"I hired someone," Jaehyun says, halfway through unloading heavy crates from the supply truck that just arrive dearly this Sunday morning. Mark is puffing as he tries to show off and lift two crates at once. Jaehyun’s knees are glad he's grown out of that already.

"What?" Mark pants, as he pushes in through the side door with his shoulder, Jaehyun at his heels.

"I said I hired someone. He’ll start working tomorrow afternoon."

"Another guy?" Mark sets the crates down and pouts. "I was hoping for a cute girl." He wipes his hands on his dirty sweatpants and puts on his baseball cap. "At least tell me he's painfully mediocre looking. I don't need competition."

Jaehyun’s not sure how to describe Taeyong to Mark. He's pretty sure Mark is not interested in Taeyong’s toned arms or Taeyong’s pretty lips. Half model, half anime might work, but Jaehyun doesn't want to give Mark any weird preconceptions. "He… Uhm looks good I guess."

"More good-looking than me?"

"Most definitely," Jaehyun teases, and Mark swears. "Don't worry, I'm sure you'll still get about half of the teenage girl hearts." He gingerly pats Mark’s shoulder, and Mark pouts, briefly, before beginning an intense and involved inspection of his Stan Smith’s that seems to preclude meeting Jaehyun’s gaze.

"If it means you'll take more days off," Mark says, still averting his eyes, "you could hire a trained circus animal and I wouldn't complain."

Ahhh, Jaehyun thinks. Feelings.

Mark never the sort to admit to emotions, but he's obviously (unnecessarily) concerned for Jaehyun, and that makes Jaehyun smile at him reassuringly, even if Mark is doing his best to sound indifferent and refuses to look at him.

Sometimes, Mark can be pretty adorable.

"He's not quite a trained circus animal." He thinks about the way Taeyong had laughed, as Jaehyun had explained the shifts, using his usual silly jokes, the ones Ten describes as 'heartbreakingly lame' and that Mark refuses to acknowledge as having been uttered. Taeyong had been very fond of and laughed every single time like they were the funniest things he'd heard all day. Then he'd sloshed smoothie all over his arm and sheepishly mopped it up as Jaehyun watched with trepidation. "I'm really on the fence about the trained part."

Jaehyun wonders, Taeyong isn’t quite the working type. He’s more of the ‘people should rather work for me’ type. He looks quite rich to be honest. Maybe he’s just doing this for his remaining time. Maybe not. Jaehyun’s not really sure. But one thing is for sure, he moves gracefully yes, like he’s some prince but working with the usual appliances and simple chores he seems like a kid just learning.

"The look on your face right now worries me," Mark says, and Jaehyun smiles.

"It'll be alright," Jaehyun says and added, "I hope."

❖

"I'm glad that we have a trained healer on staff," Mark says, as Taeyong slices his hand open on a piece of broken glass. Three attractive twenty-something women immediately produce bandages from their purses, and Mark’s scowl deepens. "And this is immensely unfair. All he does is trip, giggle, and bounce around the shop getting people's orders wrong. How is this possible?"

"Don't be jealous, Mark," Jaehyun says with a smile, straightening the collar of Mark’s shirt. "It's not the ‘sleek, pale, and brooding' thing you've got going on, but you must admit his cheerfulness is rather contagious."

"I'm sure the nice '-me' voice doesn't hurt," Mark says grudgingly, and Jaehyun shakes his head, either to clear the thought or to chide Mark for mentioning it.

"Don't kill him while I'm not here okay?" Jaehyun tells him, and Mark spins his baseball cap sideways, until the Manchester United logo turns into nothing more than a set of red and gold decal from the front view. "And for goodness' sake, don't let him use the blender again."

Even if Taeyong had enthusiastically insisted on doing the entire cleanup by himself, Jaehyun still doesn't want a repeat of the strawberry smoothie incident from last Tuesday.

"He's only been here two weeks and the girls have figured out his schedule. This is ridiculous. He strides the café like a model, but is so not fit to work stuff around here."

"Goodbye, Mark."

"His hair is stupid!" Mark says desperately, as Jaehyun walks away. "Don't leave me alone with him!"

The door cuts off Mark’s protests, and Jaehyun is hit with a wave of dreadful Seoul humidity as he steps out onto the street.

It's nice, Jaehyun thinks, to be able to leave the shop on a weekday afternoon. It's a luxury he hasn't had since Taeil left at the beginning of April. He hadn't realized how big the difference between four employees and three would be, when Taeil had first announced he was leaving, but having Taeyong on staff, even if Taeyong is an accident that is constantly happening, is a load off Jaehyun’s shoulders.

The walk is sweltering so when he enters the hospital, the air conditioning sends a shiver down his spine. He jams his hands into the pockets of his shorts after he self-consciously brushes his sweaty bangs off of his forehead.

He is headed to the first floor just above the main lobby. His sneakers squeak on the clean linoleum, and he nods to the nurses and goes to room 127.

"Jaehyun," says the woman in the bed, and Jaehyun rushes to her side, pushing back her hair from her brow. "You're here."

"Yes, yes," Jaehyun says. "We got a new guy at work, so I was able to come during the day before the end of visiting hours."

"It's good to see you," she says, as Jaehyun slides a chair up next to her bedside, before taking her hand between his own. It's cold, so he rubs up and down her fingers in a gentle massage to improve the circulation.

"You too, gran." He smiles at her. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be," she says. "I know you're working hard." She laughs, and it turns into a cough. "The nurses say you call everyday to check on me. They all want to know how old you are and if you're available."

"Gran," Jaehyun squeezes her hand, and she laughs again. They favor each other, in that smile. Jaehyun has a picture of them both, with fading colors and worn edges, which he keeps in the right pocket of his wallet along with his driver’s license and his student ID, just to remind himself of that fact.

"You're going back to school next semester, aren't you, dear?" she asks, and Jaehyun nods.

"If I can, I will," he says. "But don't worry about that." The air in the hospital is thick. "You should focus on your health. I can take care of myself."

"You've always been able to do that," his grandmother says. "You're far too hard on yourself, Jaehyun." She closes her eyes. "I wish you'd find someone to take care of you."

"Everything is fine, gran," Jaehyun says. Most of the time, he truly believes that, but his grandmother has a way of making him question whether or not everything really is fine, which makes him feel guilty, which then makes him more resolute to work harder and be stronger.

Jaehyun might not be able to lift two heavy boxes at a time from the supply truck like Mark, since he has asthma and can’t be exhausted too much. But in the past six years he's figured out how to be strong in a million other ways.

"If you say so," she says, and she smiles again, only this time the ends are brittle, like Jaehyun’s when there are a bunch of things he wants to say but he knows he never will. They favor each other, in that smile, too.

❖

Jaehyun, in a perfect world, would be three-quarters of the way to a PhD in the early history of Western civilizations. Instead of making sure there are enough chocolate chips in the refrigerator to refill the trays, he'd be sitting, bespectacled and sleep-deprived, in the basement of a library, writing about the battles with the druids for control of the British Isles.

This is not a perfect world. Jaehyun rolls up his sleeves, putting aside thoughts of the first aqueducts and successions of Caesars.

It is not so much that Jaehyun chose history, as that history, with its memorable dates and systematic timelines and cause-and-effect ratios, calls out to him like the siren-song that sends Odysseus crashing into the rocks.

"When you say it like that," Ten says, "it's kind of like how I was drawn to medicine with the promise of seeing a lot of s and ."

"Ten," Jaehyun says, as he tries to sort the trash so they can take it outside for the first time in a week, "you don't become a surgeon to look at s and ."

"I'm sure that some people don't," Ten says. "But I am not one of those people."

"I bet you see more of blood and guts in lab than you see of s or ." Jaehyun pulls out another aluminum can from the regular trash and looks between it and Ten before dropping it into the recycling.

"Well, I know that now," Ten says. "When I was a first year in undergrad, though, I wanted to be a plastic surgeon." He winks at Jaehyun, before walking over to help knot the trash bags. "Hindsight is twenty-twenty. The truth is, I should have gone into Italian Renaissance art if I wanted to look at bodies all day."

"I think you see enough bodies in your personal life." Jaehyun sighs. "The bag with the green writing is for trash, not cans, Ten."

"When it is five in the morning and you have an organic chemistry test that you are completely unprepared for in three hours," Ten says, "somehow all the bags become the same color." He lifts one bag. "Besides, I'm a changed man. I have settled down. Johnny is the only guy for me."

"If you say so," Jaehyun teases, lifting the recycling and food trash. Jaehyun actually does believe him. While he's, understandably, a firm proponent of 'history repeats itself', he has also seen the way Ten looks at Johnny, and thinks he might be his Romeo. (Ten’s grades, of course, are his Paris.)

"You could afford to see a few more bodies." Ten moves toward the front door of their apartment, the hem of his pants dragging along the kitchen floor. Jaehyun doesn't have the energy to protest, today.

"Mmm," Jaehyun says, and they don't talk again until the trash is safely out at the dumpsters and they're back into the fan-cooled living room, Ten pulling off his tee and leaving himself in only an undershirt.

"You're quiet," Ten says. "Mark says you took off this afternoon?"

"I went to see my grandmother." Jaehyun washes his hands as Ten lurks behind him. He turns around to his best friend's stare.

"How is she doing?" Ten asks.

"Well," Jaehyun says, and he doesn't want to worry Ten, so he doesn't mention the furrow between the doctor's brows or the way his grandmother's eyes hadn't quite focused. He will keep those worries for himself. "How was your day?"

"The new dude," Ten says. "Jaehyun, I went into work, and the new dude."

Even thinking about Taeyong makes Jaehyun smile. When he'd left work that afternoon, Taeyong had just learned how to mix the yogurts in the stainless steel machines. Jaehyun hasn't laughed that hard in a long time.

Taeyong isn't clumsy in everything, but it always seems like his brain tend to overthink than he expects them to be when he's trying to learn something new. This makes him more menace than aid sometimes, but Jaehyun has plenty of patience, and he's always liked teaching. "Like this," he'd told Taeyong, and Taeyong had carefully copied his posture, adjusting as he poured milk into the industrial mixer. The smile Taeyong had given him when he'd said "good job" had sent tingles all the way down to Jaehyun’s spine.

"You're smiling. You probably think his chaos is delightful, or something ridiculous like that."

"I do," Jaehyun says, his smile only growing wider as he thinks about all the strawberry pulp on Taeyong’s face last Wednesday, and the way Taeyong had silently cleaned up after Ten, too, because he had noticed that Jaehyun was constantly wiping down the counters.

"Then I like him," Ten says. "I may even deign to learn his name."

"Just like that?"

"Just like that. You don't smile as much as you used to, Jaehyun. I'm a big fan of anything that makes you happy." Ten shrugs as Jaehyun flushes. "If that means accepting an unexperienced mess into my work life, well, there are some sacrifices I am willing to make."

"He's not a mess," Jaehyun says. He’ll adjust, Jaehyun thinks. All he need is practice. "He's… Taeyong." There's a flutter in his stomach, but it is a simple enough thing to ignore. Or so he thinks.