This chapter'll have a 2.5 month timeskip and then a nearly 7 month one, so hold on!

The holidays and New Years Day went by in a flash and with it came a new decade. Before they knew it, January was already gone and they were a few days into February.

“Can I take a read of that?” asked Chanyeol, pointing to the newspaper Jongin was partially sitting on. This morning the younger was having his tea while sitting on the tiny bench by the windows that due to Jongin’s so far successful protests had somehow not become victim to the ongoing effort in the lab to create more space.

“No need,” Jongin replied, “The news nowadays is all hogwash.”

“Is not.” Jongin was suddenly jolted a bit as Chanyeol wriggled his way onto the bench while making a gentle attempt at tugging the newspaper out from underneath Jongin. When he realized he wouldn’t make any headway, he turned away and pouted. The blonde rolled his eyes.

“Hey Doctor, Chanyeol, so I was thinking...”

They both looked up in the direction of Baekhyun’s call for attention. He was standing on the photographer's side of his camera, looking through the image projected through the rear.

“Since today is such a nice day, maybe at some point today we could come together and finally take a picture.”

Jongin was about to voice his protest, but he realized upon seeing Baekhyun spring up and slam the lens cap onto the frong that he had been tricked into looking in Baekhyun’s direction just long enough to have his picture taken.

“Finally!” Baekhyun yelled. He had received the camera as a joint Christmas present from Chanyeol and the two doctors. He’d been going on and on for the few years he’d worked there about his longing for a proper camera, and since he finally received it a little over a month prior, he’d put it to as much good use as possible. Too much use for the liking of the camera-shy Jongin. Baekhyun had tried to argue about the importance of capturing photographs of the research they were doing for the sakes of the archives of history, but Jongin did not seem able to care less about the ‘archives of history’. It was big, obnoxious, and in the way all the time, and he couldn’t deal with two things of that description inside of his laboratory.

“Aw, I wasn’t smiling,” Chanyeol complained, as Baekhyun ran off to go develop the iron plate in an adjacent room. “Doctor, let’s take it again later.”

“No.”

“Ohhh, okay. I’ll make you a deal.” He smiled, Jongin raised an eyebrow. “You can either: A) take the picture again with me later, or B) Let me take a glance at the newspaper.”

“C.”

“What’s C?”

“Fire you and Mr. Byun, burn the newspaper, and throw the camera out of the window.”

Chanyeol laughed. “That camera was half a month's worth of salary for me.”

“Perhaps I’ll will leave the camera be. That way you two can start a photography business once you’re out of here.” He swallowed down the final mouthful of his tea, setting down the cup on the paper and coming to his feet. “Let’s get to work.”

Chanyeol stole a glance down at the front page of the paper scaning the front page headlines but unable to see the beginning on one of the secondary headlines due to the placement of the cup.

“...and Yoora Park Announce Marriage”

Maybe the ‘burning the paper’ aspect of choice C wasn’t such an awful idea.

“Come now,” Jongin implored.

Chanyeol was more than happy to follow this time.

Baekhyun returned beaming, showing off the picture that had come out better than he had expected due to the help of his friend, the "princely-looking spritely boy" (by Jongin's description) in a nearby chemistry lab. Chanyeol was extremely happy without how the photo had come out despite the fact that he wasn’t smiling, but said beam was wiped clean from Baekhyun’s face upon meeting Jongin’s glare. Still, a satisfied smirk remained on his face until the end of the day, at which point Jongin ordered him to bring the camera home with him and Baekhyun's smile disappeared entirely.

“I’m sure Taeyeon will be happy to have more pictures taken,” Chanyeol said sympathetically, as they entered their unit in the apartment building. “And you always have me, Jongdae, and your other friends, right?”

“It's not not having a subject, it's that I can’t afford the reagents for developing the pictures,” sighed Baekhyun, coming through the doorway toting the camera box in one hand. He was thankful that camera technology had come so far as to be able to be confined to a portable box, thankful that Chanyeol was there to help him by carrying the tripod, and most of all thankful to have such a lovely girlfriend, but no matter how fancy his camera, nice his roomate, or lovely his girlfriend, bromo-iodide did not come cheap, and without the help of Han from the chemistry department he wasn’t sure what to do.

“We’ll figure something out,” Chanyeol said, giving Baekhyun a reassuring nudge with his elbow. “Maybe someone will pay you to take photographs in your free time.”

“They can’t pay me if I can’t develop them.”

The two men continued musing ideas on where they’d come up with the money, Baekhyun giving Chanyeol a playful ‘wap’ with his briefcase when he suggested Baekhyun get rid of Taeyeon as part of his plan to save money.

“I’m bored…”

Chanyeol was slouched down over a desk on which his arms lay crossed, his head resting over them as he stared with half-lidded eyes into the enclosure in which they stored rats they would use in later experiments. He toyed half-heartedly with the lone remaining rat, a brown one who seemed not to care about Chanyeol’s confession of boredom, but who had taken a vested interest in finding out whether or not the finger repeatedly poking through the wire of the enclosure was edible.

Jongin and Junmyeon were both out on clinical rotation, and Baekhyun had gone to fetch more rats and various other things on his scientific shopping list. Chanyeol had gotten used to there being a string of experiments to do, but six months ago in February, he had caught onto word that the blood of a previously infected individual was a possible lead to a cure. From then until a couple of days ago, they had been working nonstop, but without any other experiments to overlap there was really nothing else to be done when they needed time to let reagents work. The two hour break until he could start up again was welcome, but by twenty-five minutes in he had realized that it was no fun without anyone to share it with.

With nothing better to do, he stood up and walked back to his desk to pick up a folded piece of card stock. Flipping the cover back, he took a moment to look at the wearing tin sheet on which the photo of him and Jongin was printed.

‘We make a handsome pair,’ Chanyeol thought with a smile.

Almost ten months of being subjected to Jongin was something only a handful of people in the world could tolerate, even fewer could actually enjoy, and only one of those people was not one who liked Jongin despite his attitude, but because of it and what he could see behind it, what he could see that had shifted.

Maybe Chanyeol was the only one who could tell, but the formerly dull and jaded glare of Jongin Kim now had a twinkle to it.

His face and chest were beginning to feel too warm in the August air, and he closed the picture and stowed it away safely before returning to his only living companion in the room.

He opened the cage and carefully picked up the critter. She seemed less bite-happy now that she was being picked up, but her small eyed bulged out in what Chanyeol couldn’t tell was either wonder or terror. Chanyeol let her walk along a constant feed of his large hands, putting left before right again and again while watching her fat, scaly tail wiggle behind her. Within five minutes he was tired of that activity as well, and placed her back in the cage while giving a sigh thick with his boredom.

The next item that caught his interest was the new pieces for the microscope that had been dropped off by Minseok’s people that morning; the reason for the recent pause in their experiment schedule was simply that they couldn’t continue without the new parts. Per usual he had traded the lenses for nothing more than Chanyeol's latest correspondence, and received them along with a note from Minseok saying that the parts were the most expensive and difficult to produce yet. Dr. Zhang’s microsope would have the honor of being the first microscope outside of trials to be fitted with them.

Boredom stopped being an issue approximately four seconds later, as Chanyeol heard footsteps pounding up to the laboratory door.

An enraged Baekhyun nearly tore the door off of its hinges, nearly prompting Chanyeol to hide underneath his desk for safety’s sake. Instead he settled for a meek, “Everything okay?”

“The bloody hell does it look like?” came the ornery reply. “Everything is not okay.” Baekhyun was gentle—relative to his anger—with setting down the reagents in his hands, and he shifted the crate of rats he’d purchased from being tucked under his arm to being in both hands. Chanyeol, in an effort to be affable, moved to help him, but it was really a one-person job.

“The ing Prussians torched Strasbourg to the ground.”

Chanyeol blinked. He was only vaguely aware that there was a war going on between France and Northern Germany, much less where Strasbourg was and why Baekhyun was angry about it.

“Um…”

“Do you know how many medieval manuscripts and books were in the libraries in that town? THOUSANDS! THOUSANDS, AND THEY BURNED THEM ALL- Chanyeol, why is this door open, and where is the other rat?”

Another blink.

Oh , wait, no, that last sentence was really important.

“I don’t know,” Chanyeol lied as his eyes began darting around the lab floor, hoping to catch sight of the little escapee. No luck.

Baekhyun was not fooled in the slightest.

“You do realize that if Jongin comes back and that rat is running about, you are beyond fired, right?”

Chanyeol swallowed and nodded, knowing well of Jongin’s disgust for the creatures.

“Better look fast. Rotation’s over at three,” Baekhyun suggested, pointing to the clock that was displaying a proud 2:57.

.

Chanyeol set to scurrying about stooped over so he could see the ground better; the rather humorous sight of the tall man almost made Baekhyun forget about the mass slaughter of his precious books and laugh. Chanyeol had become so engrossed in the search that he had forgotten to even think to ask Baekhyun for help, a fact for which the older was very grateful as he had his own plate of crap to do now that he was back, including less than an hour to fix the microscope before Chanyeol’s experiment was ready.

“She’s over here!” Chanyeol yelled in the loudest whisper he could, upon seeing the reflective beady eyes and twitching pink nose poking out at him from behind the desk by the window. “I need something to catch her with!”

Baekhyun placed the first container bigger than a rat he could find in Chanyeol’s blindly backward-grasping hand (he refused to take his eyes off of the rat,) sighing when Chanyeol knocked over a small bottle while swinging the glass cake plate lid over to the corner. With his other hand he grasped for a yardstick he knew was resting at the very back of the desk, behind the microscope lenses and various old bottles, and brought it around so he could prod the rat from behind.

“Yeees, come on girl…” he coaxed, poking the rat gently from behind. She didn’t seem to mind the disturbance, until Chanyeol gave her a forceful push that gave her a great start. She darted out from the corner like a bat out of hell, faster than Chanyeol’s reflexes could handle. “,” he hissed when the lid came down on her tail; he quickly lifted it again to try to slam it down over her…

And immediately realized how stupid that was as his hand came down into a sea of glass as the lid shattered around his grip.

“AH, -“ Chanyeol yelled out, swinging around to the nearest surface he could find and bringing his elbows down hard on it and his head between his arms while squeezing his massively bleeding hand and wrist over his head.

Chanyeol was in too much pain to hear the sound that came next, but Baekhyun heard it loud and clear.

The sound of a special-order, hand-crafted, one-of-a-kind microscope lens setup rattling to the floor.

 Because of the cacophony caused by the glass and liquid from the bottles that fell along with the box falling amidst the already present broken glass, it was impossible to tell by sound whether or not the component was okay, and all common knowledge should have said that it was well-nested in the box, but nonetheless, he still flipped.

“CHAN-YEOL, WHAT THE DID YOU JUST DO…?” Baekhyun yelled, kneeling in the broken glass and fluid to retrieve the part box.

“I’m such an idiot-“

“You’re right about that! If you broke the lenses…”

“The lenses?” Chanyeol had thought Baekhyun was talking about him cutting his hand. Now he realized that they had a much more serious problem on their hands.

“Oh no…”

Chanyeol fell on his hands and knees to the floor, ignoring the pain of new cuts opening up on his already raw palms. Baekhyun was already tearing into the box that was now on his lap, removing old newspaper and other packaging components, stopping only when he could fully see the perfect brass of the new part. He tilted his head to the side, seeing that the lens at the end was still fully intact.

“Oh thank god… Jongin never would have forgiven you,” Baekhyun said in one giant exhale. He looked over and smiled at Chanyeol, moving to set the box aside when they heard it.

The sound of broken glass shifting around inside of the microscope part.

The last time they remember their faces becoming so pale was when something similar had happened about a year and a half ago, and the repercussions of that incident paled in comparison to the potential ones for this.

"Chanyeol?"

"Yeah?"

"Remember when I said you'd be beyond fired?"

"...Yeah?"

"I'd be more concerned for your life than your job now."

"...Yeah."

#RuhRoh

This chapter required me to take some intensive courses at Wikipedia University.

I learned three things:

The Franco-Prussian war was a thing (the Siege of Strasbourg is referenced in this; almost 3500 manuscripts were lost along with other things when the libraries at the University of Strasbourg and the city of Strasbourg in France were destroyed. I thought Mr. Byun, with his love for books, would be distraught to hear that.

The second thing I learned was about what kind of camera technology was around in that time; I had no idea pictures were done onto glass and other non-paper materials. Apparently Mr. Byun also has a love for photography as well as science and literature. I watched a really awesome video on the collodion process (Baekhyun does tintype in the story and this guy does ambrotype, but I think the process is similar) which can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iM2aKze_DAY (Start at 11:00 for the process, or skip to 30:00 for the final product.) It's a good video for you people who like to learn interesting random things or are procrastinating or just like random background videos while working.

The third is that if you're going to write your cover pic into your story, write the story and THEN choose and edit the cover pic. Would not have picked 2/3/1870 again.