Spring came, with the melting of the snow and rainy days, it came with budding trees and flowers and nights warm enough to sit on the porch to watch the seasonal change of the stars. The days dragged on but the weeks passed quickly, the longer Junho stayed by my side, the deeper I felt our connection grow.

   Somewhere along the way, it had gotten to the point where communication between us was rarely verbal anymore; whatever the other felt, we just knew.

   I almost didn’t have to touch Junho for him to hear my thoughts anymore, but that didn’t stop us. During our time at home, we were as inseparable as ever. I spent many hours silently watching the sunlight creep across his sleeping face as the dawn lit the sky in soft pinks and oranges. The sounds of morning birds chirping in the surrounding trees had woken me just several minutes ago, and when I noticed the way the shadows cast across Junho’s perfect face, I had to stop and admire the beauty of the soundly sleeping angelface.

   As if he was begging for my touch, Junho reached out to me in his sleep, his small fingers curling into my shirt and I moved myself closer to him, letting him settle against my chest until his eyes fluttered open and a smile graced his lips so magnificently. “Morning~” He hummed softly after I kissed him.

   “Breakfast?” I offered as Junho climbed on top of me, letting the bed sheet fall away from his body, but he simply shook his head and kissed me more forcefully than before, and I let him. I let him hold my scruffy face in his hands and kiss me like there was no tomorrow. I sat up into the kiss, as his legs settled around my waist and his arms slid to my neck so he could cling to me as he seated himself in my lap so perfectly, our dancing tongues and wet kisses connecting our bodies together in a beautiful harmony with our heavily growing breathing.

   Kissing Junho was just like breathing, for the first time in ages.

   He filled my lungs with his passion and forced my heart into complete submission, all while comforting my tired mind with the tenderness of his very being.

   Only when we were both too out of breath to continue did we part our lips. I smiled at the way he clung to me with a dazed expression. “Well good morning to you, too~” I brushed his messy bed hair down atop his head. “You sure you don’t want French toast?”

   “Mmm . . . that sounds good!” Junho perked up at the sound of his favorite breakfast food, and before I could say it, he was sliding away from me, scurrying around to find his pajama shorts that were lying in the same spot from last night.

   With a yawn, I followed Junho’s excited scampering downstairs, calling out to him as I got to the bottom of the stairs. “Hey, would you start a pot of coffee?”

   A blunt thud from the kitchen answered me and I immediately halted my footsteps. The silence that followed had my heart jolting in an instant and I ran across the cold wood floor, holding the doorframe as I rounded the corner into the kitchen to see the body I loved so much lying unconscious in the middle of the floor.

   Panic filled me as I rushed to him and lifted his head off the floor, screaming with worry. “Junho!” My voice cracked as I started to feel the anxiety taking over me. “Junho, wake up!” That’s when I felt the warm liquid on my hands where his head rested, and I saw the red smear of blood on the floor from the impact.

   With shaky hands, I reached onto the wall and pulled the phone by the cord, grabbing the handset and dialing one-one-nine.

Taecyeon sat beside me in the quiet room inside the hospital’s intensive care unit, I still wore the soiled pajamas I had come in wearing the previous day. I had been there for some several hours before Taec had showed up with coffee and forced me to wash the blood off my hands. We didn’t speak, he knew me well, after all. He knew that I couldn’t speak even if I wanted to. So we both just sat there, he was sprawled out across the couch by the window and I was sitting in a chair by Junho’s bed, trying so desperately to tune out the sound of the heart monitor as it beeped away in perfect intervals.

   They couldn’t tell me what happened, the doctors and neurologists and specialists, none of them could explain why Junho’s brain had simply shut off, leaving his hollow body in the comatose state he was currently in.

   I felt the loss of his existence creeping its way down my spine in such a way that left me chilled, just like the cold hand that rested peacefully in mine. I squeezed Junho’s fingertips, as if I would attempt to pray to whatever god would hear me, but then let go as the door to the room opened. I sat up, expecting to see the nurse coming in to make her rounds.

   But it was a different, familiar but unexpected face that greeted me with a pained look in his eyes. “I got a text from the giant, so I drove out here immediately.” MinJun motioned to Taecyeon with the same hand that clutched a brown paper bag. “I brought some dinner– figured you wouldn’t have eaten yet.”

   I shook my head grievously. “Haven’t had much of an appetite.”

   With a nod, he set the bagged food on the table on the other side of Junho’s bed before looking over the sleeping boy. His brow furrowed in dismay as he reached out, and ever so gently, pushed the hair away from Junho’s closed eyes. “Can I talk to you alone?” The cat eyed man looked at me for confirmation when I hadn’t answered him.

   Without saying a word, I stood, dragging my numb legs out the room, already knowing that he would follow me. “I thought you hated this place.” I said once we stood alone in the hallway.

   “I do,” MinJun replied quite resolutely. “But I care about you more than I hate this hole town.”

   I could have scoffed, had I the strength to waste. But instead, I just stared at him, my patience long past its limit and my mind too wrapped up in grief to properly digest whatever subtle point he was trying to send me. “Why are you really here? Don’t lie to me, Jun.” My eyes watered involuntarily as I looked straight at him until he finally answered.

   “My guys at the police department have located Dong-Woo’s family.” As if my heart hadn’t stopped already, the words falling from MinJun’s lips were the final blow to my chest. “They want him transferred to a hospital in Seoul as soon as possible. They have every right to want him back, Khun . . . And with him being in the state he’s in, his mother has all the legal rights. There’s nothing we can do.”

   I stood there, waiting for the impact of hysteria to hit me, but it never came. In all honesty, I felt nothing, which scared me far worse than the idea of having nothing. It scared me to be reduced to only nothingness.

   That was the only fate I could foresee, with the coming of Junho’s absence.

   For the first time since I’d set foot in this godforsaken hospital, I caught sight of my reflection in the glass of a mirror that hung on the wall. I looked like some ratchet thing, poorly dressed and utterly crazed, perfectly fitting the miserable gaze that gleamed back at me before I closed my eyes and clenched my fists tight. “How long before they take him?”

   I knew the look in MinJun’s eyes, drooped with regret for words he hadn’t even spoken yet. “He’ll be moved the day after tomorrow. The doctor has already cleared the medical transfer.”

   This time, I felt the snap in my nerves and before I could stop myself, my fist came into contact with my hideous reflection in the mirror. “That’s bull!” I cursed out venomously as the glass shattered under my knuckles.

   The only sound that followed was the sob that bellowed from me when my legs finally gave in and I crouched on the floor to keep from collapsing. I had felt this before – this unyielding desolation that the breath from my lungs – when my mother died shortly after my father, and when the man standing over me had given up on our life together. Yet this felt far worse than death or abandonment.

   Junho was being stolen from me.

I listened to the man standing beside me sigh for the seventh or eighth time as he carefully wrapped a white gauze around my knuckles in the middle of the hospital bathroom. MinJun’s lips pressed into a thin line as he concentrated on tucking the bandage so that it wouldn’t come loose easily.

   “You’re a stubborn , you know that?” He finally ended the silence between us that he had kept going for the last few minutes.

   Unfortunately for him, I wasn’t quite ready for conversation, so I just stared at the spots of red that were already soaking through the gauze, wondering if I’d ever be bothered by something as miniscule as a cut knuckle ever again.

   “Have you considered how this might actually be better for him?” The question from the slightly older voice took me by a surprise that quickly changed into bitter indignation as he continued to speak. “Maybe the doctors in Seoul can help him, find out what exactly is wrong with him – because there is most definitely something off about his whole ‘I’m an alien’ story, and you know it . . . Junho’s a sweetheart, I’ll admit, he’s grown on me. But clinging to a fantasy story after a traumatic experience isn’t the healthy way to recover from abuse.”

   My eyes narrowed at the last part, and the words fell from my lips before I could stop it. “You speak as if it didn’t take you years to get over your own abuse.”

   It was the way he clenched his jaw, just before looking away – like he could hide his hurt from me – that had me filled with instantaneous regret. I had seen him make that face before, when talking to the very man who had hurt him so badly, and now, it was I who had caused such destruction in his eyes that broke me almost equally.

   “I’m sorry,” My voice trembled slightly. “I didn’t mean that, I don’t know why I said it.”

   MinJun had stopped holding my hand, and instead was looking down at his feet, nodding along to the lie I had just told him and looking at me with a painfully questioning smile that failed to reach his eyes. “I know what your kind of fear feels like, Khun. How it makes us do and say things we normally wouldn’t.”

   Staring in front of me, at no particular object at all, I wanted to reply. I wanted to have something to say, a rebuttal to disprove any suspicions that my fear was anything other than the acceptable amount of rational human fear. I also wanted to roll my eyes and tell him he was reading into things too much, as usual.

   But before I could say any of the things I wanted to, the door to the restrooms opened and I looked up just as Taecyeon stuck his body half through the swinging door. “He’s awake.” He said, as if he knew those two words were all it would take to have me pushing past him and almost running down the hallway.

   When I got to Junho’s room, the doctor was asking a series of questions while a nurse was flashing a light into his eye. Junho looked pale, but other than that, the only thing different was the kind of dazed look on his face. Unlike the usual curiosity that his gaze held whenever he was somewhere he hadn’t been before, right now, he simply looked lost – scared almost.

   I walked to the edge of his bed and knelt before him, grabbing his hand and holding it up to my lips. “Junho.”

   There was a split-second, when I felt the warmth and all the love he gave me, he stared back at me with those deep brown eyes and I watched the gleam in them fade like the color in his cheeks as he pulled his hand back slowly and set it in his lap. My heartbeat sped up as he parted his lips and murmured confusedly. “I don’t know you.”