a/n this is kind of a sad one, guys, i'm sorry! =( might wanna grab some tissues or a blanket or smthn

but where there's rain, there's sunshine after the storm : ) 

“Are you waking up, now?”

As the world filters back into his conscious in the form of hazed molecules of light, unnaturally halogenic brightness seeping through his eyelids with streaks of strained pain that crack across his head like muted thunder. Wincing, he sighs out in clipped tones of agony as his fingers press into the rigid rounding of his skull, attempting to press the pain away to the best of his ability, and it’s then, as the blinding light floods into his vision and his optic nerves shrivel in misuse, that he realizes he has no idea where he is.

He manages to turn his head just a little bit, for any deeper movements than the slightest shifts streak pain into his temples and registers only familiarly white walls and the speckled, robin’s egg-blue tiles along the ceiling that indicate that he is in a medical facility. What had happened to him? “Where am I?” He asks groggily, tongue feeling quite thick between his lips and he notices, dizzily, that he really wants a drink. If he had to guess, he would very quickly assume that he was in the hospital, likely in one of the small rooms that litter the emergency ward in the back of the facility, an area condemned away from the random of civilization which litters the hallway with peace and quiet.

He also notices, after a less-than-abbreviated pause, that he is not by himself in the room and that, sat beside him in a seemingly less-than-comfortable wooden infirmary chair is an adult woman, one he does not recognize, with a calm expression on her face where she has reclined comfortably into a stand-offishly seated position. One leg has been casually hooked over the other, her white medical trousers arching upwards where a socked ankle peeks out, her hands folded delicately upon one of the arms of the chair. She is not at all intimidating, what, with the soft waves of her thick, dark hair and the gentle divots of her crow’s feet sat upon the corners of her eyes, and instead exudes an aura of safety, gentility, and awareness.

“You’re somewhere safe,” she tells him calmly, warm brown eyes slightly muted beneath the cool tones of the ceiling glow. “You’re here for treatment.”

“Yingtao!” 

Tears sting the wrought-abused corners of eyes as she plants both hands on the rounds of the model’s shoulders and shakes, pleads, sobs which couple begs as she shakes harder, pleading with every tendril of deity forgiveness with hot, thick tears in her eyes, a hammering pain in her heart. Her friend does not respond to the brisk jolting of being shaken, does not even so much as stir when the model taps her palm on the girl’s cheek in beats of two, her fingers jittering upon clammy, lifeless skin. “Yingtao,” she begs aloud, unsure of what to do as she continues to attempt to have the girl rouse. “You gotta wake up - okay? You - you gotta wake up, now, this isn’t funny anymore!”

Behind her, the clacking of heeled shoes upon the polished, marbled flooring grows increasingly louder as the front desk secretary rushes over amid the fog of the girl’s clouded vision, all flurried motions and brave steps as she tries to calm the model down, tries to lay comforting palms flat across rumpled chiffon that quakes beneath her touch. “What happened?” The secretary blurts out, rushes amidst the panic, and Minseo’s words have all but shredded apart in her outward monologue to become less than chopped syllables, indiscernible shifts of language in garbled tones that mix with her despair. 

“She - ” the model cries as she lifts a hand to conceal her embarrassment, to conceal her sorrows, as though she could salvage either. “I was just talking to her, and - and she was acting funny and mumbling to herself like… like she couldn’t hear me, and… and then she just… she just went down, and…”

“Did anything happen previously?” The secretary asks where she’s knelt down, her business trousers prettily flouncy around her ankles in pinstriped elegance, and she lifts her hips just a little bit as she reaches behind herself for her company-issued cell phone hidden within her back pocket as her other hand busies itself upon Yingtao’s forehead. “Had she been sick? Exhausted? Did she eat today?”

Teary-eyed, the girl shakes her head, for she does not know. Not a single one of the three possibilities does she know because she had not had the time to hang out with Yingtao today and, therefore, had not had the time to her to lunch. Had Yingtao been refraining from eating again when not supervised, or had she fed herself today? Had she slept last night? Was she running a fever? She swears beneath her breath, then, and curses herself, for she does not know and, therefore, she deserves the award for the world’s worst best friend. “Please help her,” Minseo begs wetly, trembling with the lack of palpable knowledge she possesses. “Please!” 

The secretary nods in rapid succession as she presses the phone to her ear and lifts her hand to place it upon the ridge of the girl’s bony shoulder, rooting her there and promising her comfort. “We’ll get her help,” the secretary tells her quickly, “I promise. She’ll be okay - but first, I have to inform the president. We have to see what he prefers our course of action to be.”

The statement makes Minseo only whimper, for she is not prepared for the punishments she may receive for the overlying haze of meaning that clouds the situation. What if the president thinks that Minseo had hurt her, had dared to have the bollocks to strike her and render her unconscious? What if the blame is placed before her, and is made all hers? What if Yingtao doesn’t wake up, and what if Minseo has to stand trial for the promise that she did not do it when she was the only true witness to view the girl’s last awakened breath? 

She does not pay attention to the words that the secretary utters into the receiver, does not pay attention to the jumbled white noise on the other end of the president likely reacting in the manner that Minseo dreads the most, and instead, she gathers the girl limply into her arms and bawls, heavily, when Yingtao’s full weight presses down upon her lifelessly. Limbs remain both futile and bothersome, lanky and in-the-way as Minseo tries her hardest, through the tears, to cradle in her arms the only true best friend she has.

The following few seconds happen in rapid succession, one right after the other, as the secretary pulls the phone away from her ear and tucks it back into her rear pocket as the call ends, and she gets not even a half-second of time to begin telling the model what to do next when the thunder of heeled shoes roars from within the rear hall to the left, and Minseo barely manages to clear her vision with the back of her hand enough to make out the shapes of their treasurer and the Recreation stylist from Studio B. 

“Miss Huang!” Jinah blurts out with widened eyes and silky sways of her tawny hair past her shoulders as she rushes over, clearly uninformed and having been on her way down when the secretary had phoned the president’s office, and Minseo’s chin trembles as Jinah’s hands immediately flourish outward shakily as she attempts to figure out what to do. “ - what happened to her?”

“She collapsed,” the secretary tells her amidst the model’s hoarse crying. “I’ve already informed President Wu and he should be on his way down in just a moment to help us figure out what to do.”

Jinah half-sighs and half-scoffs, then, and slides her hands beneath Yingtao’s hair to keep her head hoisted off of the frigid flooring. “What to do?” She asks. “We have to get her to a hospital, Miss Kwon - she could be extremely ill. God, dammit - did President Wu give you any directions of what actions to take, at all?”

Quietly, the secretary shakes her head as she glances down at the girl within Jinah’s and Minseo’s arms, growing paler and more pallid with each passing minute. “It would be wise to not waste too much time, though,” she states as Jinah’s vice vision scans meticulously over her, watching for any crack in her composure. “We should get her down to the infirmary for the time being, and the president can meet us there and discuss, with us, what we should do with her next.”

“Jiyoung is still there,” the stylist, a woman that Minseo manages to remember by the name of Liyin, tells the treasurer. “She usually stays until the president leaves, just in case anything like this happens.”

They agree on the plan to transport the fallen model to the company’s infirmary in the meantime, for, although completely unequipped for a medical emergency involving surgical treatment or alterations of physicality, it will, at least, allow her to receive fluids and painkillers to keep her alive. They agree to keep this ordeal quiet, as it is just passing the harsh edge of six in the evening and the firm is officially closing for the day, which means the remainder of their colleagues who have shifts that last this long will be clocking out, as well. If they keep Yingtao here, they will surely attract unwanted attention and will, surely, be the fault of unnecessarily incorrect rumors that one of them had assaulted her and had rendered her unconscious. 

Jinah and Liyin take over in sliding their hands carefully beneath the girl’s limp, heavy body and manage to lift her off of the ground after an elongated struggle. Sensitive and soggy as a used tissue, Minseo rushes forward to hold her friend’s legs, for she knows that Yingtao is heavy and if it had taken three adult women to effortlessly lift her, then the proof really does lie within the pudding. 

“Don’t worry,” Jinah tells her with a promising expression, the glimmers around her eyes and in her inner corners having faded from prolonged time, once a glorious, pretty pink-tinged champagne now a soft wash o glitters that reflect beneath the lights. “We’ve got it - we can take her. You should head home for the night, Miss Kim.” 

Blinking, the girl falls quiet as her hands jitter in the open air, empty and alone, when they walk away from her with the model in their arms and round the corner toward the right wing. In times like this, Minseo is reminded that this is far too common of an occurrence in this firm, and more specifically, in this business, itself, one that profits off of the physical unhappiness of women in the name of superficial beauty. In times like this, she is reminded that this is a hyper-capitalist corporation that benefits from the destruction of mental health and physical well-being in the name of immediate media satisfaction. In times like this, Minseo ing hates modeling, because nobody deserves to suffer in the midst of doing w the things that they love, especially not her own friends and family. 

Still shaken, she finds herself standing and collecting the girl’s purse and time card, knowing that Yingtao will, later, be looking for them, and wills herself to take a deep breath and calm down. She will be okay - Jiyoung is a registered nurse and will know what she is doing, for she has been cradling the president’s employees within her knowledgeable grasp for over ten years. If anything happened to her friend, Jiyoung will be able to help them through it and will be able to pinpoint what it is and will be able to inform them how to fix it so they can have their beloved Yingtao back.

Minseo does not get far, however, when she manages to take merely several steps toward the hallway where it winds to the right when the blur of human rush floods into her peripheral vision coupling with loud, thunderous footsteps, causing her to instinctively turn. Glancing rapidly around as though blind, the president stares at her with a winded, blown-out expression and tousled hair, his skin having paled amidst his stress. Noticing that the entire scene that had transpired only several moments before had now been entirely cleaned up, save for one shaken, trembling Recreation model, he strides angrily over to her side with his fists balled at his sides and his heartbeat tearing at his veins. “Where is she?” He demands quietly, stepping too close for comfort, if Minseo may say so herself, into her personal space - but here, this close-up, she can view each and every crack in the man’s well-composed armor. Glistening eyes have reddened in his worry, the muscles in his jaw tensed, and she can hear, from this close in proximity, how rapid his heartbeat has become, as though he were mere seconds away from truly panicking. “Goddammit - tell me! Where have they taken her?”

Jumping in surprise at the sudden ferocity in his voice, Minseo begins to quietly stammer as her eyes instinctively shift away. “I - they… they took her to the… the infirmary, down the hall…” 

Immediately, the president glances toward the right wing, where the infirmary lies just past those stairs that take them up and in a breath before he dashes away with more loud steps, boisterous enough in nature to match his furious heartbeat. Minseo, still struggling to process everything, finds her cheeks pinking as the underlying tones of the situation piece themselves together.

Oh. 

Jinah knows him.

Both she and Yixing know him quite well, at this point, having worked with him every single day of their lives across the last twelve years, save weekends, in the immediate vicinity with the president on a personal basis. Therefore, despite leading a rather gratuitously private life and completely sealing away his emotions and his past for personal protection, Jinah knows him, and Yixing knows him. 

They know that he struggles in capacity with emotions that stretch beyond those platonic and benign, that he struggles to feign empathy when he, himself, lies within a far higher spiritual privilege wherein he has much less experience with a hunger for sympathy, whether referring to poverty and economic needs or, perhaps, the freedom of a sanctioned group dignified lesser by society. They know that he has never before found himself in a situation where he, a heteroual-leaning, economically-privileged male from a monetary adoption birthright, had to beg the government for forgiveness and acceptance to simply be given a chance at life. They know that he is not normally one to discriminate when handed a case much different than his own when confronted with poverty and existential despair that requires outside assistance to level out. They know that he has struggled on his own, secretly, quietly, and understands the feelings of those craving the sweet relief of death far more deeply than outsiders would expect, for he had wanted nothing more after his beloved had left him than to be reunited with her once more and for forever. 

What they do not know, however, is how instantaneously the chill of panic had flooded his body and had riddled him frigid to the core as he burst from his office doors in an immediate rush to the nearest staircase. He hadn’t been able to handle the slow of the loading elevator, hadn’t been able to withstand the procrastination that it would have brought when he could not have even been sure if mere seconds were precious when Yingtao’s life was at stake. Not knowing what had befallen the second beloved he had ever held dear, the news had immediately triggered his fight-or-flight response, for he was not about to lose another person to his own ignorance and selfishness. 

Yixing may have had his suspicions, but neither of them knew how his heartbeat raced in his throat as he breezed down the staircases beside the emergency balconies, how every worst-case-scenario had played before his eyes as he nearly tripped over his own worry and heartbreak a total of three times, how his thoughts raced in never-ending cycles as he began to vehemently piece together how deeply he had ruined this girl’s body and mind in his own corporeal perfectionism and, now, was about to lose her. 

Neither of them knew how the sheer thought of the second love of his life even remotely brushing hands with the brink of death had brought bitter tears to his worn-out eyes. 

He hadn’t been able to explain how furious and simultaneously upset it had made him to arrive and to no longer see the very people he had come down here to see, usually indicative in medical facilities of the clean-up of death, and the thought had tortured him so thoroughly that he, instinctively, had gone into a fit of rage. He wouldn’t let the Gods take Yingtao away from him - not like this, and certainly not now. It probably should have come as a relief to know that they had simply transported the girl to the company’s infirmary while they awaited his decision to invest in true medical assistance, but he hadn’t any time to rejoice as his muscles tensed when he burst into a rapid dash toward the infirmary, the minutes valuable and the seconds without gamble. 

When he rounds the corner toward the infirmary, however, he could both blow a sigh of relief and, additionally, lock up with tension when he sees his staff crowding around the infirmary door - sans their fallen employee. Jinah, ever the speculative optimist, turns her head at the front of the line of group influence as his footsteps slow, and her expression widens as she lets out a startled, “President Wu!”

She looks far more worried than how Yifan is used to seeing her, her anxiety etched into her irises and pressed into the crease between her brows where they dip. It does not surprise him, as he soaks up the presences of his company, that she had been busying herself with calming herself as she shudders out dry little cries, her pretty face bathed in a sheen of pale worry with a manicured palm pressed to her cheek. His vice is guarding the door, more or less, with a rather placid expression including the haze of slight disappointment mixed with thickened worry. 

“Where is she?” He asks flatly, voice a little bit lower, as he struggles to calm his heartbeat by breathing carefully and steadily through his nose and clenching the muscles in his jaw. “What did you do with her?”

“She’s resting,” Vice Zhang tells him calmly, then, with a palm pressed flat to the lengthened door frame as his back rustles gently against the locked wood. “We’ve taken care of her and brought her down here before you arrived, and Jiyoung is attending to her now.”

Still blown-out, the man glances to the closed door behind his vice’s broad back and slender shoulders, likely guarded for the girl’s own privacy. Yifan knows that he has no right to barge in on an unsuspecting woman, especially given that he has absolutely no idea what she may be doing nor what state she may be presenting herself in, whether clothed or bare, but this is Yingtao of all people. He would expect, after the several dates that had transpired between the two of them, that sparing her own privacy and embarrassment at for the sake of her safety and health would be quite warranted, especially by the object of her own attraction. Shaken, he lets out a trembling breath and stands his guard as his fists instinctively curl at his sides. “Let me see her,” he quietly demands, not in a position open to debate.

“I can’t let you do that,” Vice Zhang replies calmly, shaking his head as his voice floats out alongside a calm little sigh.

“I wasn’t ing asking,” Yifan spits, then, pressing a little harder to get his vice to break. Truly, he could very well shove his vice out of the way and yank his door open, but how would that behavior seem, being a figure of high professionalism? How would it make his business and company appear, as someone who had lost their well-trained composure all in the name of revolting against their own cabinet? “I want to see her. I need to make sure she is alright.”

“She is alright, Yifan,” his treasurer steps forward with a composed hand upon his rigid arm, willing his composure into a slack as he begins to coil himself far too tightly. “She’s quite pale and she’s probably dehydrated, but I can promise you that she is alright. We have to wait out here while Jiyoung sees to her and, hopefully, figures out why she had collapsed suddenly and what we can possibly do to help her.”

Angered, Yifan sinks his bottom lip into his mouth as his teeth chew into it, a visual struggle to maintain his composure so as to not explode without intending to. How can he be so sure that they’re even telling him the truth about what happened to Yingtao? He swears at himself internally, for he had vowed to keep a close eye on her all day; yet, as the day progressed, his workload began to stack up and his meetings began to cluster, causing him to lose sight of his side quests throughout the remainder of the evening. Therefore, he had not been able to check on the girl since lunchtime and, clearly, quite a lot had transpired in the mere several hours that he had been occupied. “How did this happen?” He asks between tight lips, his expression rigid. “She wasn’t like this earlier today, she - she was fine today, she even ate breakfast and had a meal replacement beverage. She was fine.” 

Sighing, Jinah crosses her arms over her front. “She collapsed,” she states. “Nobody knows why, but Miss Kim was there and managed to tell me, as best as she could, what happened. Yingtao was, apparently, visibly exhausted and quite out of it, and she began to slur her words and sort of - dissociate from reality, as you could call it. The next thing she knew, Yingtao was unconscious.”

As the words stick to his skin, the depth of Yifan’s heartbeat begins to thicken with worry. What if it had been a relapse episode of what had transpired early that morning in Yifan’s hallway bathroom? Had this all been a plan constructed by the hells of the universe since the very moment she awoke this morning? Had her lack of nutrition and proper care caused her to deteriorate to such an extent that she completely dissociated from her body and fainted in his own company foyer? Had he been the cause of her collapse all along?

“We told Jiyoung before you arrived that we had no outside medical knowledge to give her,” the treasurer continues to softly say, explaining her statements with a gentle flip of her dominant hand. “We had no idea what Yingtao’s prescribed diet was like, nor if there were any things that you had instructed for her to do with her figure that could have caused her to faint.”

“That is why you should let me go in so that I may talk to Jiyoung,” Yifan presses gently, having calmed himself down a solid notch-and-a-half. “I can give her all of the information that she desires, so please.”

“It is not that simple, Yifan,” Vice Zhang stops him as the man takes a strong half-step closer, drastically decreasing the space between them with his long, lean legs that traverse the floor with a much higher progression privilege. “Jiyoung herself requested that we stay out here in the meantime so that she may perform an overall wellness check to see if she could pinpoint anything wrong without additional information. Meaning, if Jiyoung manages to find something that has the potential to speak for itself, then your assistance would not be needed at all, outside of your directions to possibly transport her to a different facility.”

“What is it that you want me to do?” The president’s eyebrows curve downward as the crease between them deepens, his temper beginning to spark back up as his cabinet figuratively begins to turn their back on him and stray away from the path of his own success. “What do you want me to say - huh? If anything at all were to happen to a single one of my employees, it would immediately become my fault because I dictate the rules which they legally have to follow beneath me. Because of me,” he presses a finger straight into the center of his own chest between the lapels of his suit jacket, his blouse beneath it stress-rumpled, “she is malnourished and she is rapidly losing weight because I put her on waist trainers. I put her on a diet, and I forced her into this! She has been unwell for the thick end of several weeks, now, and all I have done is shove my head in the sand and pretend that I did not do anything wrong, but I can’t feign that type of ignorance any longer - that is why, Vice President Zhang, I would expect you to let me in so that I may speak with Jiyoung and help her correct this situation.” 

“I can’t let you do that,” his vice reiterates sternly a single, final time more, his tone rigid in a way that indicates that he will not continue to fruitlessly bicker back and forth without curbing the conversation to a rightful end. “Yifan - she’s only this damaged and hurt because of you. She will be getting help, we will make sure of that, but do you not realize that you have been the catalyst the entire time? If she truly collapsed from having an extended eating disorder and neglecting her body to such an extent that it gave out on her, whose fault would that be? Whose policies outlined the absolute quote-unquote need for physical perfection, no matter the cost?”

“You think I don’t know that, already?” Yifan practically roars, startlingly loud enough to cause Jinah to jolt and let out a shriek beneath her lowest breath. Beads of anger-induced sweat begin to make themselves known upon the man’s temples and hairline as his knuckles whiten above where his nails dig into his palms, the fog of his rage far too thick to feel such a pain which has been dulled to mere pinpricks. “Why do you think I am trying to fix it so diligently? I do not know how to reverse time, and I do not know how to fix my most destructive mistakes, but I am doing the best that I can! I can’t reverse the damage that I have done to her, but ’s sake, I am trying! I may have turned my nose up at every single ing hint and clue that she was going to deteriorate this far, but that is due to that being the thing that I am worst at, and look! I’m trying to ing fix it, okay? I want to help her, and you are going to let me inside right this very instant, Yixing, or so help me - ”

“Or what, Yifan?” His vice replies sternly, his lips pressing tightly into a rigid, pressed line, and his boss’ countenance cracks just the tiniest bit as his advances are shut right down, something that is not often done. “What will you do? Fire me? Fire your own vice president, who had stood right by your side through thick and thin for a decade and a half as you learned the ins and outs of the fashion world and learned how to build your own corporation right from the ground? Will you fire your own vice president, who held you each and every time you cried in your office over not knowing what you were doing, over the grief of losing your almost-wife? Will you fire your own vice president who was here for you through every single thing, who treated you like a brother of his when you needed it the most?”

“Shut your ing mouth!” The president snarls, shooting a hand forward, then, against his own will, and twisting it in the crepe of his vice’s buttoned blouse as he restrains himself from throttling him to death. “How dare you speak of something like that? How dare you belittle me to less than a without self-control over their own emotions? I built this firm up from its ing infant stages, and I gave you the work you so desperately begged me for! You are nothing without me and everything that I have done for you, and yet you have the audacity to speak to me this way? You have the audacity to restrict me from doing what I must and helping the people that I ing care about? How dare you!”

“Yifan, I just - ”

“Holy .”

Quiet permeating the air in thick, staticky molecules, both men fall silent, then, and turn their heads toward the direction of the sound. Yifan had gotten far too out of hand, letting go of his well-trained control to such an extent that he truly became barbaric, then, animalism enrapturing his senses and the rage-blanketed urge to hit suddenly overpowering. He had gone too far, and he knows that, but Yixing had provoked the absolute worst side of him into coming out and playing with the fire that appeared far too enticing for sinful eyes. Sparks of his anger begin to fizzle into bright meteorites that burn in the stratosphere of his consciousness when he realizes, all along, that Jinah had been listening.

Her eyes have glazed over with a glossy sheen beneath the ceiling lights with a hand placed over as though a timid little porcelain doll, petrified between the two strongest opposing forces in the entire firm, one red-hot and malevolent with a strong gluttony for the world to bend and entwine within the crevices of his skilled fingers, and the other much more blue and hazed with lavender tones that presents as a healing force, a mediator, of sorts, and one whom far too deeply understands the quarrels of living and, therefore, is knowledgeable enough to overcome them alone. Not being an immediate partner of the president’s enough to witness his day-to-day emotional fluctuations the way his vice does, Jinah had never truly seen this side of her own boss this close-up, before. Sure, Yifan has had his moments of vehemence where he explodes this way and Jinah has seen those, but those had been over the stake of his own reputation and his own business with clumsy employees and carelessly disrespectful models - but this? 

This, itself, is a garb that Jinah has not seen him wear a single day in over ten years. “You’re in love with her.”

It becomes obvious, then, as pure silence begins to tick on as seconds pass, that something is not right here. A true Yifan move would be to vehemently deny it, to even so much as threaten her own position with this firm if she were to make up another “silly rumor” regarding his love life - that’s right, since Yifan tends to be stingy about romance. Yifan absolutely hated, all these years, being pestered about his dried-out, widowed little flower that he called intimacy after the passing of his wife, something that he had ceased to water and hoe properly and had allowed to weed and dry out and die, the prettiest flower in the garden suddenly  the ugliest patch of crabgrass within sidewalk cracks. 

A true Yifan move would be to shout in her face about how wrong she was, perhaps drag her by her wrist up to his office and scold her there so as to not attract more attention, and verbally teach her a lesson on why and how to keep shut. A true Yifan move would be to do anything that he possibly could, do anything within his power, to shut down prying eyes and curious words to protect himself.

However, all Jinah receives on the awaiting end of her verbal misstep is elongated, pure silence. Yifan’s face, beneath the glow of the ceiling lights, flattens out into a hard expression, then, one that steals her absolute breath away. His eyes are practically bleeding with emotion, wet and bizarrely dismal despite how brightly-lit the firm is, and she can practically see each and every telltale word write itself out among the man’s tortured gaze. For a man who struggles to express the softer parts of himself, the intensity within his eyes speaks not only volumes but entire trilogies. 

The lack of a reaction should be enough to gain a rise in Vice Zhang, should be enough to warrant widened, shock-filled eyes and perhaps the soft parting of plush, curved lips, all to stereotypical of their humanitarian vice president; it should be enough to match Jinah’s own surprise with his own, to once again level out the playing field between both twin legs of the president’s cabinet - but the vice does not react. Rather, the look that he presents Jinah with is calm, flat, and well-informed. “Yixing,” she questions softly to fill in the silence that neither man seems to be able to cut through, “how long have you known about this?”

She does manage to notice, above everything else, the way the vice president’s facade cracks, then, finally caught behind his trained veneer. Although nowhere near the most secretive fellow in the world, he certainly has quite the mentor to learn from. “A while,” he states calmly, as Yifan’s fingers that had dug wrinkled divots into the woven swath of Yixing’s collar finally slacken, releasing him. “Yifan preferred to keep this quiet, and… just between the two of us.”

Yifan, having run out of words to say and having found himself lost and without a clear direction to turn in, folds his arms protectively over his chest to shelter his aura from his partners and to keep himself mentally steadied. He could have expected Jinah to revert to upset and sadness over not having been let in on the secret between them, or, even, could expect her to snap at them and accuse them of ist microaggressions by hiding information from a woman, as though she were too loosely-lipped, but Jinah - his faithful, trusty treasurer, a friend having stood calmly and quietly by his side for a decade and a half - simply stares at him as though he were the most fragile, premature newborn to have been birthed. 

“Yifan,” she coos quietly, her tone taking on a motherly edge, and Yifan’s heart threatens to instinctively soften around such a tone, “you’re… do you really love her? I am not dreaming and imagining this, right?”

The worry that he might outright deny it once again remains, static in the back of her mind as her fingers link around each other nervously, as Yifan simply stares at her with a muddled, neutral gaze, but Jinah could absolutely break down and cry when the president gifts her with a brief, slow little nod. 

With a pathetic little bleat, Jinah brushes past the vice with strong strides and pulls Yifan into an embrace, curtaining her arms over his upper back amid their matching heights - Jinah being a woman of striking height, perfect for intimidation - and sobs weakly into his neck. Beside them, the vice lets out a small, supportive little tisk as Yifan’s professional composure crumbles once more, softened around the people he would entrust his very life with, and lays a gentle palm in the middle of his treasurer’s back. “I can’t believe it,” Jinah mumbles into the president’s clothed shoulder, her smile crooked and her heartbeat irregular. “We’ve waited so long for you to find new happiness, I can’t believe this.”

She pulls slightly back, a teary smile written across her lips as Yifan’s thumb massages into her skin calmly, his eyes averting amid his shyness. She had watched Yifan, for ten entire years, claw at the strands of elongated reality in hopes of finding a lifetime partner as he was approaching the years of his mid-thirties, a typical bracket of time for partnership and childbearing. She had never heard the president talk about wanting kids, although she would not exactly put it past him to perhaps have one or two at the most; still, to openly admit to having a relationship with another woman is an absolutely massive foot in the door of moving past old pain. This, with flushed, color-bloomed cheeks and a veneer of pure vulnerability that he most often only shows women with whom he is close and Yixing, is the man that she would have died to work for twelve years ago. This is Yifan behind his walls built up with anguish and widowed agony, the Yifan who unabashedly shows how weak-kneed he befalls around his interests.

This Yifan, this kind-hearted man with flushed cheeks and a wholly deconstructed countenance outside their infirmary door, is the Yifan that Jinah had been starved to see in the flesh one day more. “Please keep it quiet,” the president mutters to her, then, as his eyes struggle to maintain contact with hers, though she can tell that it is extremely trying for a shy individual. “I would have - I was going to… when I was comfortable enough, I would…” 

Smiling at how at a loss for words Yifan is for what feels like the very first time, Jinah gets it. “When have I ever turned my back on you, President Wu?” She questions softly with a tender smile, eyes still a little bit wet but heart absolutely filled to the brim with adoration. “We’ve waited long enough for you to reach this kind of an impasse, and you are free to keep it as quiet as long as you would like - forever, even, if that’s what you would prefer. Besides - celibacy is not a good look on you.”

“This is why we could not let you inside, Yifan,” his vice states beside them, and Yifan’s softened gaze meets his own from the side. “When you are keeping things from people, you get very angry and you explode, and we cannot have you causing a scene when one of your top models - your own girlfriend - is very sick. You entrusted us to traverse the rights and the wrongs of what goes on in this firm, and that is exactly what we were trained to do and what we will continue to do, no matter how uncomfortable it may get.”

That’s right - Yifan had picked his cabinet members with extreme selectivity, searching for people that would be able to stomach his tyrannic behavior for years on end without finding it too overbearing. He had made sure to interview each and every person with the rudest of remarks, with the driest of fronts and the meanest of compliments. Only those who were fit to see through his protective boundary and were able to see through the cracks in his roughened speech were eligible to call themselves KW Staff, people who would protect this firm and Yifan’s own dignity right down to the very earth that they were built upon. 

He had never really taken the time before, among his extended selfishness being far too occupied with his business, to truly appreciate the people who stand beside him through thick and thin, and within that, he finds himself remembering their final interviews like it was just yesterday. 

Yixing lived alone in the east-end in a one-bedroom flat, a studio as most people could call it, one which was littered with stains and the occasional hole in the wall as he had not a single spare penny to his name to put toward renovations and repairs. He was much shyer back then, more strung-out and shaky, and jittered with each and every slap of papers upon the president’s desk, each and every raised inflection of the president’s voice. He was a timid little thing, grappling at the tendrils of life and penny-pinching to make ends simply meet. When Yifan had shouted at him for the very first time after hiring him as an intern, over simply being late with the man’s daily coffee, Yixing had dropped the cup by accident amid his sudden trembling and had watched, dreadfully, as the dark, woody stain began to seep into the president’s creamy carpeting and make itself a nice little permanent home. With some hard verbal reprimanding and a solid year-and-a-half of diligent training later, Yixing was well-composed enough and trustworthy enough to be considered a candidate for the president’s immediate secretary - his own vice.

Jinah was a fashion student - graduated from a prestigious university, was about to undergo training to become a professional seamstress in hopes of entering the fashion industry, and had been sidelined and swindled into taking business courses by her little nit of a father. She had agreed, although completely disinterested, and had received her associate’s degree in accounting several years later, minoring in microeconomics. She did not have a home to her name, as she had still lived with her parents throughout university so she would have somewhere to survive while financially dry. Although inexperienced and certainly spiritually exhausted from years of extra studying, Jinah was bright and bubbly and overly-confident in everything she did, scoring herself a practically instantaneous position within the firm. She had been a Recreation model for the span of six months, a supernova burning bright among hundreds of little stars, and Yifan had pulled her out soon thereafter and had reevaluated her based on her experience. The next week, to help further alleviate the president’s hefty workload, far too steep for one single person to maintain, she was promoted to treasurer.

“This is our job,” Jinah tells him flatly, her sharpened eyes brighter than they were before. “We are employed to protect you and your employees from everything that may hurt you - including your own self.”

Quietly, Yifan crosses that impasse and stares at his own dedicated cabinet, two people who had relied on him when they needed it the most and two people he had absolutely walked all over for twelve years. He had treated them like dirt, had abused their powers when it suited him best without even so much as properly thanking them for their efforts, and certainly was not deserving of such diligent secrecy and respect so as to be allowed to quietly fall in love with someone. 

“I’m sorry.”

Two sets of eyes bore holes into his skull in muted shock, words that neither of them would have ever expected the president to utter amid his mile-high pride. 

“I take advantage of you two far too thoroughly,” Yifan sighs as his fists clench once more amid his stress, as his jaw tenses when he struggles to sort out the feelings flooding his body in rushed, curling waves, crashing upon the shore like the silky sea foam. “I take advantage of everybody, and look what it has caused - I’m… I hurt one of my best employees by just ignoring her, by just being too busy. That had been why I sought out cabinet members like the two of you, to help me cut my workload in half so that I was not so overstressed, but still, I… I find myself overwhelmed. The two of you came to me when you needed me the most, including when you had nothing and had not a tendril of reputation to your name, and I continue to treat you horribly despite that. I know that… that is the thing that I am the worst at.”

“Yifan,” Jinah coos in a whispered tone, and the president’s eyes gently meet hers. “Could it be, perhaps, that you don’t just have too much on your plate at any given time, but that your mind is too busy with one specific thing to focus on anything else?”

Frowning, Yifan’s composure begins to reconstruct itself back up. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you said yourself that the whole reason you hired cabinet members was to slice up your workload for you and thin it out,” she tells him. “Yifan, that was over ten years ago. If you really were still up to your neck in piled work, don’t you think you would have hired more than two assistants? Could it be that you’re not actually too busy but, rather, you’re too preoccupied with thinking about Yingtao’s welfare that you get distracted?” 

Yifan bites into his lips, for he knows that his treasurer is right. He has become so obsessed with worrying over Yingtao that he had not made any actual time to physically worry. He had been so trapped within his own thoughts that before he knew it, mere seconds had turned into hours and then, he had already wasted a large amount of precious time that he could have been using to make sure that Yingtao was, indeed, healthy and surviving. “She needed me,” he bites out, more to himself than anyone else, “and I neglected her.”

“People make mistakes,” his vice confirms with a calming sigh, “but it is how you overcome your mistakes that marks you as a better person. If you have decided that you are calm enough now, I can quietly ask Jiyoung if she is ready to see you, but only if you are not going to erupt again. The last thing Yingtao needs on her plate is more added stress, especially from you.”

Flushing, Yifan cannot bring himself to deny the accusation, for it is true - he is far too expressive with his anger when it overwhelms him. “I am calm,” he states gently. “I just want to see her.”

Quietly, his vice nods his head, uncrossing his legs and heaving his weight from the doorframe as he stands straight once more. “Alright,” he says with a hand on the handle of the door beside himself. “No going back on your word, President Wu.”

Watching his vice depart as the door opens and shuts with dual clicks in the soft atmosphere of the hallway simply cements Yifan’s promise into his own mind, that he needs to behave and learn how to quell the raging beast within him in times of trial. He is bringing the firm and the people around him within it nothing but grief, and he knows that he needs to learn to stop - but how? With due time, he is sure that he could learn how to mellow out his temper if his mother’s surgery goes off without a hitch and she improves and if Yingtao continues tolerating his existence at her immediate side - isn’t that what he always wanted? 

For Yingtao, he will learn to be better and will learn to behave.

Treatment. He sighs. The hospital is always rapidly efficient with seeing their patients and attending to them, but Zitao would certainly have preferred to, at least, be aware of the entire transportation portion of his visit. Then again, what is he necessarily here for treatment for? His anxiety medications are still in effect and are not due for a refill yet, his mother’s condition was as stable as could be despite being unconscious, his ankle fracture had not flared back up at all, which was a relatively remarkable fact to behold, considering it was much weaker than it had been before the fracture - so, what then?

“Could I ask your name?” The woman asks him softly, pulling him effectively out of his reverie as he takes in the creases of age that decorate the crevices of her face, latticing her skin with experience. “When you were brought to us, your name was not discussed and we will need it to check you into the system.”

He manages to swallow around a cottony throat, not willing to sit up from his laid-out position on the medical cot, as he meets her eye and instinctively tilts his head toward her. Her speech was a dignified move that goes right over the model’s head, something meant to softly interrogate without disturbing, and, given the information she now held within her recent subconscious, a questioning felt quite necessary. “Huang Zitao,” he states. “This is… Journey Medical, right? My mother - is in the left wing, at the front of the building. I work here part-time as a dishwasher and a member of the janitorial staff to help pay for her chemotherapy bills.”

The woman nods her head, then, and presents him with a bitter little smile, as though the information perhaps burns her skin as it sticks to it amid the air. “I know of her,” she states calmly, her head falling back just a little bit as her hair curtains down her front, her elevated ankle giving an airy little bounce. “Does she not have any other children to help take care of her, or perhaps a life partner to share, with her, their salary?”

Softly, Zitao shakes his head as he over his bottom lip, his throat suddenly as parched as the summer sand. “No,” he tells her. “I am her only child, and - since I am the son, I was expected to always work my hardest for her. It’s alright - I don’t really mind anymore.”

The woman does not respond to that for the heavy end of a while, something that is likely only several seconds but feels like minutes before she soaks everything up with a slowed nod of her head. She had performed a routine check-up when the model had been brought to her in such an unresponsive state, one that had involved checking the model’s vital signs as well as stripping her of her outlying layers of clothing to investigate the state of her body’s composure. She, by protocol, had to rule out each and every single possibility for such a sudden collapse by investigating as much as she possibly could within the boundaries of her medical knowledge.

“Thank you for cooperating with me,” she tells him as her limbs uncross steadily and she stands smoothly from her chair. “I have to take care of something for just a moment, but I will return soon enough, alright? Please continue to rest, and if you find yourself thirsty, I have placed some bottled water beside you on the side table, and when I return, we will discuss your condition and where to go forth with it.”

Not having much else to say, Zitao gives her a small hum of approval as he stares up at her. He wonders where the regular doctor might be - if perhaps it would be Doctor Kim taking care of him and simply leaving one of his monitors in Zitao’s care to keep an eye on him. It wouldn’t be entirely unlike Doctor Kim, someone who always puts the welfare of his patients far above his own. Still, Zitao has an odd feeling that this is not a Doctor Kim case, or else Zitao would