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Water streams over his hands as he washes the bowl he’s just finished using. The cookies are cooled and set in his favourite box, and he’s wiped the counter down and rinsed most of his equipment off. All that’s left are the dishes.
Felix hums under his breath. Chan will probably like these. He likes when the cookies are melty and soft, when there’s extra chocolate in them and no almonds present whatsoever. They’ll be a treat, Felix decides, for when Chan comes back from the doctor.
He’s been a little more tired than usual. A little bit of a cough, and a bit of swelling in his throat. Chan had gone the week before to get it checked out, but he’d been referred to another doctor for some sort of test. “It’s fine,” Chan had told him, showing off the gauze taped to the side of his chest that Felix had initially balked at seeing, “they took a little bit to test for something. Nothing much, probably just standard procedure. Maybe an allergy or something.”
Chan hadn’t gone into specifics, but he’d left early in the morning to go get the results, giving Felix a kiss and a promise to bring him a frappucino if there was a Starbucks at the hospital.
So, something nice to cap the day off. Felix’s baking never goes amiss with his boyfriend. And the both of them always love when the house smells this good.
He’s almost done with the trays when he hears the door open and close, and his pulse skips a little at the thought of having Chan home. It’s funny, sometimes. They’ve been dating for years and it still gets him excited to hear Chan call his name in a silly voice, or something like, “Honey, I’m home!” just to get him to laugh.
There’s no call.
“Channie-hyung?” Felix pitches his voice louder over the sound of the running water. “You back?”
He hears Chan’s sneakers come off and thump against the floor, and then the quiet padding of his bare feet against the wooden floors.
“Hey,” Felix throws over his shoulder cheerfully, just barely catching the outline of Chan’s silhouette as he shuffles into the kitchen, clutching his messenger bag close. “What did the doctor say?”
There’s no answer. Felix glances over his shoulder again to see Chan set a thin envelope on the table. The hospital’s logo shines in bold printed red in the top left corner. Without turning the tap off, Felix turns to look at Chan in full, eyebrows furrowed together. There’s something in Chan’s face that makes something unwelcome and sour begin to curdle in Felix’s stomach.
Felix asks again, slow and afraid. “What did the doctor say, Chris?”
In the sink, a glass overflows.
“I have cancer,” Chan says, and Felix’s entire world goes dark.
Chan’s optimistic about treatment. “It’s only stage two,” he keeps saying. He spreads the results out across the table and motions at words and tables that Felix doesn’t understand and says sentences that Felix knows aren’t his, that Felix knows he’s merely echoing from the mouth of the specialist he’d spoken to at the hospital.
He doesn’t know if that makes it better, or worse.
“It’s going to be okay,” Chan says before he sweeps Felix into a hug and starts rummaging through the refrigerator and asking Felix whether he wants to get take-out tonight instead of putting anything together, since they’re both a bit overwhelmed by the sudden news.
A bit. Felix sits at their dining table, completely dazed. He wonders why Chan’s the one reassuring him.
Why Chan’s the one who’s pretending like everything’s alright.
It’s not, Felix thinks. It’s not, but Chan says it’s going to be, and the doctors said it’s going to be okay if he gets the right kind of treatment, it’s more common these days and he’s really young and healthy, and it was good that they spotted it early enough, see, it’s better than if he hadn’t noticed the little swell under his arm that one night two weeks ago when he’d been showering at the aquatic centre after his lesson.
And if he hadn’t—
He Googles it during dinner while Chan is distracted by his beef noodles, and then Googles it again after, while Chan is calling his parents to let them know what’s going on. He gets pages upon pages of symptoms and treatment and screening options. It only serves to make the gurgling ball of anxiety in his stomach grow and grow, to make his head spin like he’s on a ride that he can’t get off. The more he reads, the worse it seems to get.
Amidst all the new information that he’s now attempting to absorb before tomorrow comes, Felix doesn’t search for survival rates, no matter how much Google attempts to autocomplete his search results for him. He doesn’t.
He just can’t even bear the thought of it.
Felix clicks his phone off when Chan returns from the living room and slides into bed. “Hi,” he says, and Felix pulls him close until they’re both wrapped up in each other. Chan rests his head in the curve of Felix’s shoulder and is silent for a long while. Felix says nothing; he strokes Chan’s back and listens to the sound of his breathing until Chan finally says, “It’s gonna be okay, right?”
His voice pitches up on the end, a little inhale trapped behind his teeth.
“Yeah,” Felix lies, flattening his palm between Chan’s broad shoulders. Their heartbeats match, erratic and unsteady. “Everything’s gonna be fine.”
It’s easier when the doctor explains it to Felix. She couches it in terms that Felix can understand. She shows Felix the terms for it, the lymphoma, but she doesn’t use them. She talks, instead, about the effects. Short-term, long-term.
The doctor is kind. Her name is Mina and she wears a rubber chain on her glasses and her office is decorated with pretty plants that she tells Felix the names of when Chan goes into the small examination room to get his blood drawn again by a harried-looking nurse in green scrubs.
“It’s going to be hard,” she tells him, once Chan’s out of earshot.
“I know,” Felix says, but he doesn’t, really. “I’ll look after him.”
Mina smiles. It’s not pitying, but Felix feels unmoored by it regardless. “Remember to look after yourself, too.”
He doesn’t get to ask her what she means by that because Chan returns, halfway through re-buttoning his shirt up, and Felix’s attention is immediately drawn towards him for the rest of the appointment.
On the way back home, Felix asks if he’s told the others yet. Their friends, who are most definitely wondering why they’ve both been radio silent in their chat. Their friends who have no idea that any of this is happening.
“Maybe I could just not tell them,” Chan says, slowing down for a stop sign. “I don’t want anyone to worry, y’know? They’re gonna get so upset.”
“They have to know,” Felix says. He can’t imagine them not knowing. “They’re family too.”
It’s birthdays and Christmases, the overblown grandeur of New Year’s fireworks five years and counting—the quiet comfort of a hug at a funeral, the excitement of a graduation cap flung into the sky—the boring day-to-day, the surprises in between, the care taken to know and be known in each other’s lives.
They’ve been Chan-and-Felix for a long time, but they’re also Chan-and-Felix-and-Changbin-and-Jisung-and-Minho-and-Seungmin-and-Hyunjin-and-Jeongin.
They have to know.
The car pulls into their usual parking spot. Chan doesn’t turn the engine off. Instead, he looks up at Felix, expression guarded. “I don’t want them to worry.”
“Please, Chris.”
Chan’s mouth twists unhappily.
Felix reaches over to take his hand, and Chan slides his phone open to their group chat to ask when everyone’s available to get on a call together.
He follows Chan to his first chemotherapy session. They’re seen into a nice annex of the hospital that’s less stark-white than the rest of the building, and Felix tries not to look at the section with smaller chairs and teddy bears painted along the walls as they register at the counter. There’s a little drink dispenser right beside it that Chan asks about, and Felix makes a note to get him a Milo once he’s settled in.
They’re given a number, but it doesn’t take very long before the doors open for them. Chan’s chatty with the nurse, whom he’d met at his last blood test, because of course he’s this sweet even when he’s here to get a needle stuck in him.
Leather armchairs have been set in rows a fair distance from each other, a ring-curtain set around each little section to provide privacy if desired. Felix tugs at the velvety fabric experimentally as Chan’s told to sit down and wait for someone to come verify his medication. There isn’t anyone to their immediate left or right, but there’s an older man three chairs down, and across from them is a sleeping woman who looks to be in her forties, her teenage daughter curled up beside her with her laptop balanced precariously on her knees.
“Comfy?” Felix asks, perched in his own seat, just a plain cushioned chair pulled up beside Chan’s.
Chan shoots him a shaka and an assuring smile.
It’s okay. It’s going to be fine. He tells himself as much when they come back with Chan’s bloodwork, when they take his temperature and his pulse and his BP, when they roll the intravenous pole over and shut the curtains.
He forces himself to watch as they give Chan’s wrist a quick once-over and insert the needle. It’s taken out quick, leaving the catheter behind. Chan doesn’t even flinch once.
Felix does. It’d been easier when it’d just been words on paper. Cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, vincristine, prednisone. It’s different when those same words are printed on real labels, stuck to real bags, hooked up and pumped into Chan’s very real veins.
“This one first, and then we’ll do a saline wash, okay?”
“Sure thing,” Chan says, bright and easy. “Thank you so much!”
The nurse beams back at him, obviously endeared.
Felix loves him.
It’s almost boring at first. The drugs go in slow and steady, and Felix spends most of it checking his phone and keeping Chan’s attention with bits of news and funny memes and TikToks that Chan doesn’t understand but watches anyway. Mina comes by to check that the drugs are going in fine, and Chan thanks her cheerily too. An hour passes, and then two, and it almost feels like everything’s going to be just fine.
Hour three.
The nausea starts to hit, and Chan stops responding to Felix’s jokes with the same level of enthusiasm. Felix is afforded a couple more smiles and a quip before Chan’s shutting his eyes and leaning back, breathing in harder through his nose.
Felix rises to get him water and a small cup of Milo. “Drink,” he murmurs, taking Chan’s hands and putting them around the paper cup.
Chan drinks a few sips of the water. “Thanks,” he says, not looking at Felix.
Felix watches the IV drip and drip until it’s almost all gone. Then, he’s given the bag of saline, and they have to wait that one out too. Chan’s eyebrows are drawn together the entire time, but he tries his best to keep his voice light when he tells Felix, “Almost done. All good.”
The Milo goes cold under the air-conditioning.
It’s all good when they register Chan for his next dose at the counter and greet the nurses on their way out. It’s all good as they get into the car and Felix drives them home. It’s all good for approximately an hour after they’ve returned, until Chan starts feeling sick.
“It’s fine,” Chan says, but a moment later, he’s stumbling to the sink, violently ill, and Felix’s heart sinks as he rushes to get him to sit.
It’s not okay.
The sweating starts soon after. Chan’s shaking by the time he gets into bed, but he can’t lie down. Felix rubs Chan’s back as he throws up in the pail that Felix had brought him, blinking the beginnings of tears out of his eyes as he coughs and apologises nonsensically. “I know it hurts,” Felix soothes, “it’s okay.” Chan groans, and gags again. Nothing’s coming out except water and bile, now. “Water?”
Chan shakes his head, and heaves, obviously trying not to cry.
He throws up again.
When Chan finally falls asleep that night, exhausted and running on fumes, Felix goes to flush the bucket out in the toilet, and then quietly steps into the spare room across from their bedroom that stinks faintly of stale sweat and puke. It’s technically the studio where Chan works on his music, but they both use it as a study and an extra place to throw visitors at with its comfortable couch laid along the back wall.
He leaves both doors open just wide enough to see Chan’s slumped figure on the bed and sits on the couch, smoothing his hand over one of the pillows.
Then, Felix calls his mum. “Eomma,” he says, “it’s—”
A sob tears free from his throat, and he doubles over, palm cupped over his mouth.
“It’s bad,” he says.
They sit at the dining table. She’s brought a whole bag of groceries, of dry crackers and coconut water and stuff with electrolytes that Felix had overlooked in his frenzy to come to terms with what was going on.
He still hasn’t.
“He’s sleeping,” Felix tells Chan’s mother, passing her a hot mug of tea. She takes it, but doesn’t drink it. “He gets sick a lot, at night, so he usually doesn’t manage to rest enough.”
“Have you?”
“No,” Felix admits, rubbing at the handle of his own cup. His eyes are tight and sore from alternating between waking up multiple times in the night and crying when Chan can’t see him. “It’s okay. He needs it more.”
Chan’s mother doesn’t look convinced.
Felix doesn’t know what else he can say, but she must see it in his face, because she reaches over to pat the back of his hand, and he gives her a watery smile in return.
In the end, they decide that she’s going to come over to help take care of Chan since Felix still has to work. It probably won’t be for too long, Felix reassures her, since his job’s flexible and he can probably persuade his boss to let him work from home for a while. He doesn’t need to be on-site. He has to be here for Chan.
But—Chan’s job. Chan’s classes, Felix thinks. He’s going to have to start drafting emails for Chan. For his school where he’s currently midway through a diploma for Sound Production, for the centre that he teaches swimming lessons at part-time.
Chan’s mother goes to sit by his bed for a short while before she leaves, speaking to him in Korean, voice soft and low, her hand pushing his hair off his forehead. Felix can’t hear what she’s saying, but it’s okay. He doesn’t need to know. He’s sure that they both need this to themselves.
“Please call us anytime,” Chan’s mother tells Felix at the door a short while later, “call me. You’re family, Felix.”
“I will,” Felix promises. He means it this time.
He takes the seat that she’d vacated by Chan’s side. “Channie-hyung.”
Chan cracks an eye open, yawning. “Hi baby,” he says. “The others still coming over today?”
“If you’re up to it.” Felix pours him some juice. “I can tell them to come tomorrow instead, if you’re tired.”
“Nah,” Chan murmurs. “I might be more tired tomorrow.”
That terrifies Felix. He doesn’t want Chan to be more tired tomorrow. He just wants Chan to get better. He thought the drugs were supposed to help him get better.
They kill the bad cells, he remembers Mina telling them in her office, but they also kill the good cells.
Felix keeps his smile light. “Drink your juice.”
Chan takes it. He manages half the cup this time.
He gets paler and thinner with each cycle. They call it a cycle because it repeats in the same way: he goes in for his dose, he gets sick, he gets a little better for a few days, and then he goes in for his dose again and gets sick again.
Mina tells them, somewhere around the fourth dose, that it’s likely progressed to stage three, but they’re still going to consider it limited. Their options are still open and positive.
Felix can only keep it going for him.
It’s hard, he thinks. Chan is the one who’s naturally pre-disposed towards taking care of other people, not Felix. If their positions were reversed, Chan would be better at this. Chan would take care of him far better.
Felix wonders if he’s doing enough.
He makes Chan food that he can only eat a quarter of each time, and that he almost always throws up after. His skin is splotchy and red and his fingernails are growing black from the roots. They put him on the red drug two doses ago, the one that makes his heart hurt and his mouth sore and his entire body shake.
“It’s okay,” Felix tells him today after another unsuccessful dinner, rubbing his back. “It’s okay. We can try soup tomorrow. You did okay with the soup yesterday.”
Chan’s shoulders slump. “Sorry,” he says, voice thick. “M’so sorry.”
Felix cards his fingers through his hair. He says, “I love you,” and goes to bring him more water.
He comes home one evening to find Chan completely bald, and electric clippers on the table left on the table by a swept-aside pile of hair.
Felix stares at him, completely stunned.
“I asked Changbin to come over to do it,” Chan says unapologetically. “I didn’t want to watch my hair just keep falling off.”
He hadn’t even said anything to Felix. Hadn’t even told him he was thinking about it. Felix thinks about the fact that he hadn’t even gotten to thread his fingers through Chan’s thick, lovely curls one last time. Hadn’t gotten to tuck his hair behind his ear, or pull on it during sex, or rearrange it under the brim of one of Chan’s curve-billed caps.
It’s all gone.
“Why didn’t you just ask me to do it for you?”
Chan sits down. “You already have to do everything else. It’s enough,” he says, not looking at Felix. There’s guilt and shame in his voice. Felix aches. “I can’t keep asking so much of you.”
Felix goes to him, and presses his dry, trembling mouth to Chan’s bare head without a single second of hesitation. “Ask. Please ask. I’d do anything for you.”
Chan clutches him close. “I really liked my hair,” he whispers.
“I know,” Felix says. “I did, too.”
There are good days and there are bad days.
Sometimes Chan feels good enough to eat an entire bowl of whatever Felix puts in front of him. He’s cheery and bright and jokes about how he’s glad he was never a fan of spicy food and that it’s not that different from what he normally ate before.
Before. It’s the most unassuming way to put it.
That’s the part of Chan that he displays to everyone else. The unerring smile, the casual humour about the situation he’s in. He uses whatever energy he has that day to show his family that he’s doing alright, to show the kids that he’s getting better.
Those are the good days. Felix likes the good days, even if Chan overcompensates. They’re happy for a little while again.
Then, there are the bad days.
Sometimes Chan can’t get out of bed. He’s angry and nauseous and cries after he snaps at Felix for attempting to placate him one too many times. He’s frustrated that he’s weaker than before, he hates that he can’t do anything on his own, he can’t stand that he doesn’t recognise himself in the mirror anymore.
And, sometimes, Felix just feels so selfish and exhausted that he walks out.
He doesn’t go far. He paces in the study and calls his parents or his older sister or one of his friends and talks about Chan, doesn’t talk about Chan, talks about everything, talks about nothing.
It’s never for long. He always comes back and Chan reaches for him like a scared child and apologises so profusely that it makes Felix ache, and he attempts to eat all of whatever Felix brings him even if it doesn’t stay down.
“You’re getting better,” Felix murmurs, adjusting Chan’s beanie when he sits up later to give his siblings a check-in over FaceTime. “I know it doesn’t feel that way, but you are.”
Chan cups Felix’s face with one hand and rubs at his ear. His eyes can’t meet Felix’s. “Thank you for not giving up on me,” he says, lips cracked and dry.
“I haven’t given up on you before,” Felix says. “What makes you think I’ll start now, huh? Idiot.”
Chan laughs, and smiles, and one of his dimples appears in his cheek.
Felix sets his thumb in it and leans in to kiss his forehead.
This, Felix thinks. The now. The before. The only thing thing that hasn’t changed is the way they’re holding on together.
The laparotomy has been scheduled for months. The doctors are hopeful that the area for removal will be small. The scans had been promising. The chemo has been working. It should go well, all things considered.
Felix holds his hand before he goes into surgery. “Come back out soon,” he says.
“Wait for me,” Chan says.
He gets to follow Chan as he’s wheeled up to the floor where the surgery will take place. He’s not allowed inside the main surgical theatre, but there’s a little waiting area outside. He stands at the door and looks in through the window and stares at Chan the entire time until the doctors take him in, and then he’s gone.
Just like that.
Felix doesn’t remember getting back to Chan’s room. One of the others, probably. They’d showed up in twos and threes bearing gifts and blankets for Felix and promising to stay the entire time. The room’s not big enough for all of them, so Hyunjin and Seungmin sit with him by Chan’s empty bed while he catches up on work.
Nothing will go wrong, he knows. He trusts the doctors and he trusts that Chan will be fine and Chan hadn’t said goodbye. He hadn’t said he was going anywhere, he told Felix to wait for him, so he’s coming back.
It takes five hours.
Five hours and they bring Chan back in unconscious. Felix sits and waits, and waits, and waits.
Chan sleeps, and sleeps, and sleeps.
When he finally blinks his eyes open, Felix is there with water and a hand ready to take one of his. “You waited,” Chan says hoarsely, smiling around the cannula in his nose.
Felix doesn’t cry. Instead, he kisses Chan and tells him, “You came back.”
Days, weeks, months.
Chan gets better, day by day. Physio is hell, but the drugs had been worse, and Chan’s more than ready to take it on. He gets better, and better. There are still bad days, but far less than before.
Better and better and better.
Chan starts eating a little more, each day. He walks a little more. He smiles a little more.
Felix notes all of it down, files them away in his memories along with a kiss to Chan’s cheek or a warm hug. There is cause for celebration in every single moment. And slowly, somehow, things seem to be more okay than they were before.
It’s not quite the before, but it’s still better than the after.
Felix will take it.
The radiotherapy centre is in a different part of the hospital than where Chan had done his chemo. The walls here are a pale pink and cream, the guest chairs a nice brown that somehow doesn’t clash with their surroundings.
Felix doesn’t have to wait too long. He’s replied a single email about an Instagram post that’s supposed to go live the next day when Chan returns from the corridor he’d disappeared down, led away by a staff member. “Apparently it’ll start to burn a little, later,” Chan mentions idly, like he’s talking about the weather, “but it wasn’t that bad.”
“Yeah?” Felix takes his hand. Chan squeezes it and smiles. “Good.”
It’s not the end by any means, but they’re on the home stretch.
“Can you imagine?” Felix says as they walk outside, hand in hand. “Your hair’s gonna grow back in so well, like, a year from now.” If you go into remission, he doesn’t say, but he tightens his grip on Chan’s hand and helps him down the steps.
“Yeah?” Chan scratches at his chin, smiling. The sunlight overhead illuminates the once-again softening of his cheekbones, the returning redness in his lips, the hope in his eyes that’d dimmed over time but never truly gone away. He’s beautiful. “I really missed it.”
“Yeah,” Felix says. “I did too.”