Jongin realized soon into watching Chanyeol make slides that either he had an extremely fast metabolism, or he had lied about the whole I-already-ate-lunch thing. His energy was clearly flagging, and his stomach was the loudest thing in the room.

Remembering that Baekhyun had gone to contact Dr. Zhang, Jongin stood up with nothing more than a sigh to indicate his displeasure, before disappearing behind the cluttered shelves for a moment. A pouring noise could be heard before he reappeared and placed a small cup of still warm soup in front of Chanyeol.

“Oh, no, it’s okay, I’m fine,” he tried to protest before turning back to his slides.

“I’m not offering, I’m ordering. And clean your hands with alcohol before you touch it.”

Chanyeol had just finished a slide anyway, so he took the 'opportunity' for a break, taking the bottle of alcohol Jongin had just placed next to the soup—he remembered it as the same one from their previous encounter—and uncorked it, pooling a bit of the clear substance in one hand before rubbing it between the two of them. “Thank you,” he said, with a nod and a smile toward Jongin before turning to the cup he’d taken in his hands and drinking deeply.

“This is great!” he decided nearly immediately as the strong notes and subtleties played his tongue like an instrument. “Dr. Junmyeon’s wife can really make it!”

“She is a valuable asset to our research in her own way,” Jongin agreed.

“What about your wife?” Chanyeol asked, taking another deep mouthful of the soup and swirling his tongue around in it.

If one had asked Jongin why his breath hitched at that moment, he would have gone on a short rant condemning the casual directness of such a personal question, but while that thought was on his mind, the truer reason was...

‘He looks like a squirrel.’

“I-I never married,” Jongin replied after swallowing his thoughts. “No time for it,” he added before Chanyeol could ask 'why', as Jongin could clearly see he was about to. “Junmyeon’s wife is more than happy to prepare food for the three of us, and I’m hardly at my home long enough to dirty it. If a wife isn’t needed for cooking or cleaning, what good is a wife?”

“Companionship,” Chanyeol replied wistfully. With his large mouth and likely large and empty stomach, he had already polished off the cup of soup and was already working on the next slide.

“What good is the companionship of a woman to someone who spends all of his time in a laboratory?” Jongin retorted. “No, no, not that way, you’re using too much fluid,” he then complained, noticing the miniscule bubbles of plague sample collecting around the edges of the slide glass covers. This boy was the definition of an oversized oaf, clumsy both physically and mentally. He gave him until the end of the week before he contracted the plague.

“Dr. Junmyeon seems to know what good his wife's companionship is,” Chanyeol replied, answering Jongin's earlier question. The doctor sighed, and Chanyeol finally looked up to notice how flustered he was becoming. “Ah, I’m sorry…" He smiled awkwardly. "I’m six-foot-one with a mouth to match, I suppose…”

“No, no, it’s alright…” Jongin sighed. “...How about yourself?” he asked. It was only natural for him to have a bit of curiosity in return seeing as Chanyeol was indeed older (if by hardly more than a season) and asking these questions.

Now it was Chanyeol’s turn to tense up. “I suppose I put so much love into science that I never directed it toward finding ‘the one’… How’s this one?” he asked, suddenly changing the topic back to the slides.

“Fine,” Jongin said.

The other three slides were made quickly and in silence. Just in time, Baekhyun returned to let the two know that Dr. Zhang had approved their use of the microscope as soon as necessary, just as Jongin had assumed he would. Leaving Baekhyun with instructions to clean the area, he and his new technical assistant left with their slides for Dr. Zhang’s lab.

Baekhyun immediately got to cleaning, and the first thing that caught his attention was the empty cup of soup placed next to Chanyeol’s seat.

“Dr. Jongin poured him soup?” Baekhyun murmured to himself in surprise. Unless it were an emergency, Jongin would have been keener to wait for Baekhyun to return than to have poured a cup for Chanyeol himself. He shrugged, realizing that the time he was putting into thinking about a mere cup of soup could be spent getting done with washing the dishes and sterilizing the area in less than five minutes so that he could return to the book he’d been reading in his spare time.

“Indeed. There are things moving about in these slides.”

Jongin leaned back from the extremely large magnifying device in order to select one of the control slides that had been made from the saliva of a non-infected person. Analyzing it under the microscope yielded the same findings: Small, rather indistinguishable but definitely moving shapes were inching about under the lens.

When Jongin next moved away from the microscope and leaned over the slides, he didn’t notice Chanyeol lean over his shoulder to take a look for himself. Sitting back up-

“Christ!” Jongin hissed as his head collided with his assistant’s. Chanyeol likewise yelled out in pain and staggered back from the microscope while clutching the spot of impact on his jaw.

Suddenly, several feet away there was a tiny shattering noise, and Jongin’s eyes moved first to the broken slide he’d accidentally let go of in surprise, and then, now half-lidded, to meet Chanyeol’s.

“Eh heh… sorry…” Chanyeol said, awkward smile quickly dropping from his face this time. He quickly grabbed the bottle of alcohol they’d brought with him and hustled over to clean up the mess before Dr. Zhang noticed.

“No need for the alcohol,” Jongin corrected, returning to his work. “That was a control slide.”

Chanyeol couldn’t help but stifle a laugh, drawing Jongin’s attention back to him.

“Pray tell what’s so funny, Mr. Park?”

“Oh, it’s nothing, I’m sorry,” he said as he tried, barely successfully, to wipe the residual smile from his face. “It’s just, it always turns out to be the control.”

It took a moment or two for Jongin to remember what Chanyeol was referring to, but he finally remember the time he’d banished the boy—despite him being older, it was awfully difficult not to call the impish fellow a ‘boy’—from the lab.

“Yes, well, let’s not test fate or my patience, shall we?” Jongin muttered, observing what was under the slide glass of the water control. No moving particles to be seen.

This boy might be a klutz, but he was onto something as big as he, possibly even bigger.