Jinsu felt a lot better once she’d eaten, but Baekhyun appeared to be wilting.  Full of yawns, he trailed back to the main deck after her and, at Jinsu’s request, set about putting all the rooms onto earthquake mode like a zombie.  Jinsu couldn’t bring herself not to keep a careful eye on the simple pieces of coding he was changing in case he accidentally slipped up.  It was just as well she did because he did make one error and she had to change it for him.  Once that was done, she started cutting the speed and then got Baekhyun to authorise the lowering of the temporal wards.

The impact was immediate.  As though they were in an aeroplane in the middle of a very bad storm, the Attayear started shuddering violently and Jinsu was flung off her seat.  Baekhyun caught her hand before she could full on plough into the floor, but another jolt dislodged him and he went sprawling after her.

It wasn’t, however, as bad as the time it had felt like being in a washing machine, and it also wasn’t anything like as long.  With a loud bang!, they were expelled from the main timestream, the Attayear shuddering in response, and then there was another bang and a flair of light as they entered the time and location they were going to land in.  Jinsu hauled herself up off the floor, aware that she needed to cut speed completely to bring them to a halt.  Baekhyun took several attempts to scramble to his feet as Jinsu found her way into the remote engine controls.  He was so out of it that she actually had to grab his hand and make him press on the button to authorise the new commands she was putting in.

All around them, the Attayear began to power down.  Baekhyun sat heavily on the floor and tilted his head back against Jinsu’s seat, eyes closed.  She narrowed her eyes at him, a suspicion growing that he hadn’t slept at all that night.  After a moment or two, she nudged him with her toe, but he didn’t respond beyond a faint moan of protest.

“You need to take your own advice,” she told him.

“Mm?”

Jinsu poked at him again.  “Go to bed.”

Baekhyun struggled to open his eyes.  “But you might need me.”

Perhaps it was better to take the lead on this one.  “Not if I’m asleep too.  We’ve stopped, Byun.”

He looked totally confused, almost as if he couldn’t understand basic Korean.  Disorientated, he glanced around him and straightened up a little before yawning and pawing at his eyes, his hands half-hidden by his sleeves.  Now that she thought about it, Jinsu reckoned the only time she’d seen him with his sleeves properly rolled up was when he’d been cooking in the kitchen not long before.

“Sorry,” he mumbled.  “I’m kind of falling asleep.”

“Which is why I said to go to bed.”

“Oh.”  It still took a while for that to process and he let out a yawn worthy of a lion.  “Yeah.  You did.”

It was astonishing how only a few moments before he’d been awake enough to hold a proper conversation and cook and eat, and now he looked like he didn’t know which way was up.  It took Baekhyun a good few moments to push himself to his feet when Jinsu got up, and Jinsu hovered, unsure whether he’d need help and whether to offer it to him if it transpired he did.

Baekhyun did stumbled a couple of times on the way over to the door, most likely because his eyes were barely open, but once he was actually out in the passageway, he looked a little more awake due to the fact that he was moving around.  Letting out another humongous yawn, he gave Jinsu an absent smile.

Walking up the stairs as far as Jinsu’s room was the first non-awkward silence between the two of them where they hadn’t been working on the computers or something similarly demanding, and Jinsu didn’t really know what to make of it.  She’d tried to hang back a little, but Baekhyun was walking so slowly that the only way to be slower without it being obvious was to stop and let him go on ahead, and that. . . well, would have been obvious.  At times, he was so close that the cuffs of his sleeves would brush against her hands, and as they reached the top of the stairs, Jinsu caught herself thinking that Baekhyun’s sleeve paws had their benefits after all, because constantly brushing against Baekhyun’s actual hand, even unintentionally, could have got weird.  Or given off the wrong signals.  Or given off signals that weren’t there to be given.

Baekhyun seemed intent on giving off those signals anyway, because as Jinsu tried to slip surreptitiously into her room before he could realise she was gone, his fingers caught at her hand just before she could get it on the door handle.

“I nearly forgot to ask.”  He stifled another yawn.  “Is it okay with you if I add the breakfast food to the communal pantry?”

Jinsu wasn’t capable of giving him anything beyond an utterly blank look.  “Why are you asking me?  It’s your food.”

“It’s your breakfast.”

For the first time, Jinsu really understood why everybody she knew kept insisting that Baekhyun was “not normally like this” and was actually really nice.  She wondered how different school might have been if she was his friend rather than his arch enemy.

“I will miss the breakfasts,” she said, “but I’d be more upset if we were hoarding food while everybody else starved, even if it’s only enough to give everybody one extra meal.”

Baekhyun nodded sleepily and let go of her hand.  Jinsu ended up watching him wander down the corridor to his own room rather than scarpering to hide in hers.  If they made it back to their proper time, it would probably be a good idea to take him out for a meal as a thank you.

Would a meal be a good idea, though?  Baekhyun had told her not that long