Chaeyoung hates it.

The unsung truth that she can’t always protect Jennie. A metallic taste fills every moment she sees her love laying on an ambulance stretcher, and, no matter where it is, she can smell the blood. Not only the scent lingers, but the scenes as well.

Matted police uniform, gentle streams of red, two bodies (one she prays to see come home, one she sees in the morgue).

It’s a lie to say Chaeyoung never sees blood, and certainly not in the usual amount the average person comes across. Her girlfriend’s career and hers intertwine more than they hope, more than she wants. Long hours as a practicing physician leads to many unspeakables: pain, heartache, death. It takes many prayers and wishes upon falling stars for the cop to come home in one piece. In their life, comes without saying between the two of them that even if one is broken, the other can mend. In most situations, Chaeyoung admits bitterly, it’s the older of the two that gets into all kinds of trouble.

Sometimes, Chaeyoung muses, life could be safer with something slower pace. Perhaps she should have become a veterinarian in her small hometown like she initially dreamt. To think that she only abandoned the thought because her soulmate dutifully declared, “humans will need us more than ever, Chaeyoung.” In her mind, she can see the way Jennie grinned, staring dramatically while clutching her hand in both of her soft ones. Before the scars, before the blood.

(“I’ll be needing you more than ever,” is soon whispered quietly, when both of them lay sprawled on a rickety mattress, the remnants of a silent promise hanging in the air.)

That was ten years ago. Where seeing Jennie sprawled on an operating table did not apply to the norm, and where Chaeyoung performing incisions to a bullet wound seemed like an alternate reality.

As her practiced hands maintain a steady rhythm of stitching, the lead shot carefully removed before, Chaeyoung rejoices in the relaxed breathing of her other half with her own breathes becoming unconsciously in sync. With a sigh of finality, Jennie is wheeled out by a team of nurses into ward 2-11, a room jokingly referring to as the birthday room.

(In which every nurse avoids entering said room after witnessing a fairly traumatizing form of appreciation that Jennie enjoys gifting the young doctor annually.

It’s safe to say that the hosp