***This might be a double update for some of you, so make sure you've read Chapter 55!  (There is cavity-inducing fluff in it.)***

Both of them lost track of time pretty quickly, even though Jinsu still had her watch (she realised with some shock that it had been about eighteen hours after Baekhyun had gone missing that she’d started looking for him and it had been a good seven or eight after that before she’d finally asked Junmyeon about it, which meant he’d been locked in the storeroom without nourishment for over a day by the time she’d been thrown in there with him).  They went through long periods of silence, both of them almost in a trance at some point due to the warmth, with Jinsu’s throat gradually getting drier and drier.  She didn’t even want to think about how Baekhyun must feel if she was already finding it intolerable.

Every so often, Baekhyun would insist on starting conversation again just to stop both of them from going mad, but the more they both spoke, the more their voices cracked and faded.

“What’s been your favourite part of this trip?” Baekhyun asked out of the blue after the latest half hour of silence, startling Jinsu out of her doze.  She looked over to see him watching her curiously, his bruised eye almost completely closed but the other one looking a little less glazed than it had been previously.

“I don’t know,” she answered honestly.  “The only good part for me was really Balhae and so much rotten stuff has happened since then I can’t really remember much of it beyond the tiger, and that definitely wasn’t good.”

“I liked star-gazing from the top of the Attayear,” he told her.  “And wandering around in the woods in Balhae.”

He was gazing at her expectantly again, as if expecting her to have already remembered something and made up her mind.

“Shopping in Balhae on my own was nice,” was all she could come up with.  Baekhyun nodded, turning his head away.

“The pendant was pretty.  I saw it once when I was tidying your stuff and the others mentioned it.”

Jinsu wondered if she was supposed to have agreed with him that the star-gazing had been a highlight of the trip too.

“You might find this. . . really simple of me,” she added in faltering tones, “but it’s also been nice to have a peer group to treat me as a peer and like I’m valuable, even if it’s just for a short time.”

He looked back at her again, doing a pretty bad job of masking his regret.  “Next time some dumb idiot tells you you’re worthless, please just sock him in the mouth or the balls, no questions asked.  With any luck, he’ll grow up and move on.”

Grimacing, Jinsu held up her hand.  “It’s not just boys.”

He looked away again.  For a moment, Jinsu thought it was going to be another one of those silences, except more awkward.

“What about the moment that sticks out to you most?”  He coughed weakly.  “The tiger doesn’t count.  That’s like using a trump card.”

Jinsu put more thought into answering this one.

“I can’t really say you finding me in the snow, because I barely remember it, but I do have two others.”

He quietly gestured for her to go on.

“Jongdae showing up with a bow and arrow and threatening to shoot Hae Insu was pretty epic.  Plus he looked mega y.”

Baekhyun took just a split second too long to agree with her.  “Jongdae is an alpha male,” he agreed, before adding, with a twinkle in his eye, “but I’m ier.”

If Jinsu’s throat hadn’t been quite so dry, she would have laughed.  “You’re scrawny compared to Jongdae.  He’s got biceps the size of beach balls and his abs could knock you out if you walked into him.  You just have nice fingers.”

Baekhyun choked, and for a moment, Jinsu was worried he might actually harm himself.

“Scrawny?” he spluttered.  “Babe, I invented scrawny!  Scrawny is the new sizzling hot!”  He snapped his fingers and pointed at her, his face suddenly straightening out into determination.  “Which means you just called me hot.”

“Of course you’re hot,” Jinsu told him in placating tones.  “It’s over thirty degrees in here, and I’m hot too.  Besides, I’m scrawnier than you, which means I’m hotter.  And also, I think you’re a little delirious now, because you’re acting weird.”

Baekhyun slumped back against the boxes.  “I tried.”

Jinsu almost agreed with him.  “The other one was when I found out you were the mystery chef.  That was horrifying.”

The corners of his mouth twitched up.  “Mine’s when you busted me as the mystery chef.  I was panicking you were going to throw the food all over me when we got to your room or that you’d yell at me or something, but you were really graceful about it.  And so awkward too that I wanted to crawl into a hole and die.”  The smile grew softly, and for a moment he looked like he was going to say something else, but then he glanced up and saw Jinsu hanging on his every word.

“Aw, now that’s cute,” he gushed, reaching out.  “Can I pinch your cheeks?”

Embarrassed, she slapped his hand away.  He responded with a massive pout.

“Baekhyun, you’re being really weird.”

“I blame the drink.”

“You haven’t had any.”

“Exactly.”

Jinsu didn’t follow, but she let him have that one and dropped it.

“And what about the one person you never thought you’d make friends with on this trip but the opposite happened?”

Jinsu squinted at him.  “Are you fishing for compliments now?”

Baekhyun grinned shamelessly at her, his uninjured eye disappearing into a crescent.  “It would have been a mutual one.”

Maybe it was because his smile was infectious, but Jinsu had to grin back at that one.

“I’ve got one for you,” she said.  “How can you be so happy when the situation’s so awful?”

“Because the situation’s never, ever as bad as it could have been,” he said simply.  “And because I also know I’m never alone.”

“You were on your own in here for at least twenty-four hours.”

“Yeah, but I knew you’d find me eventually.””

Jinsu raised her eyebrows, unsure how she felt about Baekhyun putting so much faith in her.

“And out in the woods, it would have been much worse if I hadn’t found you when I did.  And when I was lost on my own in the woods in Balhae, I could always tell from the sun which way I needed to go, and I never bumped into wild animals.  When those Japanese soldiers found us, we had the weather on our side and I knew Jongdae could fight and was bright enough to work with me if I wanted to take a lead.  If you learn how to find the positive side in every situation, it never looks as bad as it could.”

“Then why were you so hung up on the court case from ten years ago?  That’s not optimism.”

Baekhyun grimaced.  “It’s hard not to when I’m old enough to remember how it broke my parents.  Not just financially.  I’m optimistic in situations I can control, not in ones I can’t.  And legally I’m not even allowed to talk about it, which is so frustrating I feel like I’m going to explode.”

“Legally?”

Baekhyun shifted, his gaze going up to his still-bound hand.  Jinsu made a mental note to try to do something about it at some point.

“One of the reasons I really didn’t want to come on this trip was because we were going back into the past and I knew there was nothing I could d