note: Thank you for all who's subscribed! Apparently I had a chapter left within me lol, so here you go! There's abortion talk all throughout this chapter, so if that's something you're not comfortable with, then I'd recommend not to read this chapter.

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"Are you sure? Absolutely, positively, completely 100% sure?"

"I could be lying," her gynecologist says, and for a second, Jihyo holds her breath. "But the blood tests don't. They say here that you're absolutely, positively, completely 100% pregnant, Jihyo-ssi."

She exhales, a shaky grunt of angry air, because this isn't funny, she shouldn't ing joke if she wants to keep the paycheque she's depositing in her name. Doctor-client therapeutic relationships have been broken on lesser grounds than this, honestly. "God. God."

"How're you feeling about all of this?" Dr. Byun asks, and she'd clock her in the face, truly, if she wasn't certain that she'd be making the gossip news headlines in the incoming days, not only for being pregnant, but also for being legally charged with aggression and assault against a person of authority. "Any thoughts?"

"I'm on the pill," she says, drone-like, trying to rationalize it all in her head. "We used a . I'm pretty sure we used a ."

"While incredibly effective," Dr. Byun says, rolling her swivel chair away from her table to rifle through a drawer in one of the corners of her office. "There's always the possibility of it malfunctioning. Condoms break constantly, and the pill only works when there's a rigid schedule maintained for its consumption."

She almost feels insulted, having to be told things she already knows—she's here right now at the clinic, seven weeks pregnant, losing her damn mind, isn't she?—but then again, she'd kind of asked for it by voicing her thoughts. Just like how she'd literally asked to make a baby that night, which also kind of makes her as stupid as she's being made out to be, but to be fair, she had been under the influence of alcohol. There really should be an exemption made for her and every other woman who's been notched down a few IQ points for making bad decisions on those grounds alone.

"To discuss your options," Dr. Byun says, rolling back over to her desk and arranging a set of even more pamphlets on top of it. One more pregnancy pamphlet than that, and Jihyo would've gone stir-crazy, seriously. "You know that at your age, carrying a child to term carries some very grievous risks. Not just to you, but also to your baby. I'd really like to impress on you that taking good care of your body is going to be vital for keeping the baby—"

"I'm not," she interrupts, and Dr. Byun stops, looks at her attentively to listen. She clears , projects her voice louder for no reason. "I'm not keeping it. I want an abortion."

"Ah," Dr. Byun says, tonelessly, links her fingers together and rests them over a pamphlet: Healthy Pregnancies for Older Moms. "Because I can see that you're upset over the news, I recommend that you take some time to think over your decision."

Pregnant at 36, with her acting career slowly gaining traction again, by one of her ex-variety castmates, the other half of a loveline that she'd thought to have shaken off all delusional, fan-concocted romantic ties with once he'd left the show—of course she's upset. And she's not going to stop being upset about it anytime soon, so there's really no use in waiting another day to make a choice when it's no one else's business besides hers, anyways. "No. I'm not upset. I still want the abortion."

"Maybe the father would like to know first?" Dr. Byun suggests, and Jihyo's seriously starting to think Dr. Byun's a little incompetent. Either that, or she's just really nosy. Or she's an informant for Dispatch. Whichever works.

Regrettably enough, though, it does make her think it over again. "The father?"

The father. Kang Gary. Maybe she should tell him. Maybe he'd want it. Maybe she owes him that, since she did ask. He also said he was thinking about having a kid, living out Haha's reality, but that hadn't been it. He'd talked about settling down, too, had implied the whole nine yards of a family plan. The thought of her settling down with him just because of this, having to be forced into another game of pretend with him after so many years of doing just that—

No. She doesn't owe him anything. This time around, she gets the final say. "I want an abortion."

Dr. Byun nods. "Alright," she says, stacks her pamphlets in a pile again, pulls out a notepad from her lab coat and scribbles something down. "Since my earliest availability is in two weeks, will it be alright if I set your appointment then?"

"That's fine," she says. She doesn't know her schedule then—her manager keeps track of that for her, since she's horrible at it—but she'll clear it, somehow. She'll find the time. "Thank you."

"There's no need for thanks," Dr. Byun says, smiling kindly, and okay, so maybe Jihyo'd been a little harsh about wanting to punch her. She'll minimize her animosity to ignoring her on the streets, if she was ever to encounter her in passing. "For now, I'd still like to give you some of these information sheets so that you don't come into any problems before the day of the abortion. I still impress that you take care of your body as well as to not induce a risky miscarriage, so no to too much strenuous activities."

She knows what that means: take it easy on Running Man. Not that she truly can, because then the rest of the cast and crew will figure out that something was wrong with her, but she could always just chalk it down to a flu bug or some other type of sickness like that. She's earned her right to be a little bit laid back with all the things they'd put her through, and it's not as if some fans weren't already convinced that she's checked out of the program altogether in mind, if not totally in body.

And it's only two weeks. Two weeks, she can do. Two weeks, she'll pretend, and hopes fervently that the tasks the PDs decide on for then has her sitting down and being pretty and not doing much of anything else.

"Okay," she says, stuffs the pamphlets Dr. Byun hands her to the very bottom of her bag, ensures that nothing's sticking out—cameras are ultra HD now, with a thousand times the zooming capability—goes incognito by putting on a huge hat, huge sunglasses, a huge face mask, and speedwalks out of the office to hide in her car, stowing away the dirty secret she carries for fourteen more days.

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Hoping is entirely futile, she finds out, no matter how steadfast you are with it, because life will always want to slap you around a bit and laugh in your face about it for, say, the next two weeks at your expense. This she knows, because she's pregnant—has she said that yet? Well, just let her remind you—and because the PDs has her on the fighting mat with a belly bean bag underneath some heavy upper body padding, ready to launch at an already mutinous Kwangsoo, all a week before the scheduled day of her abortion.

"Go easy on me," she whispers to him, when they knock heads before they start, because she wants the baby gone, but not this cruelly. Not like this. "Please."

Kwangsoo must hear the desperation in her voice, because he furrows his eyebrows at her before the cameras zoom in, and then proceeds to heed her request: lets her dictate the pace of the match, lets himself get kicked, lets himself be the laughing stock of the game once more, like how it was those many years ago.

She's thankful, but she knows it'd be better if she lost so that she's eliminated from the game completely. "Hit me out of the game," she hisses in his ear, when she has him in a headlock, "But don't hit my stomach."

He follows through, the consummate actor he's turning out to be: wrangles out of her chokehold, lays her down on the ground carefully, and stages them at an angle that makes it look like he's actually hitting her when his hands don't even make a graze.

"Lee Kwangsoo wins!" Jaesuk announces, and Kwangsoo primps around theatrically. She blows a frustrated breath out of pursed lips, the loose hair from her ponytail flying with the wind, but she closes her eyes in relief once the cameras have turned away and focused in on another target.

Taping finishes without any other incidents like that happening. She bows her goodbye to the guests, smiles at the VJs, tries to wrap everything up before she gets caught, before Kwangsoo gets the chance to ask—

"Noona," Kwangsoo calls out, and she isn't even surprised. They call her lucky, but all she's been getting in these last weeks, the past few months, is misfortune after misfortune that she can't undo with a chance of a second nametag, the granted power of turning back time. "What was that all about? Are you alright?"

"I'm fine," she assures, slows down her walking to let him catch up. He doesn't really need it, not with his long legs, but it's the consideration that counts. She's a good person, and she's not guilty. She's correcting a mistake. This is not compensation, not penitence, because she's not sinning. "I think I ate something spoiled last night."

"You should take care of yourself more," Kwangsoo says, voice laden with his concern. Honest, so honest, that she can't meet his gaze without wanting to spill her heart out, disintegrating the lie she's tried so hard to keep up for a week. "Are you sure that's all it is?"

She hesitates. They've reached the parking lot by now, approaching her car with every step they take, but she stops in the middle of the empty space, and Kwangsoo stops along with her.

"Noona?" he says, eyes soft, accommodating; the side of Kwangsoo that most of the viewers don't really get to see, shaded behind their misconceptions of him as that kid who made you laugh week-in and week-out by looking a fool in every aspect of life, and nothing more than that. "You know you can tell m