everybody walk the dinosaur ( infinite, yadong, nc-17 )

[nerveless]

Title: Everybody Walk The Dinosaur
Pairing: Yadong (Hoya/Dongwoo)
Rating: NC-17
WC: 8,682
Summary: Hoya goes on an archaeological field trip to Peru for school and discovers a new species of weird boy in his tentmate.
Notes: My excuse to geek out on anthropology via fiction. Also, I needed to write another Yadong very badly and accidentally cranked out another longfic. Total freak accident. I've never even been to South America, I hope it doesn't show. Cameos by Jiho (Zico) of Block B, Dongrim (Youngwon) of Dalmatian, Amber of f(x) and Hyungshik of ZE:A.


The door barges open while he's busy rifling through the papers on his desk, glasses perched precariously on the bridge of his nose and threatening to slide off the tip to careen down towards the floor, making them the fourth pair of his college years (the first three having been lost at a friend's house, sat on in the library and crushed beneath a pile of heavy schoolbooks in his room, respectively) he'd have to replace. Hoya sets a small stack of papers aside on the desk and nudges his glasses back up into a safer position with one finger, looking over at his roommate, Sungjong, who has just sat on his bed to reach for his pink laptop.

"Hey," he greets Sungjong, quickly dismissing the boy to go back to his task at his desk.

Sungjong looks up, smiling, and then raises his eyebrow. "What are you looking for?"

"These forms," Hoya sighs, setting yet another set of class notes to the side. "I never put any of this stuff in order in my folders. I thought it was in this stack."

"You should really take your computer to class to type notes on," Sungjong shakes his head. "You write way too much. You'll give yourself early arthritis."

Hoya shrugs him off, showing with the gesture that he is listening to the younger boy and at the same time letting him know that he isn't going to take any of his suggestions to heart. Hoya has his ways of doing things and he likes to stick to them, whether he's killing his fingers or not.

"Where the hell is it?" Hoya grumbles, dumping the rest of the papers in his Fieldwork class folder out on his desk. He slides papers aside with his fingertips until he at last spots what he's looking for, lifting the form and peering over his glasses to read the bold font across the top.

"What is it for?" Sungjong asks curiously, typing away at his laptop.

"My class is going on a trip in a couple of weeks," Hoya says, sitting on his bed and speed-reading through the form. "I have to take this to my professor so he knows I'm going. It's required to go on the trip in order to graduate, so I figured I'd get it out of the way now so I don't have to worry about it next year."

"That sounds fun," Sungjong flops onto his stomach, setting his computer in front of him on his bed. "Where are you all going?"

"Machu Picchu," Hoya replies distractedly, grabbing a pen to sign his name on the bottom of the form. "In Peru. We're staying at an excavation site nearby."

"Wow," Sungjong breathes, eyes wide. "I wish I could go on that trip."

Hoya laughs. "It is pretty neat, but I don't know how much I'm looking forward to digging in the hot sun all summer."

He sets his pen down, looking the form over again briefly, and then tucks it away along with all of his class notes, making sure the form is clearly visible at the top of the stack.

Hoya hands his form off to his professor before the start of his next class, standing in the long queue of students wishing to go along on the summer trip. It seems practically everyone from his class is going and he wonders how many other classes full of students are going to join them. Sitting back down in his seat, Hoya opens his folder to ready himself to take notes as the professor takes the last student's form and sets them all together in a pile.

"Now, remember," his professor speaks up, "there's a lot of people going to Peru this year, so we're going to have to split people up into the group staying at the excavation camp and the group staying in the tents outside. We're going to separate the tent people into random groups of two to share a tent, so I don't want people coming up to me later on complaining about having to stay in the tents because we don't have enough room in the camp. You get dealt what you get dealt, and that's that."

Several students begin whispering to their neighbors afterwards, wondering who's going to end up in tents. A girl sitting in front of Hoya hisses that there's no way she's spending the summer in a tent in the mountains and he rolls his eyes, settling back in his seat as his professor shushes everyone and changes the topic to the day's lecture. Hoya sits up straighter, eyes focusing on the white screen at the front of the class, and he lets his pen fly across the paper as he mechanically copies down every line of notes exactly as it appears before his eyes.

By the time his lecture finishes and the lights come back on in the room, Hoya's hand is aching in a subtle, good way and he feels accomplished as he stretches his arms out and puts his folder away in his backpack. His eyes catch on the back of a blond head bounding out of the classroom, one he's found himself training his eyes on during lulls in his professor's lectures, and he wonders to himself what the owner of the head looks like from the front because he can only ever remember seeing the back. Shrugging his backpack on and shifting the heavy weight across his shoulders, Hoya follows the line of people making their stampeding exit out of the lecture hall, letting the blond slip back out of his mind with the sudden, much more pertinent crowding of thoughts about the day's menu at the campus cafeteria.

Hoya hadn't decided to pursue the career of an anthropologist because he had any deep-seated interests in the origins of his own species. He hadn't chosen it because he wanted to discover fossils millions of years old that would land his name permanently in the textbooks he buried his nose in semester after semester, either. When he was being perfectly honest with himself, Hoya could admit that he most likely decided on anthropology as a major because he realized how little he actually understood about his own species. He didn't know why humans lived their lives the way they have over time, transforming into creatures starving for any knowledge that might lead them down the path of immortality, a super-species that could outwit death while doling it out to any other species they considered to be beneath them (including the same planet they traversed). Hoya couldn't understand why other people were cruel, violent, greedy and wholly ignorant to moral relativism. He watched the news as a child, as a young adult and as a boy on the cusp of becoming a man, alarmed at all of the different ways human beings were inclined to treat other human beings. He had considered, briefly, becoming a police officer, in the hopes that he could stop this kind of behavior from happening in his own community. As he continued to grow older, however, he became unsatisfied with this goal. He resolved instead to figure out the whys and the hows rather than focusing on the whos and whats, reading everything he could about different cultures and the intricacies of societies other than the one he grew up in, trying to figure out what went wrong with the people he'd evolved alongside in the evolutionary chain. He found his sanctuary in his studies of cultural anthropology, where he was allowed to keep himself at a distance from the societies he scrutinized under the microscope of his mind's eye while still delving deeply into the webs that created them. This illusion of safety, this glass wall that he carried with him inside of his body everywhere he went, was not something he ever thought he'd have to reinforce, but Hoya was still learning, still brand new to the concepts he was trying so hard to understand, and he greatly underestimated the very species he thought was only dangerous on the other side of the thick plexiglass.

Before he knows it, Hoya's on a plane to South America, resting his head against a small single issue airplane pillow that's a bit too bulky to be moved around much and a bit too small to offer enough padding to keep his neck from cricking on the ten thousand mile flight. Sungjong had dropped him off in Incheon with a farewell wave and a request for souvenirs he could show off to all of his friends, and Hoya had found himself boarding the plane along with a few familiar faces from his Fieldwork class. There's a girl he remembers as Amber sitting a few rows ahead of him and another girl he thinks is either Sunhwa or Sunhee in the row across the aisle from him, who has been fiddling with the overhead air condition port for the past ten minutes. There's also a couple guys he recognizes sitting here and there, a Hyungshik and maybe a Dongrim, and then he notices that blond hair sticking out towards the front of their section, waving around like the person the hair belongs to is wiggling in place in his seat. Hoya cranes his neck to try to see, but the seats are blocking his view and he has no choice but to sit back again, sighing and trying to make an effort to sleep most of the long plane trip off.

After finally landing in Lima, Hoya claims his luggage and follows the small line of his classmates towards the airport lobby, where his professor is waiting with another group of students who had taken a different, earlier flight. His professor rounds them up and checks them off of a list in his hand, making sure everyone who was supposed to take the flight arrived, and then he leads them out of the airport to the waiting vans at the curb. He takes a moment to let everyone know the trip out to Cuzco is twenty hours long and they'll be stopping in one hour to eat and another several hours to stay in a hotel for the night. Hoya drags his luggage to the van and helps to pack it away for the road trip, climbing on board the van and finding a seat next to a guy wearing large headphones. He immediately passes out again, exhausted from the jet lag and the extremely long flight, and he gets shaken awake by Headphones Boy when the van stops at a small restaurant.

In the restaurant, the groups from his van and the other van gather in the small, wooden booths to eat food none of them have ever heard of before. Hoya pokes at his food with his fork, tasting the beans on his plate, and quickly decides that he's so ravenous he doesn't care what the food tastes like. He devours his plate in record time and looks up to see that his classmates all seem to be about as starved as he is, shoveling forkfuls of food into their mouths as if the airplane food had all been poisoned or inedible (and in some ways, it had been). Headphones - who he now knows as Jiho - claims he had skipped the airplane food entirely and hadn't eaten in over twenty four hours, wiping his mouth with his napkin and setting it down on his clean plate.

"I think they make airplane food taste like shit so you'll be so starved when you get there you buy all of the expensive airport food," Jiho says, crossing his arms over his chest.

"That makes sense," Dongrim nods over his plate, sliding the corn stuck on his fork off with his teeth.

Hoya smiles at them and glances back over his shoulder to survey the restaurant. Three tables away, Blondie is laughing uproariously at something someone at his table has said, clapping his thighs with his hands and bending at the waist to chortle into his lap. Hoya blinks, observing the boy's rambunctious disposition, and gets distracted by his professor making his rounds at their table to ask if everyone's done eating.

They get back on the road soon and Hoya spends the rest of the long trip to their hotel staring out the window at the unfamiliar scenery. Peru is just as beautiful as Hoya always imagined it would be, but the beauty is something that tugs at his gut almost uncomfortably, making it difficult for him to breathe. Or perhaps that is the thinning air, he thinks, as their van swiftly approaches the mountainous regions of the Andes. Something about them, about the distant peaks and near rocky surface, settles in an almost tangible weight on his chest. Hoya takes it all in, letting his breath fog the window, until his eyes slip closed once again and he drifts off into those cloudy peaks.

The road out from Cuzco to their camp is winding, thin and a bit more treacherous than Hoya can handle, so he takes a break from staring out his window to stare forward through the front windshield. Jiho doesn't seem to mind the sheer drop off from the edge of the road at all and keeps leaning over beside him to look out and gawk at the vista from the mountainside. Everyone in the van cries out at once when the driver suddenly brakes to avoid a rogue mountain goat and Hoya briefly imagines the vehicle toppling over into the open abyss, making headlines and forcing their university to send letters of apology home to grieving parents, but instead the goat scampers back up the face of the mountain and they continue their journey unscathed.

They manage to arrive at camp before sunset. The camp itself looks like a large wooden building from the outside, the inside filled with rows and rows of flat, wooden double bunks and some tables towards the opposite end of the building where a small kitchen area is set up for the cooks to make breakfast each morning. Mosquito net surrounds each of the bunks, draping over the bare boards, and Hoya has to wonder exactly what sorts of mutant, hideous insects come out during the Peruvian nights.

"We don't have time to visit the site today," their professor lets them know as they drag luggage out from the vans into the building. "We'll be getting up early tomorrow to visit Machu Picchu first and then drop by the site to run through the procedures you'll be dealing with this summer. Tonight, we have to get the tents set up for the people who'll be staying in there. And here," he pulls out a paper, "is the list of who's staying where."

Everyone drops their bags at once to listen closely to the sleeping assignments, ears perked up like dogs at the sound of a mail truck.

Hoya decides he has the worst luck in the world when he gets assigned to a tent rather than to a bunk in the camp. He envisions the next two months of his life, living out of a shaky little tent with a complete stranger sleeping beside him and the entirety of the Andes Mountains and all its various wildlife separated from him only by a stretched, thin sheet of tarp.

He lugs his bags the short hike to Tent #7 with a grumble and an agitated roll to his walk. Once he gets there, he notices that his tentmate has already set his bags aside and begun struggling with the task of setting the tent up. It's Blondie, he realizes, and then furrows his brow trying to remember the name his own had been called out with. Dongwoo. Jang Dongwoo, he thinks, assigning the name to the face before him, now pinched in concentration as the boy tugs at a hook and pulls it to a stake in the hard ground.

Hoya sets his own bags down to walk over and take the opposite corner of the tent, hooking it into place. Dongwoo looks up, wiping his brow with a wide smile, and it's exactly the kind of smile that Hoya's always had trouble resisting the urge to grin back at.

"Thanks," Dongwoo says, reaching a hand out.

Hoya stares at it for a moment before realizing he's supposed to shake it, so he does.

"We're rooming together, huh?" Dongwoo asks. He laughs suddenly, falling back onto his ass and breaking his fall with outstretched arms. "Tenting together! We're tenting together. That sounds so funny."

Hoya stares back at him, cracking an unsure grin. He can already tell he's going to have issues with understanding his new tent partner. Once they've settled in and effectively turned their tent into their new temporary residence, Hoya and Dongwoo trek back to camp to look for snacks to fill their bellies with before nightfall. Hoya finds a bag of trail mix and Dongwoo opts for the less calorie-friendly Peruvian milk chocolate candy bar.

That night, Hoya takes a notebook from the small pile he brought along for note-taking purposes throughout the summer and starts a diary.

Monday, June 6th --

Made it to camp. Mountains are beautiful. Have to stay in a tent all summer, which sucks. Met Dongwoo. Sort of weird. We'll see how this goes...

Dongwoo is up at the crack of dawn the next morning, and Hoya knows this because he makes so much noise flapping around their tent getting ready for the day it wakes Hoya up. He sits up, wiping the sleep from his eyes, and watches as Dongwoo pulls a hat on over his head and looks up.

"Hey, you're up! We need to get to camp already if we want to snatch some breakfast. First come, first serve, remember?"

Hoya makes the kind of grunting sound he's fairly sure originated from his ancestor, the homo neanderthalensis. Dongwoo laughs in response, grabbing his shoes. They take the walk from the tent to camp together and manage to snag a bowl of breakfast each in the camp's kitchen. Jiho and Dongrim, who had also been assigned a tent together, are seated at one of the tables and Jiho waves them over once they leave the line at the breakfast tables.

"This fool snores like a freight train," Jiho thumbs at Dongrim, who's having trouble keeping his face from planting itself into his eggs. His eyes snap open at being addressed and he makes an affronted face at Jiho.

"Excuse me? Who was the one who insisted on keeping us up until who knows when listening to all of your hip hop or whatever songs?"

"Hey, nothing wrong with hip hop," Dongwoo defends Jiho. Jiho cracks a grin and puts his fork down to high five Dongwoo over the table. Dongrim shoves a forkful of tamal into his mouth, sniffing haughtily, and Hoya laughs to himself into a closed fist, dropping half of the eggs on his fork into his lap.

They have about fifteen minutes to themselves before their professor and a couple of Peruvian guides round them all up to head to Machu Picchu. Heading down the road on the bus, it's obvious to Hoya how excited his classmates are to visit the ruins. Dongwoo in particular looks as if he couldn't hold his excitement in even if he tried, and he's practically vibrating with it, talking the ears off of anyone who happens to be sitting too close to him. When he starts in on their professor, Hoya can't help but snicker into his hands at the overwhelmed and exasperated look the poor man gives his enthusiastic student as he offhandedly asks the guide how far they are.

Hoya soon finds that there is a reason Machu Picchu is considered a Wonder of the World. The complex is so vast and sprawling it takes them a huge chunk of the morning to explore each sector of the ancient city. As Hoya walks the dusty tour trail at his classmates' heels, his mouth remains in an open, awed gawk as he passes by each ruined building, imagining the city as it was when it was bustling with life, Incas rushing through the complex to meet up, to pray, to work, to bury, to worship and to live between the stone walls. Dongwoo finds him contemplating the fallen half-circle of the Temple of the Sun and stands beside him, looking on with him at what had once been a site of such sacred silence.

"It's pretty amazing, huh?" Dongwoo breathes, restricting the volume of his voice as if out of respect, like there might still be people inside, heads bowed in reverence.

Hoya looks at him, at his eyes flicking about to study the structure of the building, and he wonders what Dongwoo believes in, what he was raised to believe. They hurry to get back to the rest of the group outside of the Royal Palace and move on through the rest of the sacred district. Amber stops every few steps to capture the images of the stone structures on her camera and Hoya makes a mental note to himself to ask her to see all of the pictures once they're back at camp. At the Main Square, they take a break to sit and drink water, passing out the individual bottles and wiping the sweat from their brows. Jiho remains standing, setting his hands on his hips and looking towards Intihuatana rising ahead of them.

"If I lived here back then," he proclaims, making a few students turn their heads to him, "I'd be the leader. I'd live in that Palace and life would be good."

Dongwoo cracks up beside Hoya and holds his water bottle out in front of Hoya's face, shaking it. Hoya has his own water bottle sitting at his feet, so he gives Dongwoo's bottle a puzzled look before another insistent shake of the plastic makes him grab it away from Dongwoo's hand, dutifully taking a long drink and resolutely not thinking about Dongwoo's saliva getting in his mouth. Dongwoo looks at him and smiles brilliantly, and Hoya squints a bit, thinking about how it's way too hot to be looking as happy as he does.

Hoya shakes his head and decides he understands even less about Dongwoo than he thought he had the day before.

"Okay, people, let's get back on track," his professor waves them over.

Hoya caps Dongwoo's water bottle and hands it back, grabbing his own off the ground. They make their way through the rest of city quickly, desperate to get out of the heat. Dongwoo is much more quiet on the way back and Hoya takes the opportunity to observe him a bit more closely, taking note of the way he taps his thumbs against the sides of his thighs while he tilts his head to watch the road.

That night, he writes in his diary:

Dongwoo would make a better King than Jiho.

Dongwoo tells him about the dinosaurs on their first full day at the excavation site. Hoya had pinned the blond as a physical anthropologist, for some reason, imagining him cavorting around with apes and monkeys through dense jungle.

"Nope," Dongwoo shakes his head, fiddling with the trowel in his hands. "I'm all about bones. I want to discover a new dinosaur someday and name it after myself."

Hoya blinks. "The Dongwoosaurus?"

"Something like that," Dongwoo laughs, pulling his elbows in to his sides to imitate a velociraptor's walk.

Hoya tries to mentally make a reminder to write this observation down in his diary.

Dongwoo's enthusiasm for archaeology doesn't seem to translate into skill with excavation techniques, though, and Hoya keeps having to fix improperly dug edges around Dongwoo's work area before they fall under the notice of their professor's eagle eyes. For the most part, their work is silent work, and Hoya frequently laments the fact that he finally has friends he can talk to freely but has to work in areas too separated from the others on their grid of digging spots to be able to hold a conversation. Instead, he spends time looking up from his slowly deepening hole every day to observe the way Dongrim always trips on the edges of his own hole, Jiho gets into his daily arguments with the professor about his sloppy digging and constant ruining of his context layers, Amber takes breaks when the professor is well out of sight and sits on the edge of her dig hole snapping photos of the other students and the scenery, Hyungshik attempts to nap in the bottom of his work area without getting caught (but he does, every day), and Dongwoo swings his arms, impaling his trowel into the dirt and carefully measuring his layers, sweating through shirt after shirt, the muscles in his arms slowly becoming more defined as the days wind by.

By the end of their first month, Hoya's diary is already filled with his daily observations. Most of them are about Dongwoo, he realizes after he sits down to read them while Dongwoo is out of the tent. He hadn't thought he was mentioning the boy any more often than any of his other classmates, but the frequency with which his name crops up surprises Hoya.

Dongwoo thinks he was a zebra in his past life.

Dongwoo got corn stuck in his teeth at breakfast. I didn't tell him.

Dongwoo gets blisters on his hands really easy, so we stole a bunch of band-aids from the camp.

To be fair, I'm pretty sure it only exploded because Dongwoo sat on it.

Jiho thinks Dongwoo is an alien.

Dongwoo's eyes are too crinkly.

But then Dongwoo ate it and Prof. Lee got pissed at him.

Dongwoo talks in his sleep. All the time. I try not to suffocate him with my pillow.

Dongwoo's body gets really warm at night and it makes the tent all hot.

I never realized before how big Dongwoo's mouth is. It's cavernous.

Dongwoo thought he found a dinosaur bone today but it was fossilized poop. He still got bonus points, though.

Dongwoo said once his sister put a dress on him and he promised he'd let me see the picture when we get back home.

Dongwoo has kind of a crazy smile.

I dreamt about Dongwoo and he was flying.

Sometimes, when I look at Dongwoo from my pit, he's standing in his already looking back at me.

The July digs kick off with a bang when one morning brings shockingly cold weather into the camp. Hoya wakes up freezing his ass off, teeth clacking together, to find that Dongwoo is already awake and busy piling on as many layers of shirts as he can fit on his body. Outside the tent, they find that the rest of the camp has been similarly affected by the sudden cold front. Their professor gathers the flock of shivering students together inside of the camp building for the usual morning roundup and declares that they're taking the day off to stay in and make sure no one gets sick.

Perhaps counterproductive to their professor's intentions, a small group decides to spend the day off by bribing the Peruvian guide to drive them out to Cuzco for shopping. Dongwoo, Jiho, Dongrim, Amber and Hyungshik jump on the excuse to get out of their "prison-like" camp environment, all suffering from a strange, outdoor version of cabin fever, and Hoya remembers his promise to Sungjong to retrieve souvenirs and boards the bandwagon along with them, not that he would have stayed behind otherwise. Bundled up together in the van, Hoya watches as Jiho imitates their professor discovering their mysterious absence complete with over-the-top gesturing and incoherent screaming and laughs into Dongwoo's shoulder, shaking helplessly from the laughter and the chill.

Cuzco is full of the contrasting backdrops of Spanish colonial buildings and the rough stone of Inca-built walls. Hoya finds the juxtaposition of modern and indigenous culture clashing in the streets immensely fascinating and he once again finds himself hovering behind Amber and her all-seeing camera. They find the Plaza de Armas chock full of tourists and Dongwoo tugs Hoya into shop after shop to play with trinkets, almost getting kicked out of one when Dongwoo barely saves an expensive glass figurine from shattering at their feet. Hoya buys a small, traditional handmade doll for Sungjong from an old woman missing half of her teeth. Her hands look leathery and ancient handing the doll to him, and he resists the urge to touch them.

Jiho decides it would be a great idea to hit up a bar. Hoya immediately disagrees, but the others look contemplative.

"Come on," Jiho coaxes, "I want to try that corn beer shit the guide was talking about."

"Won't we get in trouble when we get back?" Dongrim scratches his head.

Amber shrugs. "They probably won't even notice if you go straight to your tents."

"Yeah, unless we're falling all over ourselves, wasted," Hyungshik snorts.

"Quiet, piggie," Jiho says, making the avid overeater glare at him. "Just one bar. Just for a little while. Let's go."

He walks off, and the rest don't really have much of a choice but to follow. Hoya wonders why the youngest person in their class seems to have such great command over their attention. The bar they decide on is a hole in the wall, but the guide, who insisted on coming in with them to keep them from getting mugged, claims the chicha is the best here. They each get one mug of the unfamiliar brew and Hoya takes a careful sip, peering over the glass to watch Dongwoo take a drink of his own. The taste is different but not unpleasant. It's something Hoya feels he could probably get accidentally drunk on, so he tries to pace himself as best as he can.

His pacing ends up falling to pieces when Dongrim suddenly claims he could probably outdrink them all and Jiho takes the challenge, making the rest of them keep up by pointing to them at random and insisting they're falling behind. All of them except Amber crawl out of the bar groaning at the cold settling into their bones, the artificial warmth of the alcohol in their systems vanishing almost the same instant they walk out into the open air.

"You're all idiots and you're going to die of hypothermia," Amber says, nudging them down the street towards their van. "Getting drunk in this weather? Really?"

"How the hell- you drank as much as we did," Jiho groans, leaning against her arm and holding Dongrim up by his jacket beside him.

"No, I didn't," Amber explains, rolling her eyes. "I took tiny sips while you all were gulping that crap down like water."

"She's a wizard," Dongwoo says mystically, waving his fingers. He stumbles on some cobblestone and Hoya grabs him by the arm, wrapping his own around his waist.

"I'm just smart, unlike some people." She narrows her eyes at the guide. "You too, José. How are you supposed to drive us back like this?"

"Sorry," the guide mumbles in a broken accent, hanging his head and looking properly chastised.

They make it back to camp without wrecking the van by some sort of miracle, according to Amber, and she heads back into the building only after making sure no one knocks their tent over stumbling into it for the night. Hoya realizes Amber was right about drinking in the cold when he feels like the tent is at least ten times colder than it had been upon waking up that morning. He pulls another jacket on over the one he's already wearing and still shivers his way into his sleeping bag.

Next to him on the floor, Dongwoo zips himself up in his own sleeping bag until only his face is showing, his makeshift cocoon doing little to help keep the cold at bay. Hoya shifts himself closer to the Dongwoo burrito and whispers at him.

"Hey, are you alright?"

Dongwoo rolls until he's facing Hoya, teeth chattering in his mouth. He shakes his head, his breath coming out in a fog between them.

Hoya shifts closer still and tries to make their sleeping bags spread warmth to each other somehow through heat transference. He isn't sure thermal energy works that way. Drunk, he's even less sure. Dongwoo seems to appreciate the gesture, though, wriggling against him happily, and Hoya considers the reward to be well worth the effort.

The next day is just as cold, but this time their professor knows better than to set the group free and he herds them, whining and shaking, into the van to go to the excavation site.

"A little birdie told me that some of you disregarded my instructions to stay in the camp yesterday," Professor Lee explains on the way, glancing around the back of his seat towards Hoya and his friends. They visibly shrink into their car seats when other people in the van shoot them glares of betrayal. "So we're all going to stick together today and get some work done despite the temperature. We'll be fine."

Hoya looks at Amber curiously and she rolls her eyes at the boys and points discreetly towards the other girls from the camp. Dongrim has to grab a hold of Jiho's shoulder when the boy opens his mouth, probably to yell at them for snitching, sliding the fingers of his other hand over Jiho's lips and quickly withdrawing them when Jiho snaps his teeth.

Digging in the cold is a miserable task. Their professor seems to realize that observing a group of students digging in the cold is just as difficult and he spends the majority of the day sitting in the van with the guides, which means that most of the students spend their time sitting in the dig holes with their friends and bitching about the weather instead of discovering new artifacts. Dongwoo makes his way into Hoya's pit, hopping down carefully because more than a month of digging has given it enough depth to require careful maneuvering in and out. He huddles next to Hoya, who has made some sort of a nest for himself in the dirt, and rubs his hands together vigorously over his knees, blowing on them.

"You need to buy mittens," Hoya tells him, rubbing his own cloth-covered hands together.

"I didn't think I'd need to bring them on this trip," Dongwoo pouts. "When does it ever get this cold in July?"

"I know," Hoya sympathizes. "This place is really weird."

"I liked it better when I was sweating," Dongwoo huffs, chewing on a thumbnail.

Hoya looks at his hands. They're trembling and turning a light shade of blue. Frowning, Hoya looks at Dongwoo in concern and brings his hands up.

"Want to borrow my mittens for a while?"

Dongwoo shakes his head. "It's fine. Keep them."

Hoya's frown gets deeper and he wants to reject Dongwoo's flippant attitude about his practically frostbitten fingers. Dongwoo needs those fingers to find his dinosaur bones, Hoya thinks, decisively grabbing Dongwoo's hands and putting them together, cupping them between his own. Dongwoo looks confused when he glances at Hoya and wiggles his fingers.

Hoya grins at him. "For someone who gets so warm when he's sleeping, your body heat really sucks right now."

"I get warm when I'm sleeping?" Dongwoo laughs. He lets Hoya rub his hands between his, watching the slide of their fingers. "I know I'm a deep sleeper, but I didn't know I'm also a hot one."

Hoya laughs too, a little nervous when he thinks about the dual implications in Dongwoo's words. He can't deny that Dongwoo is hot when he's sleeping, in any sense of the word. Or when he's, you know, awake. Or simply existing. Hoya shakes his head. His thoughts seem to be muddled by the cold or something.

Dongwoo and Hoya hold hands until a sudden sharp cry makes them break apart, standing up in the pit to look over at Dongrim's where Jiho is leaping down into it and calling for the professor. Someone runs over to the van to bring the harried man out to Dongrim's pit to help Jiho lift Dongrim from the bottom of it.

"Always fucking falling into his own hole!" Jiho is yelling. "Jesus Christ, this guy! Just break your leg in the middle of nowhere when it's freezing out, that's a great idea!"

"Let's get him back to camp," their professor says, helping Jiho get Dongrim to the van. "Come on, people! During this century!"

Everyone scrambles to the vans and Hoya loses the growing warmth of Dongwoo's fingers twined with his somewhere in the chaos that ensues.

The brutality of the sudden cold weather gives way to a very much welcome period of warmer air and fewer students sneezing loudly from their dig pits and crawling around in sickly misery. Dongwoo had caught a cold the day after Dongrim sprained his ankle and Hoya had spent an embarrassing amount of time fussing over him, forcing him to wear extra pairs of socks over his hands and even offering to dig for him when their professor was occupied on the other side of the site. Now, fully recovered, Dongwoo is back to being hyper and happy, and the sight gives Hoya a little extra boost in his days, whistling to himself through the digging and analyzing and careful labeling.

When they pack up to head back to camp at the end of the day, it's not cold enough anymore for Dongwoo's fingers to seek his on the van ride home. His flesh remembers the feel of the skin on skin contact and makes his hands tingle and his fingers twitch every time Dongwoo shifts in the seat next to him and his own hand creeps a fraction of an inch closer.

Jiho and Amber lead Dongrim limping around the camp building, calling it physical therapy and ignoring the older boy's pained, annoyed grunts.

"He's going to sprain it again," Dongwoo comments, chewing on potato.

Hyungshik shrugs disinterestedly and works on eating the food the other three left vulnerable on their plates before they can walk back around to the table. Out of the corner of his eye, Hoya catches Dongwoo trying to use his tongue instead of a napkin to clean himself up, licking around the edges of his mouth.

Dongwoo eats like a dog, Hoya writes in his head. I wonder if I should try rubbing his belly.

He pictures scratching his fingertips over Dongwoo's side, Dongwoo tilting his head into it and rapidly shaking his leg, tongue lolling out happily. He snorts into his food and Dongwoo and Hyungshik give him weird looks. Hyungshik goes back to keeping an eye on the Physical Therapists, wolfing Jiho's plate of meat down while hunched over it protectively, and Dongwoo looks Hoya over with a curious smile, resting his chin in his hand.

"You watch me a lot," Dongwoo says, nonchalant as he lays on his side with his sleeping bag unzipped down to his waist.

Hoya freezes with his back half-turned to Dongwoo, in the middle of pulling his sleep shirt on. He tugs it down over his torso with a cursory glance over his shoulder. "I do?"

Dongwoo nods, smiling, the movement shifting his blond hair which has started growing dark roots over the past month and a half, long enough now to form soft bangs over his forehead. He tosses those bangs with a quick jerk of his head and elaborates, "I think it's just 'cause you look at everyone a lot. That's what you do, you sit and study everyone. That's just you being a cultural anthro major."

Hoya starts settling into his own sleeping bag before he replies. "Well, studying people is pretty much part of the job description."

"I wonder, though," Dongwoo grins, shifting his gaze to look down at the stretch of tent floor between their bodies instead of Hoya's face. He traces a slight bump in the blanket under their sleeping bags. "Wonder what you're thinking then."

"I think about a lot of things," Hoya answers automatically, laying down on his back. He thinks, I think about you a lot. I think about when you hold my hands. I think about your mouth. I think a lot of things about your mouth.

"Like what?" Dongwoo presses.

Hoya glances over at him. He's leaning forward a bit, as if engrossed in the conversation. Hoya feels sort of guilty because he's not paying nearly as much attention to what they're saying as he is to what Dongwoo looks like at the moment. Soft. Nervous. Vulnerable. He wants to write every detail down in his diary to savor the image.

Blinking himself back into an active role in the conversation, Hoya shrugs. "I think you're going to be a great archaeologist someday."

Dongwoo laughs, relaxing against the floor and resting an arm over his head.

"Really?" he breathes quietly. "I haven't even found anything this summer."

"It's your first dig," Hoya reminds him. "You'll have plenty more time to discover things. And you will, later." He grins. "A new dinosaur."

"Dongwoosaurus," Dongwoo grins. He chuckles to himself, rolling to face Hoya again. "What would science books have to say about my dinosaur?"

"The Dongwoosaurus," Hoya begins, making his voice sound as scientific as he can, which really just sounds awfully silly and makes Dongwoo snicker into his sleeping bag, "is a fearsome creature. It lives in the dense forests of South Korea. It can snap trees in half with its jaws and devours smaller dinosaurs for sustenance. It emits unusually high frequency sounds which sound like laughing. It maintains an unusually high internal body temperature that keeps it hot during the winter and cools down during the summer."

"Then," Dongwoo interrupts, "there's the Hoyaraptor. It's bigger than the Dongwoosaurus, but it doesn't eat the Dongwoosaurus because the Hoyaraptor is its friend."

"No, the Hoyaraptor would never eat the Dongwoosaurus. They have a symbiotic relationship. The Hoyaraptor scouts for food using its long neck and the Dongwoosaurus chases the food down and brings it home for them."

"They're a great team. The scout and the hunter." Dongwoo stretches his arms out, yawning. "And they live in a huge nest together."

"Yes. A huge," Hoya glances around them, "tent-like nest."

"And the Hoyaraptor reads the Dongwoosaurus bedtime stories every night before they go to sleep," Dongwoo smiles into his sleeping bag, looking at Hoya. "But the book always gets torn because the Hoyaraptor forgets it has claws."

"That's okay. The Hoyaraptor can just talk the Dongwoosaurus to sleep with boring anthropology talk."

Dongwoo laughs. "But Dongwoosaurus likes the way Hoyaraptor talks, so it doesn't mind."

Hoya smiles tentatively, talking quieter. "And the Hoyaraptor likes the Dongwoosaurus, too, so he can talk to him all night."

Dongwoo stops smiling. Hoya's heart leaps into his throat, wondering if his story has gone too far.

"Does the Hoyaraptor feel cold tonight?" Dongwoo breaks the sudden, brief silence.

"What?" Hoya asks, distracted by thoughts of trying not to ruin their new, fake symbiotic dinosaur friendship. "Just a little. Not as bad as last night."

Dongwoo reaches an arm out to him. "The Dongwoosaurus has plenty of body heat to share."

Hoya stares at him for a moment, wondering whether he's joking, still playing along with their dinosaur story, or whether he's actually extending an invitation to get Hoya into his personal space. He breaks when Dongwoo starts wiggling his fingers towards him in grabbing motions, scooting over.

"See," Dongwoo continues, rumbling with happiness, "that's better." He wraps an arm over Hoya, nudging him closer, and Hoya holds a breath in when Dongwoo settles down barely an inch away, the heat of his body reaching through Hoya's sleeping bag and warming every inch of his skin beneath the layers of clothes.

Hoya almost feels like they really are in a nest of their own, cut off from the rest of the world. The walls of the tent seem impermeable, the area within them a safe place for talking and doing whatever else they feel like doing. Feeling secured in their little cocoon, Hoya relaxes, unfurling in Dongwoo's sure hold.

Dongwoo's eyes are much nicer when they're looking right into Hoya's from such close proximity. They're a little red around the very edges, a little watery, and his pupils look dilated in the dark.

"What do you really think when you look at me?" Dongwoo asks. His voice sounds a little deeper this close. It makes Hoya deliciously uncomfortable and sets his pulse racing wildly.

"I think you're fun to be with," Hoya replies, brushing his fingertips idly over Dongwoo's arm. "I like being around you."

Dongwoo's gaze is all focused anticipation now, dark and unsure. "That's it?" he breathes, then colors slightly around his face at the outburst.

Hoya grins, slow and heated. He knows now what Dongwoo wants to hear, feels like he's finally come to understand a creature he's been stalking, observing and researching intensely all summer.

"I think about kissing you," he murmurs, making Dongwoo's eyes cloud up with something nebulous and white hot.

Dongwoo pushes himself up, leaning over Hoya and pressing his palm into the tent floor at Hoya's side. His face hovers above Hoya's for a second, all of that tension and excitement winding up and out through the rest of his body. Hoya imagines him pressed up against the glass walls he's been observing Dongwoo through all summer, slipping a hand through, and then an arm, his torso, his hips, and at last the rest of his body, transitioning through the plexiglass like an escaped boa at the zoo, standing before him in all of his raw and unfiltered glory, no longer a passive subject in his diary but rather a body against his own body, real skin touching his own flesh, and Hoya has to say the hands-on experience is looking so much better than the cold research.

The last couple weeks of the trip trickle by almost unnoticed to Hoya. He stops counting the days he spends digging when he starts spending the nights afterward curled up with Dongwoo in their dinosaur cave, testing boundaries of touch and calculating results based on quickness of breath, on the sound of Dongwoo moaning and how much time it takes Hoya to fall apart under Dongwoo's exploring hands. Hoya stops writing in his diary because the things he has left to write about aren't things he feels are necessary to include in research, meant only to be kept between the walls of their small tent, between him and Dongwoo.

Hoya looks up from tonguing Dongwoo's chest, letting his nipple pop out of his mouth with a slow suck and a thoughtful pout.

"Aren't we going back in a couple of days?" he asks suddenly.

Dongwoo lifts his head, eyes barely slits behind his messy hair. "Day after tomorrow," he mumbles, his voice so raspy it catches in his throat.

Hoya frowns to himself, thinking about the long trip home. He distracts himself with Dongwoo's other nipple and Dongwoo thunks his head back on the ground again, hips jerking up while he brushes his fingers through Hoya's hair.

Dongwoo's nipples are really sensitive.

Dongwoo likes it when I bite them.

Hoya mouths downwards, across the valley of Dongwoo's stomach, and pauses at the borderland of Dongwoo's hips and underwear. He tilts his head to work the flesh stretched over Dongwoo's left hipbone with his mouth, fingers tracing underneath the elastic waistband.

Dongwoo loves it when I tease him.

The tightening of fingers against Hoya's scalp makes him smile into the sensitive crease of Dongwoo's thigh meeting his hip, tugging the pink pig boxers down his legs. He brings his tongue back up the line of that crease, following it and feeling the tremor of Dongwoo's fingers in his hair getting more and more noticeable as he cuts across his pelvis to trace the edge of the coarse, dark hair, Dongwoo's scent a tangible thing coursing into his body with each deep inhale, heating his blood and making the stabbing twinge of desire in his gut ache palpably.

Dongwoo makes me so hard it hurts.

Hoya has to shift his body over the floor of the tent to relieve the pressure of his dick confined in his way too uncomfortable pants. His own needs and wants fly out the window when his eyes meet Dongwoo's again and he can see how bad Dongwoo's got it, how close he is to just shoving Hoya over onto the floor so he could fuck him as hard and for as long as he wants, their efforts to keep things quiet enough not to alert every other tent in their proximity to the illicit activities going on in theirs all damned to hell. Hoya wraps his hand around Dongwoo while he's still watching Dongwoo's face, rubbing his thumb into the wet tip. Dongwoo buckles, head rolling back to expose the line of his sweat-slick neck, his abdomen clenching up.

Dongwoo looks too fucking good like this.

Hoya presses a hasty kiss to Dongwoo's cock, marveling at how it twitches in his hand at the slightest contact with his mouth, and Dongwoo's face collapses into a desperate, soft whine. Hoya can't believe how fucking riled up Dongwoo is. He hasn't even done anything, has barely even touched him, and he looks like he's fighting to keep his head above the tide of his orgasm.

Dongwoo says he's never felt as good with anyone as he feels with me.

Hoya knows even while he's going down on Dongwoo and nearly choking on the instant roll of Dongwoo's jerky hips, big hands wrapping around his thighs tightly, that Dongwoo isn't going to last very long. He can practically taste it in the back of his mouth as his tongue works him over, the suctioning noises of the pull of Hoya's mouth ridiculously loud and lewd to his ears. Dongwoo leaves one hand in his hair and slaps the other onto the spread blanket beneath him to fist the cloth in his clenched fingers. Dongwoo is breathing too fast, too shaky, and it's only working Hoya up too quickly to savor the feel of Dongwoo in his mouth. Sure enough, Dongwoo gives him the signal, the breathy exhalation of his name, "Hoya", into the sweaty air of their tent that lets him know to pull back, to jack Dongwoo off into his mouth while he's coming.

Hoya swallows, sits up, looks at Dongwoo for confirmation, and Dongwoo is a sweaty, grinning mess of satisfaction pulling Hoya close by his ears and kissing his dirty mouth with a silent 'thank you'. Hoya doesn't get the chance to start calming back down before Dongwoo pushes him onto his back and eyes the strain of Hoya's pants hungrily, licking his lips.

Dongwoo is all about equal opportunities.

Dongwoo steals the window seat on the plane before Hoya can protest. He doesn't mind all that much, truthfully, especially not when Dongwoo generously offers his shoulder for Hoya to sleep on instead of that horrible, shitty airplane pillow. Off to his right, he can hear Amber laughing at Jiho for spilling his airplane peanuts all over himself and Dongrim. Hoya grins to himself, rubbing his head harder onto Dongwoo's shoulder, and falls asleep.

Sungjong demands to see his souvenir gift almost the second he meets them in the luggage claim, but then quickly abandons his bossy requests in favor of grilling Hoya about the cute blond following him around. Dongwoo and Sungjong are friends before they can even leave the airport. Hoya tries not to feel too much dread about this when they start discussing Hoya's snoring habit as if he isn't there with them, giving Dongwoo a look of mock betrayal over his eerily similar imitation of the bear-like noise.

There isn't much left to their Fieldwork class besides getting their grades for the summer's work. Their professor gives a small speech about how much fun the summer was, despite some random occurrences (here giving certain students, including Hoya and his friends, a telling look). Hoya isn't surprised when he gets an A along with practically the entire class. Going on the trip was pretty much a guaranteed A, after all. The letter grade isn't the most important thing Hoya takes home from that class, anyway, he figures as he walks Dongwoo back to his dorm room. In the room, he helps Dongwoo put together a formation of pillows, blankets and chairs in the middle of the room, a makeshift tent spread out on the floor big enough for the two of them. The Hoyaraptor crawls inside of their new nest after the Dongwoosaurus and carefully pulls the sheets serving as the "tent" opening shut, enclosing them within the security of their two-person sanctuary, a Jurassic utopia all of their own.