Deer Luhan,

I want my brain back.

Leigh

There weren’t very many places we could go.  The hospital had two gardens and a fair number of people were about, so in the interests of avoiding as many other humans as possible, Xiumin found us a secluded spot in one of the gardens and then sent Luhan back inside “just in case somebody sees us”.  Luhan was still extremely reluctant to leave.

“I hate this,” I grumbled, twitching my bare toes out of the blanket.  “I can’t even listen to music anymore without wanting to dance.  Not to mention I’m going to be horribly unfit when I get back home.”

“We’ve clearly been a good influence on you,” Xiumin said with a grin.

I scowled.  “You wish.  And the… the… whatever the painkiller is.  Can’t think straight.  It’s really annoying.  I keep mixing things up.”

He carefully patted my uninjured shoulder.  “It’ll pass, it’ll pass.”

“Yes, but when?  It keeps making me throw up and I don’t like it.”  I coughed weakly.  “Ow.”

“The painkillers… you’re going to need another few weeks with them.  You’re not going to be out of hospital for at least a month.”

I pouted.

“Luhan’s already discussing getting you home with your parents.  Provided you recover at the rate you’re doing now, you’ll be home in early March.  Your dad thought continuity of care was important.  Particularly when your mum is ready to kill anything that looks vaguely like you or Luhan.”

I frowned.  I wasn’t sure if I’d actually spoken to my dad myself, but it felt like I might have done.

“I didn’t want to bring this up, but… you do know how low your chances of survival were, right?”  Xiumin cast me an anxious glance, trying to gauge my reaction.  I tried to shrug, but then remembered it wasn’t a very good idea.

“Somebody did mention something about percentages and having the luck of a bat, but I was kind of delirious.  I think.”  I paused.  “There were unicorns.”

Xiumin snorted softly.

“I was watching Finding Nemo yesterday,” I said.  “Do you know why D.O. tried to bite me when I told him he was going to be my squishy?”

“Random topic change,” Xiumin observed.  “And probably because he’s not a jellyfish but wanted to act out the scene as best he could.”

“Lay said I shouldn’t be calling D.O. my squishy, too,” I remembered.  “He said I should call Sehun my squishy, but Sehun isn’t squishy.”

Xiumin chuckled again and leant on the back of my chair.  “They’re probably just trying to take advantage.  Hospital can mean romantic situations.”

“I don’t see what’s romantic about them.  There are people dying and machines everywhere and it’s painful and they smell too clean.”

“I think you’re taking everything a bit literally.”

I yawned and coughed again, wriggling my toes back under the blanket.  “I still want D.O. to be my squishy.”

“He was the one who gave you pneumonia.  Which you still have, because your body’s immune system is pretty much wrecked.”

“Sehun still isn’t squishy,” I mumbled.  “He’s lean.  And I can’t call him my lean.  That would be like calling you my meatbun.”

Xiumin choked.  “I’m sorry, what?”

“There’s this Chinese manga Luhan told me to read to improve my Chinese back when I started,” I mumbled, snuggling down as best I could into the blankets.  “I think he did it on purpose.  The main character is a girl who is a boy in an online computer game.  I think it’s called Half Prince.”

“…Right.”

“And she has this pet in the game which is a bun or dumpling of some kind called Meatbun.  He reminds me of you.”

Xiumin didn’t say anything for a while.  I fiddled with the blanket with my free hand.  “That story really spoke to me.”

“I think this is actually your painkillers speaking.”

“But painkillers can’t speak,” I pointed out.  “And nor can stories, actually.  Heh.”

“Okay, now you’re taking everything way too literally.  You need to go lie down and get some more sleep.”  He eased the brakes off, but I stopped him with a whine as he tried to wheel me away from the tree we were parked under.

“Can’t I sleep out here?  The air is refreshing.  Please?”

“You’re ill.”

“Pleeeeease?”

“Fine.”

My restlessness only got worse as time went on.  A week and a half later, I was back in the operating theatre and dosed up to the eyeballs with morphine again because I’d tried getting out of bed by myself when nobody else was around and I’d fallen over.

“Do we need to tie you down?” Luhan demanded.  “You nearly burst your spleen again!”  But his attempt at being angry was ruined by Lay chipping in with, “But Sehun’s not really into , I don’t think that’s a great idea.”  I’d just fallen asleep on them, unable to fight off the effects of medication.

Happily, though, my pneumonia had cleared up by the time I woke up, though it was then that new problems started to arise.

The first one was the news channels and the company finally reaching an agreement for the EXO boys to talk about what had happened with the kidnapped girls, and the press conferences were all supposed to be back in Beijing.  Then there was the issue that since D.O. was no longer hospitalised and hadn’t been for a while, and the two girls who’d been kept behind for extra checks had also been discharged, the boys were having difficulty coming up with excuses to hang around the hospital and the press were beginning to stake the place out along with numerous fangirls.

Lay was the only one who could legitimately get away with insisting on remaining behind in Changsha while the others went away for the press conferences,  He said his mother was ill and all but threw a tantrum about staying, and from what Luhan told me, the manager had been so shocked at seeing this side of Lay he’d agreed.

“I can’t believe how high you still are,” Lay chuckled as I struggled to read a copy of the second Game of Thrones book which Kris had got for me.

“Shush,” I told him with a frown.  “I can’t hear what the words are saying.”

He chuckled again and looked away.  I continued trying to make out the English words, but there was a large black spot in my left eye that was making matters difficult.

“Lay,” I said.  “There’s a spot that keeps following me around.”

He threw me a weirded-out look.

“Look,” I said, pointing to the book.  “It moves with my line of sight.  If I look over to the left page, it’s here, and when I look at the right page, it’s over here.”

“Have you had your eyes checked up?”

“I don’t like eye checkups.”

“Leigh.”

“Why do they call them checkups when they ask you to look left and right and down as well as up, anyway?”

He just seemed to give up at that point and helped himself to a pear from the basket of fruit Chen had brought for me the previous day.  I tried to continue reading and failed miserably.  Lay interrupted any progress I was making after a few minutes anyway.

“You know, Leigh,” he said in a thoughtful tone.  “What do you think of Sehun?”

I looked up and blinked at him.  The black spot settled on the tip of his nose.  “I don’t think anything,” I told him with a bit of effort.  “It’s hard to think when you’re on morphine.”

He muttered something that sounded like “hopeless”.

Suho, Luhan, Sehun and Kai returned the next day, and sh*t blew up at almost exactly the same time.

“Some of the fans we rescued are questioning why there are pictures of you in a wheelchair at hospital and why there are rumours of horrendous injuries and stabbings when you’re clearly fine,” Lay told Luhan, tossing him his tablet as soon as the guy walked into my ward.  Luhan caught it with a look of surprise.  “It makes matters worse that Leigh told one of the fans she wasn’t you, so now they’re assuming it’s your brother, but there are also rumours going around that your brother’s female, according to this.”

Luhan blinked for a few seconds and then looked down at the tablet screen.  Sehun, Suho and Kai came to stand beside my bed, where I was losing an argument with the oxygen tube in my nose again.

“Don’t,” Sehun reprimanded me in English, grabbing my hand and placing it beside me on the bed.  “You don’t want to mess up the drip.”

“But it makes me want to sneeze,” I whined.  “And what if gunky stuff goes into the nose tube if I sneeze and I start breathing it in?”

“You’re still high, aren’t you?” noted Kai with amusement.

“I’m not high,” I protested, pointing at the ceiling.  “That’s high.”

Sehun turned to him.  “Is it normal to take everything so literally when you’re on morphine, or is it just Leigh?”

“Justly what?” I asked.

“Oh God, not the puns again,” Kai groaned.  I looked between hi