“Kibum? That’s it, wake up. Open your eyes for me, you can do it. Kibum...”

He recognized that voice. Kibum made his greatest effort yet to open his eyes, because he’d never heard Jinki call his name quite like that before. His voice was thick with a kind of suppressed desperation, and it made Kibum obey even though he'd much rather sleep. For a moment, a wash of colours blinded him, and he blinked until they resolved into fuzzy shapes and then sharpened. There was Jinki beside the bed, wearing the brightest red sweater Kibum had ever seen in his life. Jinki’s face lit up, but Kibum frowned in confusion – Jinki’s hair was much longer than he remembered, and the dark roots were showing where his amber dye had grown out. There was a faint smell of coffee grounds in the air.

“Kibum, are you seeing me? Do you know who I am?” There was such a heart-wrenching mixture of fear and hope in Jinki’s face that it made Kibum’s heart hurt just to look at him.

“Hyung,” he said, or tried to say. He barely had the energy to make his voice work, and it came out as a strange, faint croak. He coughed weakly and tried again. “Jinki-hyung?”

Jinki breathed in, an inhale that caught, like a sob. “Oh, thank God. Yes, that’s right, it’s me. I’m here.”

“What’s going on?” Kibum’s voice sounded like a rusty door hinge. He swallowed painfully, appalled at the sound. His mouth felt like a desert. Then memory crashed into him and he gasped. “Taemin!” 

He tried to sit up, but at the movement a terrible pain bursts into life in the centre of his brain. He whimpered and went still, confused and scared by the scale of it. He’d never felt anything like it.

“Does it hurt?” Jinki looks anxious. “Don’t try to move too much, okay?”

“Hyung, Taemin? Where’s Taemin? Is he -”

“He’s fine.” Jinki’s voice was wobbling, making him sound near tears. The smell of coffee grew stronger. “You managed to fall right over him. He only got bruised. You protected him from the worst of it. He’s here, waiting outside with the others. Everyone’s dying to see you.”

Relief. Kibum went limp against the pillows. He took in his surroundings, belatedly placing them as a hospital room. This didn’t surprise him. He remembered the accident, the terrible blows of the scaffolding poles crashing onto his back, the supernova of pain in his head. He must have been knocked out. No wonder he’d ended up in hospital. He was probably lucky not to be dead.

He coughed painfully. “Hyung, is there water?” he croaked.

“Oh God, yes, I’m sorry - hang on a sec.” Jinki pushed the button to raise the head of the bed, then placed a straw to his lips. He held the glass for Kibum and eased an arm around his shoulders to support him, so incredibly carefully that Kibum would have joked that he wasn’t made of glass if he hadn’t been so busy taking tiny sips through the straw. Even the act of drinking felt exhausting, but it was overridden by his need for the liquid. He wasn’t sure what he was drinking, but it tasted incredible, crisp and sweet with a hundred clean, subtle, delicate flavours that he couldn’t quite put his finger on, but still seemed familiar. It was heavenly.

“What is this stuff?” he asked, a little breathless.

Jinki gave him a strange look. “Water,” he said, after a slight pause.

Kibum stared at him. He would have been inclined to think Jinki was messing with him, except that Jinki kind of looked like he was about to cry. 

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Nothing.” Jinki tried to smile at him, but the tears were building up visibly in his eyes.

“There is. You’re crying.”

“I’m not - not really. It’s just -” Jinki’s faltering smile slipped completely, and the smell of coffee grounds was eclipsed by a waft of the sharp smell of new plastic. He swallowed and dragged his ridiculously bright red sleeve across his eyes. “I’m relieved. Happy. You woke up. I was afraid…”

“Afraid of what?” Kibum asked when Jinki’s voice faded out. His voice cracked painfully, like he was a teenager again. “Why is my voice like this?”

“You’ve been unconscious for a while, Kibum.” An unfamiliar voice. Kibum almost flinched as he recognised the voice that belonged to the burning-acid touch - but it was only a doctor in a white coat, coming over from the doorway. He had a creased face and salt-and-pepper hair, and as he spoke, Kibum got a waft of a blunt, unpleasant smell that set his teeth slightly on edge. Ozone, he placed the smell after a couple of moments. “Your voice will recover as you use it again.” The doctor came to stand at the foot of his bed. “I’m Dr. Ji. I’m a neurosurgeon, and I’ve been in charge of your case.”

The doctor smiled at him. Kibum stared back warily. The fact that he had a neurosurgeon would have been alarming, but it wasn’t that which was making shivers crawl up and down his skin like spider’s legs. He forgot to reply in greeting as he tried to figure out what it was. Dr. Ji looked perfectly normal, but something about him was making Kibum extremely nervous.

“You were in a coma,” Jinki told him, swallowing the tears back.

Kibum tore his eyes from Dr. Ji to stare at Jinki instead. A coma? What?

“How long was I out?”

Jinki hesitated, glanced at the doctor, who nodded. Jinki took Kibum’s hand. “Four weeks.”

Kibum reeled. A month, gone in the space of a nightmare. Or several nightmares. A flash of half-forgotten imagery came to him, a barren, ruined cityscape, empty but for the sense of some nameless horror watching from the shadows. He shuddered and tried to grip Jinki’s hand tighter. Even his hand muscles felt weak. No wonder, if he hadn’t used them for a month. Feeling him tremble, Jinki gently the back of his hand with his thumb as Dr. Ji spoke again.

“In your accident four weeks ago, you suffered blunt impact trauma to your head, which caused a skull fracture and some swelling in your brain, a condition called post-traumatic hydrocephalus. You needed emergency brain surgery to implant a medical device called a shunt, which drains the excess fluid from your brain and prevents the pressure. The surgery went well and there have been no complications.” Dr. Ji’s explanation was marked by the blunt ozone-smell growing stro