words, “walk you back” and “yarrow” reach down to him as he falls. 

-

As exhausted doctor mistakes go, sleeping through his vacation is pretty innocuous, but it’s still a little disheartening. Still, he should’ve seen it coming: he’s been sleeping worse than usual for a while now. A couple weeks ago he woke up in the bathroom with no recollection of motoring himself there. 

Since there’s no point in booking a new flight to Taiwan for the one remaining full day of leave, Do-won cancels his return flight and spends the day catching up on sleep around the house. His rest is stymied by the fact that everywhere he looks, there seems to be some reminder of Yi-young — a sweater of hers slung over the kitchen table, her toothbrush in the bathroom, a stray sock crammed against the corner of the sofa that he shouldn’t be able to tell is hers, except for some reason he remembers the teddy bear icon at the top of the band, remembers noticing them one Friday when she joined him to watch TV, her hair still damp from the shower, her legs curled up to her chest, feet on the cushions. 

At work, at home — she’s everywhere these days. 

In the afternoon, his brother comes home early from work, blustering something about everyone being let off early, and how it has nothing to do with Do-won, don’t be so vain, and the two of them watch baseball reruns together while they wait for that night’s game. Neither of them really follow sports, but with Yi-young at work and Joo-young out with a group of friends, it’s a rare time for the two of them to hang out as brothers, and it seems like the thing brothers are meant to do: watch sports together.

"I still can't believe you slept through your plane," Seung-won says. 

“My professor told me she once did the same thing.”

“So you’re not the only obsessed person in that hospital, that’s good to know. I'm sorry you're here instead of on a beach though. All those missed reservations — ah, it must be torture for you.”

The strange thing is that he’s not really thinking about how he’d missed out on the things he’d planned to see in Taiwan. The thing that’s stuck in his brain is that hug in the OR: Yi-young and that young guy from obstetrics. What was his name again? Dr. Ham? He's too tall; the way Yi-young had to reach up so far to embrace him looked uncomfortable. Her head must have been tilted at a weird angle every time. But it hadn’t seemed like she minded much considering how tightly they held each other, how she still went in for the second hug. 

Do-won is shorter than that guy. Still taller than Yi-young of course, but a much more even height difference. He isn’t a guy who strains people’s necks. Should he be? No. She likes him the way he is. 

The thought makes him feel weird — guilty, maybe. The idea of her liking him had registered as a threat when she first lobbed it at him. To be thinking of it now as a balm for these new insecurities is strangely destabilizing. He should want her to have someone who likes her back. 

Maybe her usual type is much taller guys, like that other doctor. He doesn’t know that much about her, he realizes. He knows the food she likes. He knows how she prefers to stretch out on the sofa to watch TV. He knows her brand of beer and her go-to sweatpants. He knows the look on her face at work when she's about to shift into gear and put all of her fears behind her. But he doesn't know what her life was like before she moved in with them. Living together has given him all these intimate details before he bothered to get the big picture stuff. It's like he’s been standing with his face so close to the canvas that he doesn’t even know what the whole painting looks like. 

Did she really punch a doctor at that local hospital to lose her job last year? He’d overheard her and her sister talking about the rumour once, but not in a way that made it clear if it had actually happened. He remembers thinking at the time that it was probably true — after all, his understanding of her back then was that she was hotheaded and always looking for problems, a summary judgment that makes him cringe just to think of. All these months working with her have taught him that she doesn’t lose her cool without a reason. If she punched someone, they deserved it. 

He should ask about it. He must’ve asked before. Has he really not? 

He could just get Seung-won to tell him. His brother would probably know. But instead, he hears himself ask, “How did you know Joo-young was the right person?”

His brother hums and thinks about it for a moment. “Well, we met at work, so I got to see her in action. And maybe it’s not romantic to say it like this, but I really respected her work ethic. She just seemed so smart and on top of things all the time.” He shoots Do-won a grin. “It helped that she was the prettiest on the team by a long mile, of course.”

He’s clearly thrilled to be acting in the role of an older brother and dispensing worldly experience, so Do-won rewards him with a chuckle. 

“We had a team dinner to congratulate her for big progress she made on a project,” Seung-won continues. “She offered to pour everyone a round, and while she was pouring my drink,” he leans in and bumps his shoulder against Do-won’s, “she touched my hand. On purpose. And she looked at me with this smile in her eyes, and I just knew she was it.”

“It was something that small?”

“You don't need more when you already like them as person. Sometimes it’s the tiniest moment that pushes you over the edge.”

Do-won looks down at the beer in his hand, watching a bead of light slide around the opening as he tilts it in a slow circle. A thought looms, big enough that he can feel its shadow even as he turns away from it. 

Seung-won leans forward, twisting so he can see Do-won’s face better. “You aren't asking because you've got a crush on someone, are you?”

Before Do-won can panic, his brother waves a hand dismissively and sits back. 

“No, I’ll know it's happened when you break your routine for someone,” he says authoritatively. “Right now, you only do that when we make you, or when Yi-young needs a drive or something. You’re so stuck in your ways — when you change for someone, that’s when it’s real.”

Do-won forces a laugh. “Yeah. Right.”

The game is close enough to its end that Do-won pops a sleeping pill with his last swig of beer. He wants to be able to pass out as soon as it kicks in and get a good six hours before he has to leave the house at 4 a.m. When he puts the pill bottle back down on the coffee table, Seung-won leans forward and inspects the label. 

“You really shouldn't take that brand of sleeping meds,” he says. 

“I only started trying them recently,” Do-won says. “Why?”

“I’m surprised a doctor doesn't know this — I heard those ones can re-trigger sleepwalkers. And the other night, I found you standing in the hallway just muttering to yourself. When I asked you what you were doing, you just asked if I knew where your wife was, and then went back to your room.”

Do-won looks from the pill bottle to Seung-won’s face.

“You're only telling me this after you saw me take it again?"

“Eh, I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

-

He’s drowning. 

Waves of thick sludge cling to his body, churning up around his waist and chest, so dense it feels like hands dragging him downwards. He can barely keep his head above the current, catching only the occasional gasp of air. Only a distant circle of light past his head tells him which direction is up. 

No matter which direction he strikes out in, there’s no ledge, no progress towards the walls of the pit surrounding him, just endless murky goo. It isn’t terror that cuts through him though — it’s just exhaustion. He’s been here for a very long time. He knows it like his feet know to kick. 

Faces form in the substance around him, meaty fish bodies melting in and out of the sludge. He thinks for a moment that he sees Professor Seo, then Dr. Ham, then just a tangle of tuna and surgical masks. 

‘Where are you trying to go?’ a fish asks him. ‘What are you waiting for?’

He cycles his arms again, fighting for a moment of clean air. It’s enough just to exist for the next breath. What else is he supposed to move towards? 

‘Yes, that’s what I’m asking you,’ the fish says, in a tone of voice that suggests he's being very stupid. 

I don’t know, he wants to tell it, but there’s too much confusion, too much gunk flowing around his face. He doesn’t know, he’s never given himself time to know, to figure himself out, to want something other than the daily churn, he doesn’t—

“I’m going to have to wake you up this time,” a voice says. 

And there she is, standing above him, out of reach of the rising tide: his wife. The happiness he feels is mind-altering. Life-changing. 

“I’m so glad to see you,” he says. 

“Go back to bed,” she says. “Or else. You know, I did warn you.” But she’s reaching for him all the same, reaching down into the pit to draw him up into the light. He moves towards her as best he can. 

“Yi-young,” he breathes. “You need to know that I—"

-

Do-won becomes aware of himself in stages. His face hurts. The skin stings. The inside of his cheek has clearly recently become acquainted with his teeth. His eyes are open, his neck is twisted to the side, and he’s facing a set of cupboards. He blinks, unwinds his neck back to neutral, and suddenly Yi-young is there, inches away. 

The biggest thing he can comprehend for a long moment is her face. As his body reboots, he becomes aware of cold tile beneath his feet, cold air on his legs. He’s in the kitchen in the boxers and t-shirt he went to sleep in, and Yi-young is standing so close he wonders if he’s still dreaming. 

Because he just had been, hadn’t he? The details are fading like grains of sand in an hourglass, but he knows he was just in a dream. And she was there too. 

“You were sleepwalking,” she tells him. Her eyes are strangely bright, shiny. “You’ve been sleepwalking randomly for weeks now. I had to slap you to wake you up. Sorry.”

“Oh,” he says, because he can’t really manage anything else. He still feels like he’s underwater. He thinks he might have been in his dream. He’s definitely off-balance on the edge of something, fighting the gravitational force of her face so close to his. 

“You need to figure out how to stop it, because my room is closest to the kitchen, and you keep waking me up,” she says firmly. “One time I found you rooting in the cupboards and you handed me a box of shrimp crackers and said they were sutures.”

“Sutures are a thing you do, not something stored in boxes,” he says stupidly. 

“I know that.”

“I’m sorry. I hope I haven’t done anything weirder than that.”

She breaks into a tiny smile. “It was pretty funny at the time. But this can’t go on.”

He’s awake enough to know he should step back now. He’s looming over her in the kitchen they share, at god knows what time of night. But he can’t move. 

“You’re so pretty,” he hears himself say. 

“I thought that slap woke you up,” Yi-young says. A flush is spreading unevenly across her cheeks. “Are you still asleep?”

“No,” he says. “I’m not asleep.”

He wants to kiss her. The desire pulses through his body slow, sluggish, waking up the rest of him. It’s too strong to be new. The only thing that’s new is his willingness to feel it. And god, is he feeling it right now, the blood tingling in his hands, his mouth. He wants to kiss her so much it almost takes him out at the knees. 

But in their kitchen in the middle of the night while he’s half-awake isn’t the way he wants to do this. And he does want to do this, he realizes. It doesn’t matter that their siblings are married and her sister might kick his ass. It doesn’t matter that they work together and that Yi-young might still realize she only liked him out of proximity and that she’s way out of his league and then leave him in the lurch. It doesn’t matter that there’s that other doctor hanging around her all the time, inviting her to dinners. Do-won likes her. He likes her so much. There’s no point in ignoring it anymore. 

If he kisses her now — hungry and weak and far too few steps from his bedroom — he doesn't know if he’ll be able to stop. And he wants to do this right. Ask her to dinner. Buy her flowers. Hold her hand first. Break every routine.

So he takes a breath and steps back, letting the tension trapped between their bodies fall away. 

“Thank you for waking me up,” he says. “It’s probably the sleep medication I’ve been taking. I’ll make sure to stop using it.”

“Okay,” she says. For a moment it looks like she wants to say something else, her bottom lip caught by her teeth. But then she just takes a deep breath and smiles at him, the way she’s started to learn to do at work with the difficult patients. He gives her a nod, and a “sleep well,” and they both split up to head to their respective rooms. 

He’s just about to pull his door open when he hears her voice again.  

“Do-won?”

She’s paused outside of her bedroom, a square shaft of yellow light cutting a line across her face from the cracked-open door. The lip-bite is back. If she gives the slightest indication that she wants him to, Do-won thinks, he’s going to be at that doorway in seconds. 

“Any fish in this dream?” she asks. “Too many, maybe?” 

A glistening, muddy set of eyeballs. A gummy set of lips and a question. What are you waiting for?

“Not too many,” he tells her, and can’t help but smile, feeling like she’s somehow in on it. “Just enough.”