***Potentially a double update.  Make sure you've read chapter 34!***

Baekhyun was full on shivering by the time they got back to the Attayear.  Jinsu had thought about giving him back his cloak or at least suggesting sharing it several times along the way, but he’d shot down her one attempt to talk the second she’d said his name and she got the feeling that he was stubborn enough to refuse, even if he was at risk of getting hypothermia.

It was about a half hour walk back with nothing to direct them but faith in the watches, and just as they were stepping back inside, they saw the other three splayed out on the floor of the atrium.  The technician who was medically qualified was adjusting blankets around one of the boys and Jongdae was talking to Jino from his position lying on the floor, eyes closed and his voice barely above a murmur.  Yixing was with them, focussing on a screen in a panel in the wall.

Unbearable warmth swept over Jinsu as the Attayear doors hissed shut behind her and Yixing turned the screen off.

“Thank God you were close enough for that to work,” he said.  “We weren’t sure if the snowstorm would completely block the signal.”

“I thought GPS wasn’t possible until the late 1970s,” Baekhyun replied.  “That was when the first GPS satellite was launched into space.”

“We have a minor signal we can erect on the Attayear for emergencies like this.”  Yixing patted the screen.  “It only has a radius of seven miles, though, so it’s quite limited.  Post 1978 we can connect the watches to the Attayear via proper GPS, but before that, we have to make do with what we have.”

Baekhyun grunted, chafing his hands.  It looked like his fingers had lost circulation, and his teeth were beginning to chatter.  The technician threw a blanket to him and he draped it around his shoulders, looking grateful.  Jinsu hovered awkwardly by the doors, wondering if she was needed for anything.  She probably owed Baekhyun a thank you of some kind, not for bringing her back because she could have done that herself with the GPS, but because he’d got her away from the Japanese soldiers in the first place.  The only trouble was that she had no inclination to talk to him (especially since she’d hidden him from Minhwan and he’d messed up her bathroom), and she also had no idea how he’d react to it, since he’d been less than thrilled by her trying to give back the cloak.

Then again, she reasoned, she had hidden him from Minhwan, so Baekhyun rescuing her from the soldier could count as him thanking her for that, which meant they were even.  She nodded to herself.  That worked.  Time to focus on something else.

Mercifully, the other three weren’t in bad condition.  One of them had a bruise and was bleeding a bit from one of the Japanese soldiers trying to catch him, and Jino was turning over a gun Jongdae had just given him, asking something about grandfather clauses and injuring people.

“I kind of wasn’t focussing my aim,” he admitted.  “Not that there was enough visibility to do it – I don’t think I actually killed anyone, but if I injured somebody to the extent they couldn’t move and got stuck out in the whiteout, would that be my fault?”

Jino glanced down at him.  “Difficult to say.  There’s a high chance if the whiteout’s a bad one that they’d die whether or not they were injured.  Not like you could change what’s just happened, in any case.”

Jongdae nodded.  He still looked unsure of himself, but apparently it was a good enough answer.  Looking around, he spotted Jinsu and sat up, holding his arms out towards her.

Without a second thought, Jinsu sat beside him and allowed him to crush her into a hug.

“We were worried when you got separated in the whiteout,” he told her.  “You look like you came out the best of us, though.  Where in the world did you get that cloak?”

Jinsu hesitated, and then jerked her head in Baekhyun’s direction.  “He gave it me because I was cold after the Hae Insu thingy and refused to have it back because I contaminated it with my germs.”

Jongdae nuzzled his head against the cloak’s soft material.  “He’s mad,” he declared.  “This is toasty warm and it’s almost minus twenty outside now.”

“Well.”  Jinsu shifted awkwardly.  “Can’t complain.”

A soft, throaty chuckle escaped Jongdae.  “I’m so tired.  We could have died twice over.  This is, what, the third or fourth near-death experience for you?”

Jinsu made a non-committal sound, but he was right.

“You’re such a trouble magnet.”  He yawned, draping an arm around her and snuggling up comfortably.  “Mm.  I could go to sleep right here.”

He honestly looked like a little kid, and Jinsu had to resist the temptation to run her hands through his hair as he shifted once more to get properly comfortable, his hair all messed up and his eyes closed, his resting smile tilting his lips peacefully up.

It only took seconds for that image to be dramatically shattered, though, by Baekhyun plopping down beside them in a puddle of melting snow.  His cheeks were still blue and he looked frozen, but still managed to maintain a poker expression.

“So, how long have you two been dating?”

Jinsu and Jongdae both choked so hard she was worried they were going to suffocate.

The snowstorm naturally meant that they were able to gather the final lot of materials that they needed to ensure the Attayear was safe to go, and so Minseok and Yixing decided it was best to wait it out, not least because they weren’t sure how bad weather would affect the Attayear’s ability to travel.  However, there was also the problem of Japanese soldiers in the area.  Everybody agreed that the five of them had done the right thing in escaping before they could be taken too far away, but at least one of the Japanese soldiers had to have made it back down the mountain, because one boy who went out for an illicit smoke in the woods (apparently a snowstorm wasn’t enough of a deterrent) came back in hurry with news that the place was crawling with soldiers.  Yixing locked everybody into the Attayear after that for safety reasons.

Tensions heightened considerably when they were all cooped up with the bad weather and potential threat.  The only two people who didn’t get remotely snappish were Minseok and Kyungsoo, Minseok because he just seemed to have this amazing gift for being unruffled and Kyungsoo because he seemed to enjoy being unflappable in a manner that wound everybody else up.

Halfway through the second day of being trapped in the Attayear, they ran out of manual things to correct around the time machine that didn’t require extra resources from somewhere.  The only other thing that could be worked on at all was the coding.  Minseok had left the main computers switched off to prevent the virus from spreading, which meant that they were only able to work with the information they currently had.  It was an awful lo