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So I think I figured out a solution to the issue. When it's done I want to be able to advertise this story on the regular calendar, and with the full chapter's violent content, I can't do that. So what I'm going to do is post the full version of this chapter in a separate story. You won't miss any hugely important details by reading this version, but I'll make a note of the one or two things you do miss at the bottom of this chapter. Also, 100% of the content in this version is in the unabridged version, so there's no need to read it twice :)

*Click here for the full, Rated M, trigger warning version of this chapter: http://www.asianfanfics.com/story/view/884342*

“’Morning.”

“Hey…”

“……Why didn’t you come here when you realized you were sick?”

Chanyeol pretended not to hear the question that Baekhyun had launched at him the moment he finally woke up, but he knew Baekhyun wasn’t going to be one to leave the issue alone. He’d might as well try, however.

“I’m here now. Just drop it,” he said groggily.

“You knew you were sick, and you did nothing about it for the two most critical days. How, exactly, do you expect me to leave that alone?” Baekhyun was beginning to seethe, continuing to stare at the ceiling rather than focus his gaze on Chanyeol, at whom he’d been harboring a bit of anger after finding out that Jongin had to force him to come.

“Maybe just don’t open your mouth about it,” Chanyeol retorted in his grumpy morning fog. “Please.”

“He’s not the only one who’s worried.”

Baekhyun’s gaze finally came away from the ceiling and looked over to where Kyungsoo was stirring and had now become a part of their conversation. “Kai’s worried halfway sick about you.”

There was a moment of pause as Chanyeol searched his recent memory to recall the identity of the man in the other bed, much less who ‘Kai’ was.

“Kai’s Dr. Jongin’s childhood nickname. This is his friend, D.O.”

“Nice to meet you again,” D.O. said, nodding to the man in the bed next to him.

“I’m just sorry it had to be like this,” Chanyeol said, nodding back and giving a little wave. Any distraction from the question was a welcome one, so he took his opportunity. “If I can ask, how did you and Dr. Jongin meet when you were kids?”

D.O. smiled very slightly. “Wasn’t the best circumstances back then, either. He was homeless; I grew up in the slums, but I did have a roof over my head.”

“Dr. Jongin was homeless growing up…?” Chanyeol said weakly, in astonishment. As far as he’d know, all of the doctors in the university were of either old or (as in Dr. Junmyeon’s case,) new money.

“He ran away. Good house, but bad home situation. Awful dad, good mom, but she loved her husband more than her kids. Far as I remember, dad offed her and the two older daughters, then made his son give false testimony.” D.O. started coughing with the power and sound that was seldom seen outside of heavy smokers. “That’s when I met him. Just ran away a few days before, and I gave him some bread.”

Both of the other mens’ hearts felt heavy in their chests. “H-How did he get from there to here?” Baekhyun was barely able to ask.

“Hard work, luck, and a love for learning. No, really,” he said when he noticed the polite but unimpressed look on Baekhyun’s face. “Sounds cliché, but that’s what it was. The master chimney sweep here at the university took him in, and I joined him. Kai spent every free moment he had sneaking around reading every medical book he could get his hands on. That work , but before he got taken up by the medical school, I think he found something he needed there.

"He learned that family didn’t have to be the people you were born to. And that the people who make up his real family are the most important people in the world to him. He’d do damn near anything for them.”

Chanyeol’s heart sunk a bit, and the change in facial expression didn’t go unnoticed.

“Something the matter?” D.O. asked. “You look like you’re about to cry.”

“I… once he told me… well not really told, more like ‘implied’… that I was one of those people… Until I ed up an important experiment and got fired…” He covered his face, as he was afraid that D.O.’s assessment of it was true. “I really screwed up… I… I wanted to become one of those people, and I had it, and I screwed it up.”

D.O. chuckled. “You didn’t screw anything up. He tries to shut things and people out, but once they’re in, they’re in. He doesn’t quite get that other folks don’t work the same way.” He coughed again. “Anyway, I wasn’t exaggerating when I said he’d do damn near anything for his family, but one of the things he won’t do is tolerate adversity in his medical work. So you might have been taken out of his workplace, but once you’re in his family, you’re there for life. The man gets mad easily, but he’s so bad at holding grudges that he oft forgets he was mad in the first place.”

Chanyeol remembered back to the time when Jongin had fired him and forgotten about it, with a small smile. That sounded like his Doctor, alright.

“When he really really cares about something, it’s hard to get him to stop talking about it, which is damned annoying. And that’s how I know he’s worried about you. While you two were asleep yesterday, he wouldn’t quit bouncing ideas off of me about why you didn’t go to the hospital. And he’s gonna give you that today, so unless you plan on playing dead or hurrying this plague along, I’d advise you just tell him whatever it is. Don’t let what happened get in the way of your friendship, if you don’t want it to.”

D.O. realized he’d been neglecting Baekhyun in the conversation, so he gave a look back over to him. Baekhyun who was giving a look to Chanyeol. The kind of look you only give someone when the topic of the person they like comes up.

And that’s how Kyungsoo Do became the first person to put all of the pieces of the puzzle together.

“Y’know…” he commented, the same mischievous grin coming to his own face, “I don’t think I’ve seen him so worried about someone-“

D.O.’s smile deflated when there was a strong rapping on the door and Junmyeon came in, followed by Jongin. “Good morning fellows, good to see you’re awake!” he said cheerily, in contrast to the dark, puffy circles underneath his eyes. “Baekhyun, Jongin and I narrowed down which cures we think had the best effect depending on the data we’ve received from other trials, and we’ll be administering them to Chanyeol and Mr. Do as well. You may have just saved a few million lives,” he said, only half-jokingly.

Jongin didn’t add anything to the discussion, and Chanyeol noticed that he didn’t have many words for the group over the next few days, either. Unlike D.O. had assumed, he didn’t exchange any words with Chanyeol at all. He kept himself busied entirely on D.O. and Baekhyun, who unlike Chanyeol whose disease progression was stopping and had even begun to heal a bit, were still continuing along the slow but downhill slope. Chanyeol had at first felt relieved that Jongin wasn’t going to interrogate him, but that relief slowly faded to envy when he saw that he was giving particular attention to D.O.’s condition. His sickly body didn’t have the fuel to keep that fire burning though, and when it finally went out, depression sunk in in its place.

By Thursday, three days after Chanyeol and D.O. had been admitted, even Junmyeon who had no prior knowledge of the tension between the men had realized that they were probably the cause of the strange atmosphere in the room.

“Jongin, could you go ahead and administer Chanyeol’s medicine?” Junmyeon asked once he had noticed something was astray.

“I’m checking D.O.’s pulse again,” Jongin said, hoping his flimsy excuse would hold.

It didn’t. “That’s the third time this hour. Now hurry along; the window for Chanyeol’s dose is closing.”

“It’s okay,” Chanyeol said tiredly. “I feel fine.”

The other three men sighed at once.

“Okay, that’s it,” Baekhyun said before falling into a coughing fit.

Junmyeon continued where the wheezing man’s sentiment left off, grabbing Jongin by the shoulders as the taller grasped for the syringe for Chanyeol’s medicine, and pushing him from his place between D.O.’s bed and the wall from the space between the window and Chanyeol’s. The men of the hour looked at each other with wide, apprehensive eyes for a split second before breaking the awkward eye contact.

“I don’t know what’s going on between you two, but you need to reconcile it before all five of us go crazy.”

With that, Junmyeon snatched the curtains that separated Chanyeol and Baekhyun’s beds shut, and then moved around the bed to do the same with the ones separating Chanyeol’s from D.O.’s.

“I don’t know…” Jongin sighed in a low tone. He’d pulled one of the chairs from the table over to D.O’s bedside and was now sitting with his knees spread apart, elbows balanced on them, forehead resting on his palms. “This is completely absurd, I know, but part of me wants to believe that it’s my fault he didn’t seek treatment. If he hadn’t been fired… If I hadn’t been so…” He sighed again for what was well past the seventh time in the two minutes since they’d gotten on the subject of Chanyeol’s failure to get medical attention.

“May be,” D.O. said pensively. “What I got from Baekhyun is that the guy really idolizes you. ‘Number one fan,’ in his words.”

Jongin wasn’t sure how to reply to that.

“But you can’t blame yourself for it. He’s a grown 22-year-old man, and you have a world to save. You can’t let your feelings get in the way.”

“Feelings? I’m trying to be logical about this,” Jongin said as he raised his head, surprised his intent to keep his evaluation of the situation strictly mental had been misinterpreted.

“Yeah, you try to be logical about everything.” D.O. said dismissively. “But your feelings are in the way here.”

Jongin’s eyebrows creased in confusion. “What are you talking about?”

D.O. pointed to the bed adjacent to his, where Chanyeol, who hadn’t woken up since his arrival, was sleeping.

Jongin’s heart skipped a beat at the serene face.

“What is that guy over there to you?”

“……He’s, uh, my former assistant.”

“Try again.”

He recalled his exchange with Chanyeol a few weeks prior.

“…Family.”

“No. Baekhyun and Dr. Kim are family to you,” D.O. asserted. “Now what is Chanyeol?”

Jongin didn’t moving from the position that Junmyeon had put him in, but he did let his eyes drift back down to his former assistant. He could see where the blisters were healing, and the redness in his arms was going away.

“R-Right, then,” he started, unsure why his voice was so unsteady. “Brace a bit.”

Chanyeol’s eyes flinched as the needle went into his arm, but otherwise his gaze didn’t move from its position on the curtain on the opposite side of the bed. Although he wanted to be done with it as quickly as possible, Jongin forced himself to empty the syringe slowly, counting to fifteen before moving his fingers to Chanyeol’s neck to check his pulse. As he counted ten seconds on his pocket watch, he realized that Chanyeol’s heart rate had indeed increased over what Junmyeon had measured for the past few days, and when he looked back down, that his face was flushing red. Gently, he brushed a few strands of red-brown hair from the man’s forehead and placed his hand across it.

That finally snapped him from his funk.

“W-W-What are you doing?” Chanyeol stammered, turning his head back around and finally making eye contact with Jongin.

“Checking your… temperature…” His voice trailed off as he found himself getting lost in deep brown eyes.

Suddenly, there was a knock on the door, snapping Jongin and Chanyeol’s attention away from each other. It could be heard opening slightly. D.O. and Baekhyun could be heard groaning and cursing.

“Dr. Junmyeon, we need you for L3,” a nurse said. Junmyeon could be heard getting to his feet.

As Jongin’s heart restarted, he came out from behind the curtain. “Doctor,” he said, eyes wide, “you’ve authorized L3?”

“Yes. I should be back shortly.”

Jongin’s faith in his supervisor was absolute, but he couldn’t help but feel a tinge of worry.

“Take care,” was all he could say.

The atmosphere in the room went from tense to heavy for all but D.O.

“...What’s L3?”

Things that may have been missed by people who aren't reading the unabridged version:

• Jongin's dad was an even bigger than I made him out to be here.
• Tao and Sehun introduced Kai (and later D.O.) to chimney sweeping.
• D.O. saved Sehun's life at the extremely high risk of his own, which helped Kai to realize the strength of family.

Forwaaard march~!