This time, Dongwoo is already awake and the curtains are retracted when Hoya walks in. Hoya smiles awkwardly at him. It’s the smile he began to wear on stage and on TV when the Woolim CEO told him that he needed to smile more, a smile that was bared teeth and awkward eyes.

            Dongwoo had always found the smile endearing. He himself was blessed with a quick smile and cursed with the inability to hide it. Hoya, of course, was the opposite, but in that awkward smile was all his earnestness, an earnestness which drove him to force his face to smile in place of forcing himself to be happy.

            Hoya won’t apologize for yesterday, he’s too proud for that. His smile, though is enough for Dongwoo. Unfortunately, it is also so absurd that Dongwoo can’t help but to burst out laughing when he sees Hoya’s face.

            “What’s with that look on your face?” He asks around his laughs.

            “What? This is my smile! This is how my smile looks!” Hoya raises his eyebrows while pointing to his face, and suddenly his smile looks much more real.

            “Okay, okay. Here, come sit over here.” Dongwoo gestures for Hoya to sit by his bed as he struggles to quiet his laughter behind the back of a hand.

            Hoya sits on the stool that he left there yesterday. The smile flickers as his gaze passes over the small black button.

            Dongwoo says, “I didn’t need to use it last night or today.”

Hoya wonders for a second if he can believe Dongwoo, but Dongwoo really at lying.

            “Good,” he says, smiling slightly.

            There’s a silence then. Donwoo looks at Hoya and knows what he wants to ask, even though Hoya won’t in his earnest apologetic act.

            “I think I can go home today.”

            Hoya’s smile widens. He beams down at Dongwoo and Dongwoo smiles back. Of course, the smile can’t help but be followed by laughter, and Dongwoo’s laugh is so infectious that soon they’re both laughing together. He and Hoya are back on the same page, and it’s enough to make Dongwoo forget his cancer for a moment.

            Hoya helps Dongwoo stuff his knick knacks and toys back into his backpack (finding a parking slip on Dongwoo’s desk he asks, “What is this? Why did you even take this out?” Dongwoo just laughs and shrugs). The doctor comes by and hands Dongwoo a bottle of pills along with a prescription for more pain killer. At this point, many of the flowers are wilted or shedding their pedals. Hoya thinks that they should be left in the room, since he feels that throwing them out would be too ungrateful, but Dongwoo takes it upon himself to toss them, because he finds the idea of leaving them to be cleaned up by the hospital janitors even more ungrateful. When the small trash can by the door is overflowing, he neatly sets the flowers around it.

Hoya brought a new set of clothes with him, and Dongwoo changes in the bathroom. The process is slow, there are needles and tubes and stitches to navigate, and Dongwoo had never before realized exactly how much contortion was necessary to get a button up shirt and pair of jeans on. It probably would have been significantly easier with Hoya’s help, but Hoya doesn’t offer and Dongwoo doesn’t ask.

Dongwoo uses some water to spike his hair a bit in the front. He looks in the mirror after he’s done and smiles, posing a little. The clothes are a little looser than before, but he felt more normal than he had ever since the beginning of this ordeal. Add a couple accessories and he’d look like a real idol again.

Dongwoo opens the bathroom door and steps out. Hoya, who had been looking out the window, probably distracting himself from his own impatience, smiles. It’s good to have the Dongwoo he knows back, to know that things can go back to normal.

            Hoya had texted the managers and Sunggyu in advance, so one of the managers went out and bought a cake, and Sunggyu had herded everyone into the front foyer. The moment Dongwoo walks in the members are enthusiastically exclaiming about how well he looks. Woohyun rubs his shoulders, Myungsoo smiles quietly, Sungyeol lightly punches him in the shoulder, and Sungjong keeps asking Dongwoo questions and nodding with understanding at his babbling answers. Sunggyu, the leader, carries the cake in the back of the frenzy.

            Dongwoo laughs with the members and hugs each of them as the group follows Sunggyu to the kitchen table, and Dongwoo blows out the single green candle stood in the center of the cake. As Sunggyu begins to cut the pieces, though, he excuses himself, moving to his bedroom to rest.

            As the door clicks shut, a silence falls over the other 6 members picking at their cake. When Dongwoo was taken to the hospital, he left a void that made conversation less lively and laughter less frequent. For a couple moments, when Dongwoo had come back, it seems that life would return to normalcy. It would march on at its accustomed pace, with only a slight stumble in its step from Dongwoo’s hospital stay. What they hadn’t taken into account was the ripples of that stumbles continuing to spread.

            Myungsoo quietly stands up and disappears into Dongwoo’s room, leaving the door behind him just slightly ajar. The five of them hear him ask Dongwoo if he needs anything, and Dongwoo’s sleepy “no thanks.” Myungsoo slips out and closes the door behind him with a small wry smile.

            “He’s already almost drifted off to sleep.” he says.

            “He can really sleep anywhere and through anything. If the world ended while he was sleeping he wouldn’t realize a thing,” Sungyeol sighs.

            Hoya remembers Dongwoo waking up at 6 AM the night after their second win from the quiet sounds of him going to practice.

            Sungjong gets up then and scrapes his cake into the trash. He puts his plate in the sink and goes to his room. Sungyeol and Myungsoo follow suit, so that Woohyun, Sunggyu, and Hoya re the only ones left at the table.

            “Hoya,” Sunggyu says. “How is it?”

            Hoya shrugs, frowning. “Dongwoo hasn’t told me much.”

            “Do you know when he’ll be back?” Woohyun asks, and they all understand what he really means.

            Hoya shrugs again. “I really don’t know.” He gets up and throws out his slice. “He’ll be back soon” he says, nodding as he speaks.

            Woohyun nods and plays with his cake, but Sunggyu doesn’t pick up his fork. He bites his lip, thinking.

            Dongwoo used to think that he could sleep through anything, too. Maybe he had been able to before, but not now. Sleep used to be something comforting, a cool cleansing before the next long day. Without the promise of a new day, though, sleep becomes something entirely different: a terrifying lowering of the defenses, and opportunity for his strength and life to be stolen away.

            Dongwoo hears the anxious conversation in the kitchen, muffled by the door but clear enough. He hears Hoya tell the Sunggyu and Woohyun that he will be better soon, and he feels like getting up and telling them that it’s not true, that he won’t be better for a long time. He hears, though, the silent agreement from the other two members and, he wants to believe it. After all, who is he to tell them that what they believe is wrong.

            When Dongwoo wakes next, the dorm is silent. He only hears the quiet breathing of Myungsoo and Sungyeol, his roommates. He looks over his shoulder at the LED clock next to his bed: 12:30 AM.

            He’s about to drift off to sleep again, but as he turns over he feels the stiff resistance of the jeans and shirt Hoya brought to the hospital. He usually wouldn’t mind, he’s fallen asleep in his day clothes before, but tonight there is a need for some kind of ritual which differentiates naps from sleep, a need to divide his life neatly into days with clear endings and beginnings instead of hazy uncertain periods of consciousness and then unconsciousness. He pushes himself up with a grunt and makes his way to the bathroom, grabbing a pair of PJs and a T-shirt from his drawers on the way.

            Dongwoo shuffles across the deserted living room to the bathroom. He closes the door behind him and, bracing his hands against the sink, peers at his reflection. His half asleep brain is too tired to edit and compromise the image his eyes transmit, and suddenly the gaunt paleness of his face is honestly apparent.

            He turns on the sink and, splashes a cupped hand of cold water on his face. It wakes him up a bit, but doesn’t wash off the dark smudges on his face.

            Dongwoo begins to his shirt, from the top button down. His fingers hesitate at the fourth button. In the hospital bathroom, he had changed quickly with his back towards the mirror, only turning around to face his reflection after he was fully clothed. He hadn’t really thought about it, with Hoya waiting and all.

            He hadn’t thought about it this time, either, but now he was staring straight at his reflection, his eyes fixed on that button, and right under the button was that enigma: a wound that he had felt so viciously but never actually looked at. He didn’t want to, for just ignoring it was in some ways a denial of its existence, a denial of its effects outside of a purely internal struggle, but to turn away from it now was an admission of defeat to something already acknowledged.

            A sudden quick slip of Dongwoo’s fingers undoes the button.

            His abdomen is tender and pink, contrasting with the blue dashed line drawn down the center of his stomach. There’s a clean cut along the center portion of that line. The cut is smoothly sutured together and Dongwoo can already see the edges of it puckering together into white scar tissue. There’s no sign of vengeful claw marks, none of the bleeding ulcers he had imagined. Just a clean cut.