[Two weeks prior...]

“I’m sorry to be leaving like this again,” Junmyeon said apologetically, taking his hat which was brought to him by Baekhyun.

“Don’t worry about that, Doctor,” Baekhyun said, giving his boss a hearty slap on the arm. “Now’s the time to be concerned about Mrs. Kim and the new little one.”

“I can’t believe it’s finally time,” Chanyeol sighed happily.

“I can’t believe you knocked her up so soon after the first one,” Baekhyun muttered.

Nine months and they still hadn’t let Junmyeon live down the fact that it had taken all of three weeks after their first child had been born for Mrs. Kim to become pregnant again. He had practically been heralded as a champion by Jongdae, who offered to take all of them out to drinks, but that plan came to a halt thanks to a crotchety reminder from Jongin that Junmyeon was a teetotaler.

Junmyeon’s face burned red and he shook his head at Baekhyun’s lewd phrasing at first, but then gave a cool shrug and grin. Baekhyun and Chanyeol fell into laughter.

Jongin and Junmyeon came back from their rotations at around 3:20, after Baekhyun had temporarily wrapped up Chanyeol’s arm and demanded he go have the wounds examined at the hospital.

“I shouldn’t keep the carriage waiting,” Junmyeon commented after their giggles had died down a bit.

“Take care of yourself, Doctor,” Jongin said along with a stern nod.

“You too, Jongin. You two don’t drive him mad,” he said, pointing a finger and giving a serious eye to at the mischievous duo before directing both at Jongin, “And you don’t burn down the lab with them in it.”

“Yessir!” The assistants rang out in military fashion along with salutes. Jongin snorted, and Junmyeon took his leave with a wide smile.

He still hadn’t finished cleaning the glass away, much less the spilled liquid and the blood mixed with it, and the two doctors looked at the fantastic mess with astonishment.

“When was the last time you went to visit your mother, Baekhyun?” Chanyeol asked in a thoughtful tone as they waved goodbye.

“Dunno,” Baekhyun replied. “It’s been some months, maybe a year by now. You already know we write every couple of months.”

“You should visit her,” Jongin murmured. Both Chanyeol and Baekhyun blinked in surprise, expecting something more along the lines of how overrated mothers are to come from Jongin than the advice he had just given. “I’d give you two additional days of paid leave to tack onto some weekend.”

“Oh, thank you Doctor but like I said, letters are enough for the both of us.”

Jongin looked like he disagreed, but he didn’t protest any further, and the matter was dropped until two days later, when he received word that the plague had hit Baekhyun’s home village hard.

As Baekhyun tried to explain that there had been a little accident and the reason for Chanyeol’s absence, Jongin’s eyes fell to the still open lens box. Baekhyun’s face went flat when he realized he had forgotten to put it away.

He also realized that he wouldn’t be able to come up with a recoverable lie quickly enough. Slowly, he began to explain the necessary details of what had happened.

“I’ll be fine,” Baekhyun reassured Chanyeol for what seemed to be the eighty-ninth time that day. “Like I said, she and my brother and the rest of them live on a pretty isolated farm. I just want to check to see if they need anything and bring them some of the supplements and tea we made.” They had recently found evidence that some certain types of herbs, fruits, and vegetable helped to mitigate some plague symptoms and maybe even decrease the likelihood of catching ill in the first place. “I’ll be back before Wednesday.”

Baekhyun knew by Jongin’s swift exit from the room that it was over for Chanyeol this time, and by Junmyeon’s facial expression that he wouldn’t be able to stop that.

“What about your family?” Jongin asked. “Surely they must miss their ball of energy.”

Chanyeol was silent for a few moments as he worked on scrubbing the countertop before replying with a tight-lipped smile.

“Surely they must.”

Jongin was the kind of man who never failed to take note of someone’s facial expression when he mentioned their family, and Chanyeol, despite being one of the last people Jongin would have expected, had given the kind of response that was the exact reason why he took note.

“You know, Mr. Park,” he said, getting to his feet and taking the two and a half steps to where Chanyeol stood, “no man can choose his family, but he may always choose with whom he associates himself, and those people are infinitely more important. Whether or not those people are related to him by blood is a non-factor.”

Chanyeol took a break from scrubbing, giving Jongin a curious eye. He knew what Jongin was aiming at and that he was actually making a very good attempt at being nice, but any talk of Chanyeol’s family always left him in a surly mood.

“Those people with whom he associates himself are his family.”

“What’s the definition of a family?” Chanyeol asked, returning to scrubbing. As much as he didn’t particularly like the topic, he still wanted to hear Jongin’s answer.

“I want to hear it from you first,” Jongin said, raising an eyebrow and folding his arms across his chest, before unfolding them and reaching over to grab the dust rag Chanyeol had been using to clean before he met the formidable spot he’d been scrubbing. Usually the answer people gave to this question indicated what they were missing in their own family, and the answer that came was the most direct he’d heard yet. Jongin took up where Chanyeol had left off on the dusting.

The other man grunted, putting so much elbow grease into cleaning that the wire sponge began to leave marks in his skin. “Family are people who don’t throw each other under the boat for the sake of keeping up appearances.” He put down the sponge, looking at where bruises were starting to form on his knuckles. “Look, with all due respect, can we not talk about this?”

“After I tell you what a family is, yes.”

Chanyeol met with Junmyeon in his actual office: A room a bit smaller but far less cluttered than the laboratory.

“Come in and have a seat, Chanyeol,” Junmyeon said in a soft tone. Chanyeol nervously rubbed his hand up and down the properly done gauze wrapping covering his stitches, nodding to the doctor but refusing to open his mouth with the knowledge that he would be unable to speak in anything more coherent than a stutter, and managing that rather than breaking down sobbing would be a miracle.

Chanyeol sat down. The August heat was neither cool enough to avoid making him sweat buckets, nor hot enough to burn him alive. Making eye contact with Suho was neither something he could do nor try.

“That um… That… microscope piece, as you know, was a crucial component for the um… next phase of our experiment, and… with everything that happened today—the rat, the rest of it—in conjunction with general issues with, um… ‘damaged materials’ over time, we have come to the unfortunate conclusion that for the sake of the research, we’ll have to let you go.”

“There is no definition for a family, but to me, family are people who remain by your side when they hate you. They’ll come running to help you when they think you’re the spawn of the devil, and they never leave you when they wish you were dead.”

“So between our definitions, does that make us all a family here, then?”

Jongin had been preparing himself for the question.

“Yes.”

“So then… you’ll never leave me?”

That one caught him off-guard.

He turned away to take to dusting the objects on the wall opposite the window, facing away from Chanyeol. “I thought you wanted to stop talking about this, Mr. Park.”

“Promise?”

He couldn’t tell if Chanyeol had seen through his guise or if he had just ignored him, but Jongin paused.

“So much for a promise, huh?” Chanyeol muttered.

An upset Jongin was never a difficult one to find, as he always had the same mission objective of smoking a pipe in the highest-up deserted location he could find. That almost always meant the roof.

“I’m not going to pretend to be the best advocate on what family should mean. But Dr. Jongin, you…” Chanyeol gave a single chuckle, “you had sure as hell gotten me hoping it meant more than this.”

He turned to leave. He knew he wasn’t going to going to get a word out of Jongin, that is, until Jongin actually spoke.

“Five hundred thousand.”

Jongin heard Chanyeol come to a stop.

“Five hundred thousand is how many people have died in this pandemic. If you expect me to continue risking lives for the sake of “family”, you have either misunderstood or sorely underestimated me.”

“Goodbye, Doctor Jongin. Thank you for the opportunity.” He knew that if he opened his own mouth again, something would come out; whether it would be pure anger, tears, or both, he wasn’t willing to learn.

“Goodbye, Mister Park.”

"...Promise."