She knew it was Kim Jongin the moment she felt his overwhelming, dark aura press down on her. It was as if a black raincloud followed him everywhere he went. Even though this was only the third time he had come to the eye clinic, Soojung felt that the artist’s presence instantly changed the previously cheerful atmosphere into one of gloom and melancholy. And she sighed, because she also knew she would always be the first person to tend to Kim Jongin whenever he came. It almost made her wish for a co-receptionist to help her out, just so she wouldn’t have to deal with him each time he arrived for his appointments, even though she had staunchly insisted she could handle everything by herself when Kyungsoo and Junmyeon had first employed her during Bright Vision Eye Clinic’s early stages. And while it had been much easier handling all of the patients’ accounts on her own for the past few years, Kim Jongin’s terrifying presence was almost enough to make Soojung surrender her smidgen of pride in her work to avoid him.

Never mind that she thought he was extremely handsome; almost everyone who had ever laid eyes on him thought so. But Soojung wasn’t too taken by his dashing looks to forget how intimidated she felt whenever he was around. As enticing as the idea of dating such an attractive man was, she knew such a fantasy would never come true. There were absolutely no sparks between them and Soojung would just be wasting her time if she pined after someone like Kim Jongin.

That knowledge made it easier for her to attempt to stare at the artist straight in the eye when he walked up to the receptionist’s desk with an unfathomable expression on his good-looking face. And since he wasn’t wearing a scowl as he had the previous two times, Soojung was able to let out the breath that she had been unconsciously holding as she pasted on a bright smile and cheerfully asked, “How are you this afternoon, Mr. Kim?” She thanked her lucky stars that her voice hadn’t trembled as she spoke.

“I could be better.”

“O-oh, is that so?” Soojung couldn’t help her voice wavering when he spoke to her so indifferently. The dismissive note in his tone didn’t make the situation any more comfortable and only served to remind the receptionist why falling for him was a terrible idea on her part. “W-well, Nurse Park will you to the exam room once she’s finished with the patient she’s currently tending to.” Kim Jongin’s eyes seemed to bore into her skull as she spoke, so she quickly lowered her gaze to his open file that was sitting on her desk. “It looks like Dr. Do has marked you down for a blood test today.” Her voice was steadier now that she wasn’t looking directly at him, but she could feel his suffocating aura wrapping around her.

“How long will I have to wait for Dr. Do in the exam room?” The artist slightly lifted his chin as he added distastefully, “Being punctual doesn’t seem to be a strength of his.”

“He’ll be with you as soon as he finishes his prior appointment. Dr. Do and Dr. Kim are our senior doctors, so their schedules are much more hectic than those of our two junior doctors. Unfortunately, you’ve only caught Dr. Do on his busy days so far.”

“Is that so?”

The receptionist nodded nervously, still averting her gaze from his. Her heart pounded loudly in her chest and her palms grew sweatier by the second.

“Then my next appointment with him shall have to be on a day when he’s not as inconvenienced,” the artist stated as he tapped the side of his chin with his right pointer finger. A softer, thoughtful expression was now decorating his face and Soojung couldn’t help but feel more flutters in her chest when she allowed her gaze to pass over his handsome face again.

However, she quickly squashed any favorable thoughts about Kim Jongin that were currently passing through her mind and instead turned to her computer to pull up the booking system. “I can schedule your next appointment now, if you’d like.” That technically wasn’t protocol, since the patients who were currently being seen by the doctors had priority over the artist, but Soojung was willing to slightly bend the rules if it meant he could leave the eye clinic immediately after his appointment. The less she saw and interacted with him, the better it was for her sanity.

A look of surprise crossed Jongin’s face at her suggestion, but he quickly masked it with the unfathomable expression he had been wearing when entering the eye clinic. After all, he wasn’t going to complain when things were going his way. “When would be a good time to see him then?”

Soojung quickly glanced at Kyungsoo’s calendar before answering, “Dr. Do is extremely busy on the weekdays, but he’s generally quite free on Saturdays. He typically likes to take the weekends for rest and administrative work, so he sees patients every hour instead of every half an hour on Saturdays, unless he’s called in for an emergency.” The receptionist’s cursor hovered over the column of Saturdays as she asked, “Do you prefer coming in the morning or in the afternoon, Mr. Kim?”

“Afternoon.”

“I can book you in for four o’clock on Saturday, two weeks from now, if that works for you.”

Jongin nodded. Any time was a good time to see Dr. Do if it meant he could get a step closer to repairing his botched color vision.

“Great!” Soojung’s usual cheery tone was able to surface with the artist acting quite cooperatively this time around. And the situation became even better when she spotted Sojin walking down the hallway to the receptionist’s desk. “Well, there’s Nurse Park! She’ll take you to the exam room right now. Have a good afternoon, Mr. Kim!” Soojung rambled as she hastily motioned towards Sojin, who waved at them.

Seeing that he couldn’t get a word in edgewise, Jongin just shrugged and followed the nurse to the back of the eye clinic. Once he was out of sight, the receptionist let out another loud sigh and leaned back into her chair with her eyes closed.

Dealing with Kim Jongin was utterly exhausting.

--

Once Jongin was situated in the black exam chair, he was about to close his eyes as he waited for Kyungsoo to arrive. After all, a leopard could never change its spots, so why would the ophthalmologist be on time today?

But Nurse Park stopped him by asking if he could take off his tawny coat and roll up his sleeve.

“What for?” Jongin asked in surprise, since he hadn't been expecting this sudden turn of events.

“Dr. Do prefers having his patients’ blood pressure checked and recorded before he administers the blood test,” Nurse Park explained with a smile as she took the artist’s coat and neatly folded it on the nearby counter. “It helps him with the analysis of the test’s results, which will be mailed to you in about a month.”

“One month?!” Jongin couldn’t help but let his jaw fall, even though he had promised Yixing he would try to be tolerant. But this was absolutely absurd. He didn’t have time to wait around for an entire month for these results.

The nurse’s smile faltered, but she professionally kept her composure as she patiently clarified, “It takes much longer for our clinic to send out blood test results, because we are a small private clinic that has to send our samples to a local laboratory that is partnered with us. We do not have facilities of our own to process the samples, so we have to wait on the laboratory to send us the results first before our doctors can analyze them with the patients’ specific situations in mind. And the laboratory usually sends us the test results in batches, since they are serving other clients as well. It can take up to two weeks for a batch of results to be sent to us, unless certain samples have been marked as urgent. Dr. Do, in particular, is very thorough when he looks over these test results and it can take him up to several days to complete a single analysis, depending on how busy he is with seeing patients. Because Dr. Kim takes on most of the surgical procedures in this clinic, Dr. Do does most of the paperwork for the patients of both Dr. Kim and himself.” There was a hard glint in Nurse Park’s eyes as she finished speaking, as if she were daring Jongin to argue with her on this.

Even though he had no wish to, the artist grudgingly conceded and kept his mouth shut as he nodded while rolling up the left sleeve of his slate gray shirt. The chilly air of the examination room immediately hit his bare skin, causing tiny goose bumps to form along his upper arm. Jongin lightly bit down on his lower lip and kept himself from shivering, since it wasn’t that cold. He would just be an overreacting pansy if he let the cool temperature affect him so much.

Nurse Park trawled through the bottom counter drawer for an aneroid sphygmomanometer. After standing up straight, she began wrapping the gray cuff of the instrument around the artist’s upper arm, several centimeters above his elbow. “You’ve been fasting for the past twenty-four hours, correct?”

Jongin slightly winced when he felt the cuff squeeze his arm as the nurse wrapped it around him. He couldn’t help but feel that she was purposely tightening it more than she needed to, but he also wasn’t the medical expert, so he bitterly supposed to himself that his opinion didn’t really matter in this situation. “Yes. My manager informed me two days ago that I would have to when he got the call from Ms. Jung.”

“Good.” Nurse Park surveyed the aneroid sphygmomanometer with satisfaction before inserting the eartips of her stethoscope in her ears and placing the cold metal chestpiece against Jongin’s arm, slightly underneath the cuff’s edge. With the black inflation bulb in her left hand, she used her pointer finger and thumb to adjust the air release valve before rapidly inflating the cuff.

The artist let out a sharp hiss when he felt the cuff tighten even more uncomfortably around his upper arm.

Since she was carefully listening for knocking sounds as she gradually released air from the cuff, the nurse didn’t notice his discomfort with her gaze locked on the gauge of the aneroid sphygmomanometer, noting which tick mark the needle was pointing at every few seconds. After a few minutes, the pressure from the cuff greatly lessened as Nurse Park completely opened the air release valve. “Your blood pressure looks normal,” she reported as she undid the aneroid sphygmomanometer from Jongin’s upper arm. Once it was properly stowed in the bottom counter drawer, the nurse straightened up and made several notes in his file before pushing open the door of the examination room. “I’ll see if Dr. Do has finished his earlier appointment.”

And then she left before Jongin could say anything and he glared at the door while rubbing his sore upper arm.

--

“I apologize for making you wait, Mr. Kim,” Dr. Do said immediately as he walked through the door with Nurse Park right behind him. “My previous appointment lasted longer than planned.”

“It’s fine,” Jongin answered through gritted teeth as he glowered at the nurse, who purposefully averted his gaze by busying herself with setting down a large blood test kit on the counter and opening it to begin preparing the syringe that Dr. Do would be using. “I’ve learned not to expect anything anyway.”

Kyungsoo raised an eyebrow while internally sighing, since the “agreeable” Kim Jongin from two weeks ago had most certainly been too good to be true. It had been nice while it lasted. “Well, I shall administer your blood test and then you can be on your way. It shouldn’t take more than five minutes. You aren’t afraid of needles, are you?”

“No, I’m not scared of them.”

“That’s good. But if you feel uncomfortable while I am drawing your blood, please let me or Nurse Park know. She can give you a stress ball to grip, which should distract you from the pain.”

“Okay.” But Jongin knew he wouldn’t need one. He had never fainted or felt uncomfortable when receiving shots as a child, so there was no reason that he would this time as an adult.

When the nurse finished fitting a tube that would collect the artist’s blood sample into the syringe, she handed it to Dr. Do, who had slipped on a fresh pair of gloves. Nurse Park then wrapped a tourniquet in the middle of Jongin’s left upper arm while the ophthalmologist used an alcohol wipe to clean the patch of skin on the artist’s forearm, just below his elbow pit, where the needle would be inserted. After the tourniquet was secured, Nurse Park held Jongin’s arm in place so that it was easier for the ophthalmologist to find the median cubital vein. Dr. Do uncapped the needle and eyed the artist's forearm before quickly yet carefully ing the needle into the vein. Keeping his left pointer finger against the barrel of the syringe, the ophthalmologist used his right hand to slowly pull up the plunger as he began extracting Jongin’s blood.

Several seconds of silence passed before it was suddenly interrupted by a strangled gasp from the artist. “Why… Why does my blood look like that?!” Jongin’s characteristically low voice was becoming more high-pitched by the second as he fearfully watched his blood slowly fill the large barrel.

“Like what?” Dr. Do peered at the syringe as he gradually pulled the plunger upwards. “It looks quite normal to me.”

“But—but it’s not,” the artist choked out in horror, his eyes still staring at the syringe. “My blood… It’s—it’s not red.”

Kyungsoo furrowed his thick eyebrows in confusion, not understanding what Jongin meant. The artist’s blood looked as red as anyone else’s. It looked no different from the tubes of blood that the ophthalmologist had extracted from any of his other patients.

But to Jongin, the vibrant red that his blood should have been was absent. Instead, it was cast with dark purple and dark brown hues. The shade made him feel nauseous, not because it was an ugly color, but because it wasn’t natural. Red was such a pure color, bright and strong, that caught the attention of everyone who saw it. It was untainted as a primary color, able to stand on its own without needing to mix other shades to be created.

Instead of being that brilliant, beautiful color, his blood looked more akin to dried, aged oxblood. Jongin remembered seeing the shade from the pictures that Sehun had sent him of his outfits for Seoul Fashion Week two years. While the color itself was actually quite pleasing to the eye, now it only meant his color vision was far worse than Jongin had imagined it to be. If his scarlet red blood now looked like…like this brownish, purplish monstrosity to him…

He wanted to wretch.

Kyungsoo noted with concern that the artist’s face now had a pallid tinge to it and motioned with his head for Sojin to grab onto Jongin’s shoulders, in case he collapsed while the ophthalmologist was still drawing his blood. “We’re almost done, Mr. Kim. Take some deep breaths, okay?”

The artist nodded numbly as he obediently began inhaling and exhaling with Nurse Park guiding him through the breathing exercises.

Half a minute passed before Dr. Do finally removed the tourniquet that was around Jongin’s arm, and pressed a cotton-wool pad to the needle before carefully pulling it out and capping it. Since Nurse Park was still helping the artist with his breathing, Dr. Do grabbed the roll of bandages from the kit sitting on the counter and carefully wrapped it around the cotton-wool pad, making sure it was bound tightly enough so that the pressure would stop the bleeding. The ophthalmologist then removed the tube of Jongin’s blood from the syringe, and placed it in the tube rack sitting in the blood test kit before tossing the used syringe and needle into a nearby sharps container. “Are you feeling better now, Mr. Kim?” Dr. Do asked cautiously, motioning for Nurse Park to take the kit away while he dealt with the dazed artist. “Do you need some water? I can ask Ms. Jung to give you a cup before you leave.”

“I’m—I’m fine.” Jongin let out another shaky breath while his eyes were screwed shut. Kyungsoo waited patiently for the artist to compose himself and rubbed his back comfortingly. “I’ll… I’ll be going now.” He opened his eyes and stood up from the exam chair, although a little too quickly, causing him to slightly stumble forward.

“Careful, Mr. Kim,” the ophthalmologist said as he caught Jongin’s arm and steadied the taller man. “I can call Nurse Park to —”

“No thank you, but I’ll be fine on my own.” Jongin pried his arm from Dr. Do’s grip and grabbed his coat from the counter, slipping it on as he slowly walked out of the exam room with the ophthalmologist worriedly looking at him from behind. He passed Soojung without saying a word to her and called Yixing to pick him up immediately.

As he waited outside of the eye clinic, the artist felt his stomach curl painfully and he leaned against a column with his eyes closed. Shallow breaths passed through his lips and Jongin had to consciously regulate his breathing to avoid hyperventilating in such a public space. He had already shown too much weakness today.

Maybe he’d ask Yixing if they could go to a bar tonight. Jongin needed to get drunk to forget that his blood wasn’t red anymore.

♈♈♈