A/N: Hi, guys! Before anything else, I have a couple of important things to say.

First: I made a mistake in the last chapter. I forgot to italicize the dialogue between Yunho and Lee Soo Man, to indicate that it was said in Korean. I fixed it the day after I posted the chapter, but I think most of you have already read it before I noticed the mistake. So yeah, I just wanna let you know of that correction.

Second: I know I said last weekend, that I won't be able to update this weekend, but I had a slight change in my schedule. The paper I was supposed to be working on had its deadline changed from this coming Monday to next Monday instead. So yeah, that's why I'm able to update this weekend, but won't be able to do so next weekend.

Anyway, now that all that's done... We have a very long and intense chapter here, so let's just get through with it now, shall we? Also, Yunho's very "out of it" in this chapter, just to give you all a head's up...

“He can’t keep acting like this!” I heard Yoochun shout in total frustration from downstairs.

Startled, I jumped up from my bed and ran downstairs, only to find the boys in the main hallway, apparently having just arrived home.

I frowned as I checked my wristwatch. It was barely past two in the afternoon.

“Why are you guys back so soon? Don’t you have another hearing session this afternoon?” I questioned.

“Our lawyers had to ask for the meeting to be moved to another date,” Junsu replied quietly.

“What?” I couldn’t help but say it loudly, surprised as I was. “Why?”

“Is Yunho here?” Jaejoong just asked me instead.

That made me pause and look among them again. Sure enough, the leader’s presence was absent.

“Uhm, no?” I said carefully. “I thought he said during breakfast that he was just going to meet you in the courts after visiting his family today?”

“Hyung didn’t show up,” Changmin muttered, rubbing his face.

“What?” I gaped at him.

The maknae gave a big sigh before continuing, “That’s why the lawyers had to ask for the date for this hearing session to be changed. They had to say that there was a personal emergency on our part. It doesn’t exactly make us look good, but it would be even worse if we continued on with that session without Yunho hyung…”

“Yeah, we all know what people would be prone to speculate if we don’t show up as a complete unit…” Junsu intoned.

“And I’ve just contacted Yunho’s sister, Ji-hye,” Jaejoong added blankly, a faraway look in his eye. “She said Yunho hadn’t been in their family home to see them today at all…”

I was stunned silent.

“But- but then, where is he?” I managed to sputter out. “Because I swear he also left the place as well not long after you guys did this morning!”

“Good question,” Yoochun grumbled, highly irritated. He turned around and slumped off into the living room.

We all followed him.

“This can’t go on,” Yoochun said quietly as he sat himself on the sofa, propped his elbows on his knees and placed his head on his hands. “This just can’t go on. Like what I said, Yunho hyung can’t keep acting like this. He needs to get himself together. I mean, he’s our leader, for god’s sake!”

“What can we do?” Junsu said anxiously, biting his fingernails. “We don’t even know what exactly is wrong! We need to get him out of whatever that’s bothering him, but how can we, when he won’t even tell us what’s going on?”

It had been more than a week since Yunho had “dinner” with their president, and still, none of us can wrangle the truth out of him about what really happened that night. Yunho had been so unusually quiet the past week, and it had been unnerving all of us. All we could do was to exchange anxious and nervous looks, though, because whenever we tried to question him outright, Yunho was prone to getting really angry.

A soft sniffle broke my train of thoughts and Yoochun, Junsu, Changmin, and I turned all turned our heads to the direction of the sound.

Jaejoong was clutching the doorsill of the entrance to the living room so tightly that it may very well be the only thing that was keeping him upright as silent tears rolled down his cheeks.

“Jaejoong,” Yoochun breathe out, raising his head from his hands and looking at his soulmate in shock.

“Oppa,” I said worriedly, hurrying over to his side. “Oppa, what’s wrong?” I asked anxiously as I rubbed his arm in an attempt to comfort him.

“We-we’re l-losing h-him,” Jaejoong manage to say through his sobs.

“W-what?”

“Y-Yunho,” Jaejoong said. “W-we’re l-losing him. H-he’s g-going to stay, I j-just know it!”

We all stared at him for a while, before we all burst into protests.

“No, you can’t think about it like that!” Junsu countered.

“Oppa, just because he’s out of it now doesn’t mean he’s going to back out on you guys!” I tried to rationalize.

“N-no, I know Yunho!” Jaejoong choked out through his tears. He tried to wipe his face, but more tears just rolled down from his eyes anyway. “H-he’s really unnerved right now, I can tell! H-he won’t go with us, I just know it! What happened in your time will happen again! Yunho will stay!” He almost wailed as he said the last part to me.

“Jaejoong oppa, you’re just upset right now,” I said in a would-be-calm voice. Jaejoong’s words were sending me into an internal panic attack, but I couldn’t let the eldest member see that. It would just cause him even more distress. I needed to remain strong and calm. “Sure, Yunho oppa’s been acting rather oddly, but that doesn’t mean right away that he’ll stay with the company. We’ll figure out what’s wrong with him soon enough, okay? I swear, I’ll do everything I can to make sure you’re not separated from Yunho oppa this time around,” I said the last part quietly.

Because I knew that apart from worrying about how their group would be divided, Jaejoong’s fear for their relationship as a couple if Yunho decided to stay was even greater. And the fact the Yunho had been distant even with Jaejoong during the past week wasn’t helping Jaejoong’s fear at all.

Jaejoong just wrapped his arms around me and continued his crying on my shoulder.

As I rubbed his back up and down, I glanced back towards the three younger members. They looked even more worried and unnerved than ever before, and I couldn’t fault them for it. They had spent the last week seeing their leader so out of his funk, and now they’re witnessing their eldest member break down.

This wasn’t good for the group, and this wasn’t good for any of us individually as well.

“Well, let’s just say that Yunho hyung did decide to stay,” Yoochun suddenly said, making us all turn to him.

“What, oppa?” I said, confused and dreading what Yoochun might say, because I didn’t like the darkness in his tone at all.

“Let’s say that we don’t manage to shake Yunho hyung out of it and he still stays with SM,” Yoochun repeated, making Jaejoong flinch.

“Yoochun, I don’t think-“ Junsu began warningly, but Yoochun just cut off him off.

“No, no, it’s all very… hypothetical… of course.” But Yoochun’s voice suggested that he believed that this was just hypothetical thinking much less than this was something that would happen again for sure. “Let’s say that Yunho hyung did decide to stay… what about you then, Changmin? Will you still go with us, or remain with Yunho hyung?”

Changmin, who had been standing next to the sofa that Yoochun was sitting on, looked down at his hyung with wide eyes. Jaejoong, Junsu, and I all gasped, shocked that Yoochun actually asked Changmin that, now of all times!

“Y-Yoochun oppa,” I said, my voice trembling a bit. “I-I don’t think now is the time to suddenly ask for a declaration of sides-“

“No, no, now’s a good time as any,” Yoochun told me, shaking his head, though his eyes were still trained on Changmin. “In fact, now’s the best time for it.”

“But you shouldn’t be declaring ‘sides’ at all!” I continued to protest. “You’re one group, you’re all on the same side!”

“Are we still?” Yoochun asked quietly, finally turning his gaze towards me. “That’s the question, isn’t it? Are we still on the same side? Or is the split that happened in your time about to happen again now?”

I could only stare at Yoochun in silent horror. He wasn’t serious, was he? He couldn’t really be questioning that, could he?

But then, the look on his face told me that he was completely serious and that he really was questioning that.

“How can you say that, Yoochun?” Junsu sniffled. By now he had joined Jaejoong in crying.

“With the way Yunho hyung is acting right now, I just think it’s best that we prepare ourselves for whatever outcome that the interference of that old devil may have caused,” Yoochun said quietly, and we were then able to see the fear and desperation that he has been hiding all along under his mask of frustration and anger. “Don’t look at me like that, you guys,” he added, as he noted the way we were all staring at him. “I don’t really want to consider this any more than you guys do… but given all that's been happening lately… well, it would be foolish and a huge oversight if we don’t start considering what could happen if things don’t go as we’ve planned them to…”

We were all silent as we let Yoochun’s words sink into us. It wasn’t nice, it wasn’t pleasant, but it was one of those harsh truths that we all have to live with.

“So… about that question that I was asking you, Changmin?” Yoochun said eventually, returning his focus on the maknae.

Changmin looked from Yoochun, to Junsu, to Jaejoong, to me, then back to Yoochun again. Then, he looked down at floor and kept his eyes fixed firmly on the carpet for the next few minutes. Jaejoong opened his mouth, looking as though he was about to tell Yoochun not to pressure their youngest with something like this, when Changmin finally looked back up.

“I-I would still do what my future self did. I’d stay with Yunho hyung,” Changmin said in barely more than a whisper, looking straight into Yoochun’s eyes.

“I knew it,” Yoochun all but spat bitterly, folding his arms across his chest and looking away from the maknae.

“Well, you asked for it,” Changmin answered back evenly.

“So, if Yunho hyung really decides to stay, you’re going to turn your back on us as well? You’re just going to leave the three of us to continue on with the lawsuit?” Yoochun demanded at Changmin.

“Hey, hey, I thought this was all just hypothetical,” Junsu said weakly, but the two didn’t pay any attention to him.

It was like a déjà vu for me of the time a few months ago when they’ve just found out that they were going to split and Changmin and Yoochun were fighting. And I really didn’t want an actual repeat of that, so I hurriedly moved away from Jaejoong towards the two who looked just about ready to lunge at each other again.

“Enough!” I shouted at them. “This isn’t the time for you to fight! You should be standing firmly by each other’s sides, not ripping each other’s throats off!”

“Tell that to him, then!” Yoochun snapped, giving Changmin a nasty look. “He’s the one who’d leave our side!”

“And you’re the one who’s a filthy hypocrite!” Changmin retorted. “I should have known that all that before was just a show!”

“What are you talking about?” Yoochun demanded hotly.

“Whatever happened to all that assurances that you were telling me before?” Changmin shouted. “Weren’t you all saying that we’ll stick together this time around, no matter what? That nobody’s leaving, if someone’s going to get left behind?”

Yoochun froze as the maknae threw his past words back at him. It took a while before he could respond to Changmin.

“Changmin-ah, this is different…” Yoochun said slowly.

“Oh, really? How so?” Changmin immediately sneered.

“We’ve already decided that we would leave. We’ve already filed the lawsuit. I’m sorry, but our position right now is slightly different from what happened to our future selves in Erin’s time! Yunho hyung’s future self didn’t even join us in filing the lawsuit then! But now he had! So, excuse me for being more than a little bothered if he suddenly backs out and decides to stay with SM! You know how I don’t like it when people won’t just make up their mind and stand their ground! And we especially can’t afford to change course just because of some mere whim, now of all times!” Yoochun tried to explain himself earnestly.

“Whim?!” Changmin said incredulously. “Yoochun hyung, you very well know that even if Yunho hyung does back out, it’s not because of ‘some mere whim’! You can’t call it that! We all know that the president threatened him, even if he won’t tell us exactly what was said that night!”

“Exactly! We won’t even know why we’d be staying in the company, if ever!”

“We’ll know about it eventually!”

“’Eventually’ being the operative word!” Yoochun plowed on. “It’s hard for us to just drop the lawsuit all of a sudden, if ever, because I highly doubt we’d know the exact terms of what that devil had used against Yunho hyung by then! We can’t go through something like that blind, Changmin! If worse comes to worst, okay, let’s say we all remain behind with Yunho hyung this time, but we need to at least know the reason why we’ll be forced to stay in SM, for starters!”

“That’s gonna be hard, Chunnie,” Junsu said despondently from his spot at the corner. “We just can’t squeeze it out of Yunho hyung, no matter what we try to do!”

“Maybe he thinks we’ll be better off without knowing it. You know, like how he wouldn’t want to burden us with it,” Jaejoong said fretfully, though at least his tears had finally ceased. “He can be idiotically noble that way…”

“Tell me about it,” I muttered idly. Yunho did have a streak of “I’ll-bear-it-all-by-myself-and-not-trouble-my-friends-with-it” in him.

“But that won’t do!” Yoochun insisted. “Yes, that’s really admirable of him and everything, but if we’re all going to be forced to stay in SM- well, we’ll still be a whole group, right? And you don’t keep something like that from your groupmates! We share everything, remember? Problems and all that included! Besides, for all we know, we might be able to find a way out of it, if Yunho hyung would just tell us what Lee Soo Man had told him! We might be able to throw it back at him, that way he can’t entrap Yunho hyung, nor any of us, for that matter, in the company!”

We all fell silent again.

Yoochun did have some point, after all. If we only knew what their president had told Yunho, we might be able to find a way around it. But the question is how do we convince Yunho that we can help him? That we want to help him? That he doesn’t have to bear everything and suffer by himself for the sake of everyone else?

“You know, I do see your point, Yoochun hyung,” Changmin suddenly said, making Yoochun nod and smile a bit in satisfaction, seemingly glad that the maknae can finally see it from his point of view.

However, I felt that there was something more to what Changmin meant to say.

“But?” I prodded on the youngest member.

“But,” Changmin sighed wearily, “Just so you all know… I’d still stay with Yunho hyung, if the worst happens, even if I have to do it blind and not know at all what’s forcing us to stay and suffer in that company.”

Yoochun made half-disbelieving, half-protesting noise, but before he could voice anything out, Changmin raised a hand to stop him, and the maknae continued.

“I don’t have it in me to let Yunho hyung stay there alone, no matter what,” he said quietly. “We all know how horrible the management of the company is, that’s why we’re in this lawsuit mess in the first place, right? And even if we would be promised that it would all change if we just stay, we all know that won’t exactly be true… and I don’t have the heart to let my hyung suffer through it all alone. So, if he stays, I’ll also stay and suffer and bear it out in there with him… I don’t know have to know what Lee Soo Man threatened Yunho hyung with, to have a reason to remain behind. My hyung will be suffering alone; that’s already more than enough of a reason for me to stay with him.”

We could only stare at Changmin after he finished his pronouncement, but he wouldn’t meet any of our eyes. He just looked down at the floor again, blinking rapidly in an attempt to clear the moisture from his eyes.

I myself was also starting to tear up.

So, this was why Changmin had stayed behind with Yunho, after all!

We all knew that Yunho was self-sacrificial, but who knew that Changmin was like that as well? I mean, I certainly didn’t! Okay, so the maknae could be a complete at times, especially to me, but seeing this side of him… yeah, my heart just totally melted.

Yoochun then abruptly got up from his seat. At first I thought he was going to walkout or something dreadful like that, but, to my slight surprise, he wrapped an arm around Changmin’s shoulders and proved that he was also capable of hugging the life out of the maknae.

Jaejoong and Junsu were both soon in the hug, too.

I guess they were all touched as I was by Changmin’s words and show of loyalty to their leader. I smiled despite my still teary eyes. Well, at least the four of them aren’t arguing anymore.

Now, if only we could get Yunho here with us and pry from him whatever Lee Soo Man had told him…

Nobody had mentioned that particular “discussion” among I and the four members to Yunho when had arrived home late that night, apologizing most profusely as he said that he had completely forgotten about their hearing schedule for that afternoon. Or at least he tried to seem like he was apologizing most “profusely”; I know his other members noticed just as much as I did that he wouldn’t meet any of our eyes again that night.

It was few days later after that “meeting of minds” of sorts of the four members, and Junsu and I were just lazing about in our bedroom, as it was their day off (Junsu had told me that they’ve been having more day offs recently, because of the temporarily more freedom that they’ve been granted in the hearings, than they’ve ever had during their whole stay in SM before. I have no idea how much of that was an exaggeration on Junsu’s part, or if he was even exaggerating at all. I’d like to think he was exaggerating at least a bit, because it would be horrible to imagine how overworked the boys must have been otherwise... but then I get the feeling that Junsu had just told me just as how it really had been for them…)

Anyway, I was lying down on my front on my bed with my elbows propping me up, and Junsu was sitting right beside me, swinging his legs most enthusiastically off the side of my bed. He was currently telling me about the latest progress about their case as their lawyers have recently updated them with. Among the five of them, it was from Junsu that I get the most insight about what was really happening with their lawsuit. Especially lately, because Yunho was still totally out of it and either just drifted around the house like a ghost or spent most of his time here locked up in their bedroom; Jaejoong and Yoochun always looked that they have a lot running in their heads (and Jaejoong was obviously worrying very much about Yunho); and as for Changmin… well, let’s face it… I just know that apart from the fact that he won’t be telling me anything, we’ll probably just end up fighting, and I really don’t wanna provoke Yunho into getting angry with the two of us, unpredictable as he was lately.

“Well, we’ve managed to gather up all the documents showing that we practically haven’t stopped working our butts off at all ever since we entered that damned company, and our lawyers have been presenting those to the judge,” Junsu told me. “Also, our contracts with SM are being carefully studied right now by the court. And it would be easy to tell from just one good look at those how unfair our situation in the company has been…”

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” I frowned, puzzled that Junsu didn’t really sound that happy about it.

“Yeah, it is,” Junsu nodded a bit. “But the lawyers are telling us, and we ourselves already know it, too, that we need something more than those…”

“But aren’t those things already proving your claims against the company?”

“Well, yes, but while we’re already at it, we also want to show how… underhanded… SM can and will work, just to get what it wants and to maintain its power and influence. But we’re going to need really strong and incriminating evidences for that, as our lawyers have said, and we just don’t something like that yet that would prove the foul methods SM’s not afraid of using on its artists…”

“Yeah, you’d want to show the world that SM is willing to use underhand metho