Yesteryear

Sleeping for a Month

Wooyoung had slept for a week after his trip to Rome. Yongguk had instructed him to demand all the time he needed to replenish his energies and Wooyoung had taken him up on that. For a blissful week, he altered between ordering food, watching his show, and taking naps all day. His bruises healed much faster in their usual surroundings and, after a week of bliss, he could proudly say that he got bored and wanted to go back to work.

The first thing he did after his long holiday was calling Seungyoun so they could gossip about his trip together. When Wooyoung mentioned getting railed in the garden of a Roman villa, Seungyoun had yelled at him through his choked up laughter. Wooyoung had giggled and played with the plushie in his hands. It was a little rabbit with floppy ears he had ever since he was a child.

"Young man! Was syphilis a thing back then?! I swear to God; if you brought syphilis back-"

Wooyoung had interrupted his indignant friend with a chuckle.

"I already took a test, no worries. I'm clean as I can be. Syphilis wasn't a thing yet, either."

Seungyoun had grumbled something about the lack of safety two thousand years ago under his breath. Then, he had dropped the mom show to ask Wooyoung about his experience. Looking back, the memory - a much as it melted Wooyoung's insides - sounded like a fairytale to tell.

"I had a bad time after I got attacked for speaking to the wrong woman and the lord I visited was disheartened by the idea I might leave Rome with a grudge. As if. But he took me to the party of his hot neighbour; his name was Sandalius. And we drank Cretic Wine and things just dwindled, and then- Oh, fuck." Wooyoung interrupted his speech to look down on himself with a frown. Via his phone, Seungyoun squeaked at the sudden break right at the juicy bits.

"What?"

Wooyoung masked his facepalm by running a hand through his hair. And he had speculated why he had been unusually fatigued. Sandalius had literally said the wine would 'help him sleep.'

"I have opium in my blood. Damn it." Wooyoung wasn't one to abuse drugs, on the job or not. He wasn't surprised that in his drunken state, he had forgotten that the Romans spiked their Cretic Wine with it.

Seungyoun's noise was understanding. Opium was so spread out in history all over the world that it came to no shock that they got in contact with it occasionally.

"It should have disappeared already by now. Spicy, though. Tell Yongguk in case some officials drop by to run a blood test on you," Seungyoun said. His words soothed Wooyoung's distress, and he picked up his story again. He left out the explicit details even when Seungyoun whined at him since they were a private secret between Sandalius and Wooyoung. The joy he shared with the god of a man was one Seungyoun couldn't easily reimagine.

They ended their call without an update. Yongguk was still working on the new case and while he had found a trail again, he had yet to locate its source. Until he didn't give the command, Wooyoung had absolutely nothing to do. He could only lounge around and relish in the memories of Babylon, Rome and the two attractive men he had met there that were so similar and yet so different.

But this time, the wait until he could leave again stretched unexpectedly long. Wooyoung visited Yongguk in the institute once to find him half-starved, fatigued even through the masses of caffeine in his blood, and with his hands buried in his greasy hair. He had vented to Wooyoung about his struggle to find anything, about how the trails he discovered lost themselves into nowhere and were thinner than hair. Wooyoung had helped him during the afternoon as they sorted out already recorded tales to pick out new and interesting factors. They were beyond the year 500 AD with their chronological search now and Yongguk feared they wouldn't find anything after such a big time frame.