“You want to know something funny?” Jinsu overheard Youngdo saying when Jisung dropped a bowl of boiling beansprout soup and blasphemed loudly when it splashed all over him.  “Saying Jesus Christ is currently a massive anachronism.  The timeframe we’re currently in lacks the light of the world and is cold and unforgiving with no chance of redemption.  Charming, isn’t it?  We could go out there and be prophets or something.”

Jinsu wasn’t sure whether Youngdo or Jisung was the Christian or whether Youngdo was being serious or poking fun, but on a more literal level, it was a fairly accurate description of Ancient Scythia.  Before sneaking into the kitchen to load up the tray with food to take up to Kyungsoo (she might just have put enough on it for three people so that she could eat as well; she wasn’t quite at the stage of admitting that some thought had gone into the fact that Baekhyun might be awake and hungry too), she’d poked her nose out of a porthole.  The place they’d landed in was indeed bleak and forbidding.  She could just about make out tundra extending to what had looked like the borders of a forest, but there was no life to be seen for miles.  It also appeared that they’d managed to land in the middle of winter: just standing outside the Attayear for two minutes had been enough for her nose and cheeks to turn blue with cold and for her to completely lose feeling in her hands.

Once the tray was loaded up, Jinsu was faced with the issue of balancing it on one hand so that she could carry it up with her.  It was okay when it was just going a few steps across her room, but she had stairs to navigate with this.

Flexing her arm carefully, Jinsu took her time to balance the tray and made her way carefully out of the kitchen.  She was almost at the stairs when Minhwan appeared out of one of the rooms along the passage, followed by Kyuhyun.  Kyuhyun continued on, but Minhwan stopped, frowning at the tray balancing on Jinsu’s hand.

“Where do you think you’re going with that much food?” he demanded.  “We’re short on supplies and you landed us in the middle of a Siberian winter; it’s not like we’re getting more food easily.  You can’t have that much.”

Jinsu bristled at his pugnacious tone.  “I’m not an idiot,” she seethed.  “As a girl and somebody currently not able to do much in the way of manual labour to help out on the Attayear, my necessary daily calorie intake is much lower than yours will be.  I spent a year counting calories when I was thirteen and I know just how much I need to eat, thanks.  The rest is for friends who do need a higher calorific intake.”

Minhwan snorted and began to make his way around her.  “Your cousin’s dead and Loverboy Jongdae went sailing out of the window; you don’t have Minseok to cry to anymore.  What friends?”

If they genuinely hadn’t been short on food, Jinsu would have introduced the large bowl of scalding soup to Minhwan’s face.

“Your mum, a**hole,” she retorted before her brain had a chance to tell her that it really wasn’t a good idea.  Resisting the urge to retrospectively cringe, she decided it was best to pretend dignity and stalk off.  Minhwan, however, was offended enough to whirl around and block her.

“You—” he began, but Jinsu wasn’t in the mood to protract the argument.

“Look,” she said flatly.  “We’re short on food at the moment, but if you don’t get out of of my way, I’m going to walk into you and three people’s portions will end up on the floor, and the first thing I’ll do is go back to the kitchen and get three more, which’ll mean we’re six down because you’re being a knucklehead again.  Just go away.”

He was too surprised to stop her as she brushed past him again.  Jinsu’s attitude fled the second she was on the stairs.  One nil to her, but she was probably going to pay for that later.

Kyungsoo’s face lit up like an LED torchbeam when Jinsu walked into the room.

“Is that bulgogi I smell?” he asked excitedly.  “And beansprout soup?”

At some point during the day, he’d painstakingly managed to get himself to shift ends of the bed so that he was now next to the desk and able to see who was coming in and out of the room.  Considering he’d told Jinsu earlier that he had now power in his legs and it was excrutiatingly painful for him to even twitch his toes, it set a lot about his determination and willpower, and also about his arm strength.  Now that she thought about it, Kyungsoo was a bit bulkier than he appeared at first glance.  She wondered if his biceps could compete with Jongdae’s and then shook herself, disturbed at where her thoughts were wandering.

Kyungsoo attempted to prop himself up a little as Jinsu placed the tray on the desk beside him, and feeling like a mother hen, Jinsu carefully slipped her hand between his shoulderblades and helped him to sit up.  Much happier now that he was in a position to help himself, Kyungsoo reached for the food and dug in, giving Jinsu a quick thumbs up and a torrent of words of gratitude that were swallowed the second he had food in his mouth.  Amused, Jinsu dithered for a few moments over where to sit and eventually perched herself on the mattress beside him so that she could access the food too.

There was no awkwardness with Kyungsoo anymore.  Jinsu felt she’d more or less got his measure and Kyungsoo had definitely got hers, because before long she was almost in hysterics at the outrageous things he was saying.

Her chuckles must have woken Baekhyun up, because before long, there came the sounds of somebody surfacing on the other side of the room, and then Baekhyun sat up groggily and stretched, yawning loudly.  The t-shirt that he was wearing rode up a little, revealing a flat expanse of stomach.  Jinsu hastily averted her gaze, but she thought she caught a hint of muscle there.

“I forgot to ask,” Kyungsoo said, “did you bring some of this up for Baekhyun as well?”

Jinsu nodded as Baekhyun turned in their direction and swung his legs out of bed.

“D*mn shame.”  Kyungsoo pinched another piece of meat between his chopsticks.  Footsteps padded across the room as Baekhyun followed his nose and sank down into the office chair, picking up the third pair of chopsticks Jinsu had brought with her.

“You angel,” he murmured gratefully to Jinsu before tucking in, still barely awake and with his sleeve paws almost covering his chopsticks.

“Whoa now.”  Kyungsoo held his chopsticks up.  “What funky stuff have you been dreaming about, Baek?”

Baekhyun looked up at him with a still-out-of-it “hm?”, a beansprout drooping out of his mouth.  Jinsu wanted to snatch it out, or shove it  back in, or just anything that made him look less scruffy without liquid from the soup dribbling d