The next few days passed in a whirlwind of pain and fear and darkness. Every time Kibum woke up he would feel fine for a few minutes, and then the pain would return until he was crying and , in too much agony to be embarrassed at the fuss he was making, or even really aware of anything except the pain. Then the ozone-smelling doctor would give him the painkiller again, and he would fall into the blessed oblivion of sleep, only to wake up and repeat the whole cycle over again. Sometimes Jinki was beside him, white-faced and smelling overwhelmingly of plastic, and sometimes it was Taemin with his cloying crushed-rose perfume. Once it was Jonghyun who sat beside him and Kibum’s hair away from his sweaty forehead, and Kibum almost smiled that time, because Jonghyun smelled delicious, like warm vanilla…but all too soon the black agony was back and they took Jonghyun away.

If Minho came, Kibum didn’t know it.

Days later, he swam just beneath the surface of consciousness and heard Dr. Ji's voice at the end of the bed, discussing him with someone else who smelled like freshly cut grass. The pleasantness of the scent offset Dr. Ji's ozone smell, and Kibum found his awareness moving towards it, rather than pulling away like he usually did when he smelled Dr. Ji nearby.

“You can’t keep him on this much longer,” the mown grass-smelling person was saying. “It’s too toxic. It’ll damage his organs.”

Dr. Ji made a noise of irritation. “I know, but every time it starts to wear off he has a pain crisis. You’ve seen the EEG results - his theta waves go off the charts. I don’t want him to slip back into a coma if it gets too severe for him to handle.”

“Could be a neurosensory disorder or nerve dysfunction,” the cut-grass person suggested. “Hyperalgesia?”

“Hyperalgesia,” Dr. Ji repeated slowly. There was a pause. "I could trial an antidepressant.”

“It’s worth a shot,” the cut-grass person said. “Try him on an SSRI.”

Hyper-al-what? Kibum thought confusedly. He’d never heard of that before, but he was sure that whatever else was wrong with him, he didn’t need antidepressants. He dragged himself up to the surface of consciousness and concentrated on getting his eyes to open. The cut-grass person turned out to be another white coat-wearing doctor, a youngish woman with short dark hair and kind eyes.

“What’s hyper-whatever you said?” he asked blurrily. The two doctors turned to look at him.

“Ah, were you awake?” The mown-grass doctor smiled at him. “My name is Dr. Han and I’m a neurological specialist. Hyperalgesia means abnormally increased sensitivity to pain. It can happen when damaged platelets react with your peripheral nervous system and release too many pain-producing chemicals.”

“Oh,” Kibum blinked. It took him a while to process all this medical talk with his brain still fuzzy with the echoes of pain. “You mean my nervous system is whacked out?”

Dr. Han grinned. “You could put it like that. This is probably why you’ve been unconscious so much. Sleep is your brain’s way to escape from the pain.”

“Will I get better?” Kibum asked anxiously.

“With the right medication we can suppress the excess chemicals your brain is producing. SSRIs – a type of antidepressant – can do this. Hopefully, your brain will then be able to continue the right patterns on its own. Recovery from traumatic brain injury is different for everyone though, so we’ll have to wait and see.”

Kibum shivered at the words traumatic brain injury. He’d never dreamed that such scary words would apply to him. He wanted to ask if he had brain damage, but he found he was too scared of what she might answer. Besides, he tried to reassure himself, he didn’t feel brain damaged. He could still think clearly, at least when he wasn’t in pain. In fact, things seemed clearer than ever, both inside his head and out. Colours were still incredibly bright and vivid, but he seemed to be getting used to processing them because they didn’t hurt his eyes any more. The weird smells were still – well, weird. He didn’t really get where they were coming from. Taemin’s rose perfume was all very well, but why should Jinki smell like plastic sometimes and coffee at others? The cut-grass scent on the neurological specialist was unusual, but Kibum supposed it would be possible to make a perfume with that scent. But surely, nobody in their right mind would wear an aftershave that reeked of ozone?

If the smells weren’t perfumes, what on earth were they? Had his sense of smell just gone totally haywire, producing random smells where there was nothing to create them? Could a person hallucinate smells? Kibum didn't know, and he didn't want to ask Dr. Ji, and Dr. Han was already gone.

Dr. Ji gave him the antidepressant and watched him eagerly for his response. Kibum became rapidly, if unhappily, used to waking up to find his bed surrounded by interested doctors discussing him with long, complicated words Kibum had never heard before, or a throng of medical students earnestly taking notes on their tablets. It made him feel stupid and uncomfortable, lying there being stared at, but worse than that was the strange sensation that could actually feel their gazes. It was like a physical pressure pushing down on him. Even their types of attention felt different. Some of them were a blunt, heavy pressure that made his limbs feel heavy – others were sharp, needle-like points prickling all over his skin.

He hated the antidepressant. It wasn’t that it didn’t work. Just the opposite; it seemed to work just as Dr. Han had explained, and the agony that had plagued him from his healing hip, head and ribs faded. The problem was that other parts of him seemed to fade too. The sharpness and clarity of vision he’d had since waking up left him, making everything seem dull and slightly blurry. His hearing must have been sharper too, because now sounds were oddly muted in comparison, like being underwater, and he couldn’t hear people speaking in the corridor or the next rooms across any more. The smells had been the strongest perception, and they did not completely vanish, but only sometimes now would he get a hint of warm vanilla from Jonghyun or a brief waft of crushed roses or pine needles from Taemin.

Kibum missed those senses as if he had lost a limb, but the things the antidepressant did to his mind was worse. He felt smothered by a heavy, dull blanket that was leeching away all his interest in life. When his parents or the other members of SHINee or some of his friends from other idol groups visited him, he couldn’t seem to take a proper interest in what they talked about, couldn't laugh at their jokes and attempts to cheer him up. Even smiling took serious effort. He felt empty and numb, and plagued by an inexplicable sense of loss.

After a few days of this, he began to become aware of a strange, sinister whispering noise in the background. At first he thought he was imagining it, but it only grew stronger, until he was lying there listening to it all the time instead of focusing on what was going on around him, scared and unnerved beneath the blanket of numbness the medication had wrapped him in. He thought there were words in the whispers, but no matter how hard he strained to listen, he couldn’t quite make them out. What he did know was that they hissed louder whenever he saw a medical instr