[CONTENTID1]Things[/CONTENTID1]

[CONTENTID2]Chapter Seventeen[/CONTENTID2]

[CONTENTID3]

Jakyung had never been more grateful for sewing lessons in her life.

She had complained when Nana made her take them. Out of all the things Nana made her learn, this by far was the most boring. She knew how to mix a perfect Long Island Iced tea. She knew how to change a spark plug, and she knew how to find a leak in a flat tire. So why did she need to know how to sew?

She had a feeling that Nana was preparing her for this moment.

It had been a struggle to get Chen into the elevator in her apartment building. The large gash in his side hadn’t hit anything vital, but it was still bleeding profusely and she was afraid for him. She had only seen someone like this pale once before, and her mind refused to accept that he could be dying in her arms.

So she had gotten him to her apartment and laid out on her couch as fast as she could. She didn’t care if his blood stained the couch; she could always buy a new couch. She couldn’t buy a new Chen.

Her hands shook as she frantically searched for the sewing kit she kept under the sink in her bathroom. When she finally found it, she had to will her hands still as she brought it to the living room and used a lighter to heat the needle to sterilize it and threaded it carefully. She peeled back his blood soaked shirt and hissed as she saw just how bad the wound was.

She got to work quickly, praying to every god and deity she knew that he would be survive. He had lost so much blood, red was becoming her least favorite color. When she was finished, she cleaned him up as best as she could, and grabbed her phone to dial Kai.

She tried to keep her voice from wavering as she explained the situation to him, but by the time she hung up the phone, she was barely convincing herself that everything was fine. As she stood over her kitchen sink, washing Chen’s blood from her hands, she couldn’t stem the flow of tears. Her body shook with her loud sobs no matter how hard she tried to keep them from coming.

She cried as she washed her hands, and cried as she sat on the floor next to Chen, holding his pale hand. And that’s how Kai and Yixing found her, crying, when they entered her apartment ten minutes after she had called them.

She resisted their attempts to get her to leave Chen, even when they explained that her quick stitching job was probably the thing that saved his life. She sat in the arm chair as Yixing checked over Chen’s body, but moved back to his side as soon as the older male had told her that he would be fine and just needed to sleep for a few hours. She moved only once, when Yixing told her that she had some small injuries herself that needed to be attended to.

Kai watched as Jakyung wept over his friend’s body. He still hadn’t gotten the whole story from her, but he realized that now probably wasn’t the time to press her for details. She looked worse than a few days before after the episode with Mark. He didn’t dare try to convince her to rest because he knew she would resist. He watched as she fell asleep at Chen’s side, and smiled at the image.

She pretended not to care, but he knew better.

Kai woke her after an hour, and managed to convince her to eat something. Yixing had made a stew from the few things she kept in her kitchen and was firm in his insistence that she eat. Yixing probed her for information as gently as he could, and she revealed that she had come into the fight halfway through.

“Were the men wearing any certain colors, or did they have any distinguishing tattoo’s or something like that?” Kai asked. Jakyung thought about it for a moment and nodded.

“They were all had the emblem of a bird on their jackets,” she told them. “Like in the style of those really cheesy American gangster movies.”

“Well, at least it was Mockingbird and not some other gang,” Yixing said with a sigh. Jakyung didn’t pretend to understand what he was talking about.

“So you really are all in a gang,” she said, more to herself than to them. She had suspected it the very first time they had walked into Elysia, and then again when she’d helped Xiumin with Baekhyun and Luhan the week before, but she never had any definitive proof.

“Yes we are. Is that a problem?” Kai asked evenly. Jakyung looked at him with weary eyes.

“Do you think I give a about you being in a ing gang? Chen is half dead on my couch. If it mattered to me, I wouldn’t have stopped to help him at all,” she snapped. Kai was actually surprised. He wasn’t expecting her to have a problem, but he also wasn’t expecting her to have such a strong reaction to the question.

“Don’t take it the wrong way, Noona, please,” Kai said to her. “I know you don’t care. It’s a good thing.” He was quite convinced that she had no idea of her own family’s gang affiliation, but he knew that wasn’t what influenced her answer.

“It’s hard to pretend you don’t care about someone when they do everything to make you want to care,” she said quietly. “How could he tell me something like that and then almost go and get himself murdered… Is he crazy?” She let out a wry laugh and Yixing leaned over to tell Kai what Suho had told him after the banquet.

“He confessed to you at the Spring Gala?” Kai asked incredulously. “He really is crazy.”

“I know, right?” Jakyung swiped angrily at a few more tears that sprung from her eyes. “The idiot kissed me and walked away like it was nothing. What kind of person does that?”

“Maybe he knew you would say no,” Kai replied. Jakyung’s shoulders sagged as she realized that he was right. “I mean, you’re in a… thing with Xiumin-hyung.”

“You’re in a “thing” with Xiumin?” Lay asked, having heard this for the first time. “Xiumin-hyung is in a thing? He never does things!”

“Xiumin and I are undefined,” Jakyung muttered. She hated this. She hated that she was even discussing anything vaguely romantic involving herself. Chen was sleeping off a knife wound in her living room, and she had no romantic feeling for him whatsoever, but she had spent the last four hours crying at the thought of losing him. She couldn’t even imagine what she would have done if it was Xiumin in his position.

“Hello?”

Chen’s voice was so quiet, Jakyung almost didn’t hear it. But she was kneeling by his side in an instant, his hand held in hers.

“What happened?” He croaked out, trying to sit up. He let out a groan as pain shot up his side.

“Don’t try to move,” Jakyung scolded softly. “You got hurt and I had to sew you back up like in those corny mafia movies.” She tried to find some humor in the situation, but her laughs only ended up as weak sobs.

“Hey, hey, Jakyung. Don’t cry,” Chen said, giving her hand a squeeze. “I just needed to get