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Suho holds the phone in his hands, staring at the brightness of the screen that seems to be amplified because of the darkness of his room. Of course, it’s already so dark because it’s eleven in the evening. He has therapy scheduled tomorrow and somehow, he can’t bring himself to sleep. He knows he should but he’s just sitting there on his bed, holding his phone to his face.
He figures he really shouldn’t call Sieun at this hour. The guy already helps him in his baths, brings him food and calms down Nurse Lee whenever he pisses Nurse Lee for him. He should wait until the following morning before calling Sieun.
But what if something happens again and he won’t be able to call Sieun? What if something happens again and he won’t be able to talk to Sieun ever again?
Suho presses call.
He tells himself that if Sieun doesn’t answer, it’s okay. At least he tried. But Suho hopes Sieun answers.
“Suho, are you okay? Is everything okay?” Sieun’s groggy voice registers to his ears but the concern is still what’s prevailing. Suho can hear him shuffle his covers, probably standing up already.
Suho feels bad but he already woke Sieun up, might as well go on with it. “I’m okay,” he quickly answers.
“Okay, what’s the matter?” Sieun still asks.
“I can’t sleep,” Suho admits. “I know, it’s shitty of me to call you in the middle of your slumber —“
“It wasn’t a slumber. I was asleep for barely five minutes before you called,” Sieun corrects him.
“But you’re still asleep,” Suho insists.
Sieun waits for a moment before he asks again. “What’s the matter, Suho-ya?”
Suho takes a deep breath and tells himself that he has already been a jerk for calling so late at night so he might as well be a jerk for saying this. “Can you please come?”
It doesn’t take Sieun a beat before he answers. “Wait for me. I’ll be there soon.”
Soon is actually not too soon because Suho’s hospital is in Seoul while Sieun now lives in Suwon. It’s not that far but it’s also not that near. Still, Sieun arrives faster than how any normal human being will do at eleven in the evening. Panting, he carefully but swiftly opens Suho’s door so as not to disturb other rooms.
And Suho is just there, waiting, staring at the door until it opens. Sieun’s heart swells at how Suho’s face breaks into a grin, like a child who has been waiting for a parent in the grocery line.
Suho knows he’s the one who woke up Sieun and he’s the one who asked Sieun to come but he still can’t shake the surprise mixed with joy in his face that Sieun is really here in his room now, flesh and blood. “You came,” he breaths.
Sieun’s eyes are soft when he realizes Suho must have had thoughts that he won’t come. “You called,” he answers. “Are you really okay? Do you want me to call one of the nurses? It’s Nurse Lee’s off today I think.”
“I’m fine. I just can’t sleep,” Suho answers, standing up from his wheelchair. He can now stand up but it still wears him off quickly to walk on his own. He still needs crutches. He tries not to depend on his wheelchair or his crutches as much as he can. But sometimes, it just becomes too draining for his body.
“But nothing hurts? Your legs? Your body?” Sieun asks, just to make sure.
“No, man,” Suho confirms. “Will you please take me out now?”
That sounds awfully not as how it should sound and Suho becomes aware of it just as soon as the words leave his mouth. His eyes widen and he gapes like a dying fish, staring at Sieun like Sieun is about to stick a ballpen to his eyes, with a blush creeping on his cheeks. He prays the darkness of the room is enough to conceal it.
“That’s not — I just meant —“
“Where’s your jacket? It’s cold outside,” Sieun, fortunately, stops Suho from making a fool of himself more.
“It’s your jacket. Is it mine now?” Suho corrects Sieun, pointing at the gray jacket hanging by the steel chair beside his bed. “Grandma told me you left it here. She tries to give it back to you but you told her it’s for me when I wake up and I’m cold. Is that true?”
That sounds awfully accurate and this time, it’s Sieun’s turn to turn red. In true Sieun’s fashion, he totally ignores Suho’s question, just throws the jacket in question to Suho’s direction and wheels Suho out of his room without saying anything.
There’s something about the quietness of the night and the coldness of that evening that calms Suho. He thinks he can probably sleep in his wheelchair while Sieun pushes it but Sieun is not his caregiver, even though Sieun seems to like acting like it.
There’s just so many thoughts that are constantly running through his mind all day and nothing to stop those thoughts. Until now. He thinks if he didn’t call Sieun earlier, he will lose his mind already because he keeps remembering what he heard from one of the new nurses.
“Suho,” Sieun’s voice takes him back to where they are right now.
Suho doesn’t know where exactly because he hasn’t been outside the hospital premises since he woke up but it seems far enough that he doesn’t see any sign of the hospital even if he looks around. It’s probably a nearby park, considering the trees that surround them, the playground and the benches, and the street lamps lighting up everything in that little space.
“Just tell me what you’re thinking,” Sieun pushes more, brows now furrowing in concern.
“I heard what happened,” Suho begins, staring at the empty playground, “from one of the new nurses. He probably saw the livestream, you know, and recognized me. He was scolded by Nurse Lee and the other nurses,” Suho quickly adds because he can just feel the shift in Sieun’s aura already. He doesn’t need a new nurse beaten up. “And he already apologized for reminding me of what happened that night.”
Sieun tries to stop his heart from beating so fast but he can’t. He just wants to forget that night even happened. He hates it more than when he broke his arm because he can’t exactly hate the day Suho was born, regardless of what happened to him.
“But he mentioned something else,” Suho continues, keeping his eyes ahead of him. “Wooyoung can’t fight anymore because his ankle was permanently damaged.”
Sieun knows this conversation is bound to happen one way or another, sooner or later. It’s not that he wants to hide what happened to Suho but he’s just worried Suho will blame himself.
“You know, when you went in my place to save Youngyi even though they were asking for me,” Suho says, glancing behind him to see Sieun looking right back at him, “I hated myself for that. I thought, maybe you wouldn’t have a broken arm if I was the one who went to them instead.”
“It wasn’t your fault. I made that choice myself,” Sieun immediately tells him.
Suho nods. “But still, I couldn’t forgive myself because in a way, I did that to you.”
Sieun walks in front of Suho, kneels down and looks straight back in Suho’s eyes. “You didn’t. Wooyoung, Youngbin and Beomseok did that to me. You couldn’t have known.”
“Exactly, I couldn’t have known,” Suho says, the softest his voice has ever been. “Did you know they also caused my motorcycle accident?”
Sieun’s eyes visibly darkens. “What.”
“I didn’t want to tell you because somehow, I knew you wouldn’t let it slide, even if it was Beomseok,” Suho explains.
“That mother—“
“It doesn’t matter now,” Suho cuts him off, even smiling a little. “What I’m trying to say is, can you tell me what else happened? Because when I leave this hospital soon, I don’t want to miss anything anymore. I don’t want two years missing from my life and my memory because we’re trying to protect each other. Alone.”
When Suho said it like that, Sieun can’t retort anything anymore, can he? Because Suho did lose one year and nine months worth of his life. He could have used it to study, to go to beach, to take a trip somewhere or to even have a relationship. But it was taken away from him because he was asleep and there was nothing he can do to take back that time again.
Except maybe to keep that from happening again.
“Can we protect each other knowingly from now on? Intentionally? Deliberately?”
Sieun looks at Suho’s almost pleading face, slowly nodding. “Yeah,” he answers.
He remembers how Suho knocks in his door right after he comes home from the hospital and him hiding his arm with a cast. His eyes are like that now but unlike before when they don’t say what they truly mean, now Suho just wants to be honest.
“I should have listened to you when you told me to stop going after Beomseok,” Sieun suddenly says and there is regret and guilt in his voice but it is more evident in his eyes. “If I did…”
“You were his friend, too,” Suho tells him.
“I should have just completely given up on him from the beginning.”
“That wasn’t you, Sieun-ah,” Suho says, smiling a little. “It isn’t you to give up so easily. Besides, you couldn’t have known.” It’s like Suho is repeating what Sieun just said to him a while ago.
Suho couldn’t have known, Sieun couldn’t have known, but the thing is, there were things that they could still have told each other, but they didn’t. Because they didn’t want the other to get hurt. Because they were fighting for the other. Because they were protecting the other. If that is good or bad, they already learned it now.
“That he would try to kill you three times?” Sieun’s voice is low and quiet but Suho can still hear the rage in it.
So he quietly reaches to hold the other’s hand. “Hey, it’s okay. I’m okay now,” he tells Sieun, gripping on the other’s hand a little tighter, as if to make him feel that he is there. “Wasn’t it just two times though?”
“The second time was when I went instead of you. That hit was still meant for you,” Sieun reminds Suho, scowling at the memory.
“Oh,” Suho mutters, understanding. “It really was three times.”
“I will never forgive Beomseok.”
“Hey, don’t say that.”
“He tried to kill you. Three times.”
There is a visible pain in Sieun’a face, pain that visibly disappears little by little when Suho pulls him closer to him, smiling in the process of doing so, and saying, “I’m okay now, Sieun-ah. Okay? No more going to revenge me on your own, okay? If you want, wait for me to get all healed up and we can take them on again. Together.”
The promise of fighting together both scares and excites Sieun.
They look at each other for a long while, Sieun memorizing the sharp edges of Suho’s face and Suho just sinking more and more into Sieun’s eyes, probably both just bathing in each other’s presence because one year and nine months is a long time and the hours, minutes and seconds they get with each other are more precious than they can ever appreciate anything.
“Your eyes,” Suho whispers. “They’re really beautiful, you know.”
It’s almost as if Suho doesn’t even know what he’s saying because right after he said that, he blinks five or ten times, in utter disbelief with himself because what the hell is he saying, and his eyes widen as he tries to look at everything except Sieun who is right in front of him.
“I just meant —“
“That my eyes are beautiful?”
“Yeah. I mean — what?” Suho’s brows are crumpled as he stares at Sieun, standing up.
“Pretty sure you’ll say I’m beautiful soon enough,” Sieun says, glancing back at Suho.
“But you are.”
This time, Suho holds Sieun’s gaze and he doesn’t regret doing so and he doesn’t regret digging a hole more for himself and burying himself on it because in the moonlight just like that, the wind blowing some of Sieun’s hair away, he truly is majestic.
“You’re the first person who says so,” Sieun tells him.
“Yeah? Then, everyone must be blind then.”
Suddenly, Sieun’s phone rings, much to Suho’s relief because he cannot keep burying himself further than the hole. “Hello, Nurse Lee?”
Nurse Lee sounds frantic and panicking. Sieun can even hear her running footsteps. “Sieun-ah, Suho is missing. I just clocked in and checked on him first thing and he’s not his room. What if someone came for him? What if someone took him? I already looked for him everywhere in the hospital but there’s no sign of him. Should I alert the police already? What is something happens to him?”
Sieun glances at Suho who is looking back at him as if asking, what’s up? It’s just then that he notices that his hand is still stretched to Suho who is holding on to it and pressing on Sieun’s thumb every now and then.
He gives Suho a light squeeze before taking a deep breath, to ready himself for the wrath that’s about to come from Nurse Lee, and answers. “I took Suho out, Nurse Lee. I’m sorry. We’ll be back in ten minutes.”
“YOU WHAT?!” Nurse Lee shouts over the phone and Sieun has the clarity of mind to move it away from his ears and end the call immediately. He’s pretty sure he will hear the exact same thing when they get back to the hospital anyway.
“Let’s go back,” Sieun tells Suho, giving Suho’s hand another squeeze before he lets it go and he is spinning the wheelchair to the direction of the hospital.
“You should have told her we’ll be back in at least thirty minutes or more,” Suho sulks, missing the air that is not hospital air already.
“Don’t worry. I will take you out of the hospital more if Nurse Lee still trusts me enough to let you be solely in my care,” Sieun assures him.
“You better keep your word, Yeon Sieun.”
“And I will take you out for real after you get discharged.”
Suho’s head spins faster than anything that it almost hurts his neck. His eyebrows are furrowed like when Sieun first brings him an ox bone soup. “What was that?” he carefully asks.
Sieun glances at him for a moment before he brings back his focus to where he is pushing Suho’s wheelchair. Suho is the first one to be honest, to ask for complete honesty between them and even though it’s probably in a completely different sense, Sieun wants to return the favor.
“I will take you out for real,” Sieun repeats what he said, saying each word clearly so Suho understands completely what he means. He glances at Suho again who is looking back at him in awe and complete shock. “Look forward. You’ll hurt your neck if you stay like that.”
Suho does but Sieun doesn’t miss the tinge of red in Suho’s ears. He can’t help but smile to himself, hurrying because he really doesn’t want to be in Nurse Lee’s bad side.
Expectedly, they hear an earful when they get back to the hospital and they receive it well because they also see how worried Nurse Lee is and how relieved when she sees that nothing bad happened to both of them. In the almost two years that they have known her (although Suho’s time is a bit debatable), she hasn’t failed to make them feel that they have an older sister in her, sometimes even a mother, like now as she scolds them and tells them to at least leave a note so she won’t panic. She tells them repeatedly that she almost called the police already because she’s so scared something bad will happen. She doesn’t make them feel that she’s just a nurse who is just being paid to look after Suho.
Eventually, Nurse Lee feels like she already gave them enough sermon for the time being so she leaves them be with a huff. “You two will be the death of me.”
Suho is already lying in his bed, his covers pulled up to his chest, just the light above his bed the only thing lighting the entire room. They already angered Nurse Lee enough not to turn on any other lights. For now, Suho is supposed to be asleep.
He glances at the couch, knowing that’s where Sieun is.
“Suho, go to sleep,” Sieun’s voice echoes in the corners of the room, seeing that Suho is looking at him.
“Will you stay?”
“I’ll be here when you wake up.”
Suho’s eyes flutters, suddenly feeling the exhaustion from the entire day in his body. It’s past two in the morning now. But perhaps it’s also the assurance that when he opens his eyes next, he won’t be alone. Sieun will be there.
“Good night, Sieun-ah.” Suho is barely able to mutter before his eyes finally shuts down for the night.
Suho thinks he’s already dreaming it but he sees Sieun hover above him, leaning down, pressing a chaste kiss on his forehead. “Sweet dreams, Suho-ya.”
The following morning, Suho feels the most rested he felt since he woke up from comatose. He wonders what time it is, opening each of his eyes one by one like he used to, to adjust first to the morning light and then, fully opening both his eyes to look around the room.
Beside him, sitting on the steel chair by his bed, is Sieun, who is already looking back at him with those pretty eyes.
And just like that, Suho can confirm that it’s his best morning yet.