Deer Luhan,

I hope your dad recovers soon and you find your aunt quickly.  Sitting with Baekhyun was the most harrowing night of my life, and I don’t even know him that well.  I can’t imagine how bad it would be when it’s people you actually know.

Leigh

It was the steady beep of the heart monitor that eventually calmed me.  According to Chanyeol, who’d come to the hospital with us, I’d spent the seven hours that Baekhyun was in surgery huddled in a corner in a passage as close to the operation room as I could, practically screaming at people to leave me alone whenever they tried to get me to go somewhere else or lie down.

But all that was over now, and I was finally coherent, if not exhausted, and Chanyeol had left at dawn to fill in forms and get some rest and food.  After a good deal of argument, he and the doctors had agreed that I should be allowed to stay with Baekhyun until I felt a bit better.  Baekhyun was still unconscious from the anaesthetic, but he was breathing unaided and his chest was rising and falling regularly and the doctor who’d come to check on him an hour before had pronounced him stable.

Shortly before breakfast, Luhan rang for the fifty-second time.  I’d been rejecting calls from everybody throughout the night because I wouldn’t have been able to handle speaking to anybody, but I was now beginning to crave the comfort of a familiar voice.  My mum would have been the best, but it was midnight in the UK, so Luhan was going to have to do.

“Hi,” I said morosely.

Luhan didn’t give me time to get any further.  “I saw the news.  Is Baekhyun okay?”

I nodded, biting my lip, and glanced over at him.  He was still breathing normally.  “Yeah.  I’m with him now.  He has three fractured ribs and the bullet grazed his lung, but the doctors said they got the bone shards out of his lung surface and nothing vital was hit, so he’ll recover as long as nothing gets infected.”

“Oh, thank God.”  Luhan’s voice sounded weak with relief.  “The reports over here are saying things like he only has a ten per cent chance of living.”

I felt myself tearing up.  “No, the doctors were hopeful he’d pull through before they even started surgery.  There was a lot of blood though.  And a lot of internal bleeding.”

“The main thing is he’s safe now,” Luhan told me.  “I hope everybody else is okay, you included.  It must have been a shock.  I saw the footage – he landed right on top of you.  You looked like….”  His voice trailed off: he evidently couldn’t find the right word to describe it.

“That should have been me,” I choked out.  “It’s my fault, Luhan.  I should have been the one in front when Baekhyun was shot.  We got too close to the front of the stage, so I had to do the flairs behind him instead.  I’ve never felt so uselessly rotten in my life.”

“Leigh, Leigh,” he said, as though trying to talk sense into me.  “Somebody who saw the dance video has analysed the footage and what’s so far known of the trajectory of the bullet.  If you’d been in front, you would have been shot dead immediately.  Baekhyun was lucky he was standing just off to the side or it could have been fatal.”

He wasn’t making me feel any better.  “Luhan, you don’t understand!  That bullet was meant for me!”

“No, that bullet was meant for me.”

That shut me up.

“I’m so sorry, Leigh.  I didn’t think they’d try to target me in Korea.  I thought it would be safe.  Look, if you want to go home or something, then I don’t blame you—”

“No,” I interrupted him.  “No, Luhan.  You said it yourself: if I disappear and you’re not here, they’re either going to follow me or track you down in China, most likely both.  Then we’ll both be killed.  I’m not going to be safe either way, but I’m probably safer with EXO than I will be on my own.  I might just be some random girl you found in the park in London, but I’m not a total idiot.  And you still need time, don’t you?”

There was a long sigh from the other end of the phone.  “Yeah, I do,” he admitted.  “But it’s making me really uneasy.  I feel helpless.  I don’t want anybody to get hurt.”

“Well, we’re already hurt, so you can’t do anything about that.  I’m in too deep now, Luhan.  I feel responsible for Baekhyun.  If I hadn’t been a show-off about the flairs, they wouldn’t have been incorporated into the choreography and then I wouldn’t have freaked out at how close we were to the front of the stage.”

Luhan was silent for quite some time.

“Let me know when you’re promoting in China,” he said eventually.  “If I can’t swap back with you, I should at least arrange security guards or something.  And, er… you might want to stay away from the internet.  At the very least, avoid looking up EXO’s Luhan.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Well, you just said you felt responsible for Baekhyun and…” he seemed to be toying over the best words to use, “well, some of the fans think you are too.”  He hesitated for a long moment.  “There’s a suicide petition.”

I took my phone away from my ear and stared at it, wondering if I’d misheard.  Luhan’s voice proceeded in a tinny quality from the device, and I hastily put it back to my ear again.

“…to wait until Baekhyun’s better before going outside,” he was saying.  “Some of the fans of individuals can be rather over-zealous in their commitment.”

“Thanks,” I said, supressing a shudder.  “I’ll bear that in mind.”

“You should also be aware of the conspiracy theory.”

“Don’t tell me: the Illuminati are involved.”

Luhan managed a strained chuckle.  “No.  Some people are saying from the footage that it looks like you managed to change direction when you were on your hands.  So some of them think you knew about the sniper and got out of the way to save your skin.”

“But surely I wouldn’t have bothered trying to go in front in the first place were that the case,” I pointed out.  Luhan just sighed.

“Don’t argue with fan girl logic,” he advised.  “You’re talking about people who want us to be gay for each other but would be devastated if that turned out to be true and would happily break us up with a significant other, male or female, because they want us to date them when we don’t even know some of them exist.”

That made me laugh.

“Keep me updated on Baekhyun, will you?” Luhan requested.  “Oh, and Leigh…?”

“Yuh-huh?”

“From what I heard of the actual song, it sounded great.  Thanks for taking that on.”

A rustle from the bed attracted my attention, and I turned to see Baekhyun’s fingers curling and uncurling.

“He’s waking up,” I informed Luhan quickly.  “I’ll speak to you later.”

He hung up, and I turned to survey Baekhyun.

He was awake and had his head turned towards me.  There was a glint of wariness and fear in his eyes.

“Baekhyun, how are you feeling?” I asked.

He continued to stare.  Then he blinked at me.

“Baekhyun,” I tried, “do you understand what I’m saying?  Blink if you do.  You’re in the hospital.”

He surprised me by speaking.

“What are you doing in here?”

“I had to make sure you were okay,” I told him.  “I feel really bad that you were the one shot.”

“What are you doing here?” he repeated, his voice rising a notch.  “You’re not Luhan.”

I stared at him for several seconds, bewildered, and finally held up a hand.  “Baekhyun, how many fingers am I holding up?”

The beeps from the heart monitors accelerated in frequency and Baekhyun tried to scramble away from me.

“I’m not ing concussed—!”

“Baekhyun!” I interrupted in alarm.  “You shouldn’t be moving – your injuries—”

“Who are you?!” he screamed.  His heart rate spiked.

I co