Warning(s): some blood, cursing
Length: 6.3k words

The paramedics arrived within five minutes of your emergency call, and even though you didn’t want to be there, you were unfortunately, inescapably present. You saw Seulgi sobbing so profusely that she was hiccupping and choking on her own tears. You saw Baekhyun’s bluing fingers, his chapped lips, his unmoving chest. You saw an EMT bring out a ing gurney.

You didn’t want to see it, but you saw it anyways, and if you didn’t see it then you heard it.

Something about alcohol poisoning. Something about choking on his own vomit. Something about statistics.

When the paramedics wheeled Baekhyun out, Seulgi immediately ran after them, but you stayed because you felt like fainting.

Baekhyun had been lying on top of a book the entire time he was sprawled out on his bedroom floor. In a room filled with books it should have been no surprise. But out of all the books he had, it had to be this particular one.

The Beautiful and Damned, the cover read. By F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Damned, indeed. You wanted to laugh at whatever joke the universe seemed to play, but Baekhyun didn’t deserve that—not in this moment, not even after everything he had done. Because as much of a heartache he was, he had so much to live for, so much to lose.

- - - - -

“He had a blood alcohol content of 0.32%, and—”

“Is that bad?” Seulgi blurted out before the doctor could respond.

The doctor—Dr. Yen—only raised a brow at the outburst. She tucked a loose lock of gray hair behind her ear and looked down at her clipboard with indifference. “It’s a fatal percentage,” she said factually. “If he weighed less or hadn’t built up a tolerance to alcohol, it might have killed him. Fortunately,” Dr. Yen paused to look at you and Seulgi, “the two of you found him. So far his vitals are stable.” Seulgi let out an audible sigh that signaled that she had been holding her breath. “However,” Dr. Yen added, “his stomach had to be pumped, and he hasn’t awoken yet. I suspect it’ll be a while until then.”

“But he is fine, right?” Seulgi interjected again. “He’s gonna be okay?”

Dr. Yen nodded. “He will be, but I strongly advise you to talk to him about his habits.” Her eyes glossed over her clipboard, and she pursed her lips for a moment. “You mentioned that he’s been drinking very heavily for at least a year now, right?”

Seulgi wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. “Y-Yeah, that’s right.”

“Well, stories like those don’t usually end well,” Dr. Yen said. “Usually what happens with people who’ve built up a strong tolerance for alcohol is that they keep drinking more and more—to the point where they can’t stop.” Dr. Yen’s voice didn’t waver for a moment as she said this, and you were beginning to regret your own words when you told her to tell you the news as hard as it could be. In this moment, you wanted her to sugarcoat the terribleness. “What happened to Baekhyun,” she stressed, “is that he kept drinking more and more until he passed out is because he most likely didn’t feel as drunk or influenced as he did prior to when he started drinking.”

“So you’re saying he didn’t know he was…” You swallowed your words. “He didn’t know he was poisoning himself?”

“Most people would realize that they can’t take another shot once they start to feel ill,” Dr. Yen explained to you and Seulgi. “Your friend didn’t stop drinking until he fainted which tells me he’s built up an unhealthy tolerance to alcohol.” Dr. Yen looked at you and Seulgi with that knowing look. “I can only offer advice here, and it’s definitely up to you and to him to follow through with it, but I suggest that he seeks out some sort of help so that this incident doesn’t happen again.”

“You mean like take him to rehab?” Seulgi inquired. “Send him away to some sort of facility?”

“That’s one possibility,” Dr. Yen replied, “but there are other options. I’ve seen people take that route, but I’ve also seen some go to AA meetings which are less forceful. Others have also turned to their church or other place of religious comfort.” Dr. Yen shrugged as if Baekhyun would want to go to any of those options. “It depends on the person, but I highly suggest that you two talk to him first otherwise any chance of recovery will fail.”

Seulgi had gone silent, and there was an awkward silence between the three of you, so you spoke up.

“Thank you, doctor,” you said. “Do you know when he’ll wake up?”

“Probably this morning,” Dr. Yen replied as she looked at the clock behind her. It was 1AM now. “He’s getting fluids, but he still needs to get a lot of alcohol out of his system.”

You thanked Dr. Yen again, and she walked away and left you and Seulgi outside of Baekhyun’s room. The door was open and so were the blinds which gave you a clear view of the resting boy dressed in a hospital gown with tubes attached to his arm. When they had transferred him to that room, you saw a nurse wipe the back of his hand with disinfectant before connecting him to an IV drip—something about him being dehydrated.

It was jarring to see Baekhyun in a position like that. He had been so invincible to you when you first met him that you still couldn’t believe that he was in this position. He was the frat boy of frat boys, the trouble at parties, Big B! This wasn’t supposed to happen to him. Yet here he was.

“What are we gonna do?”

You looked over at Seulgi who had now found her words. “I don’t know,” you mumbled. “I guess we can try to convince him to get help.” Your eyes found Baekhyun’s face through the open doorway. “He nearly died. He has to take this as a wakeup call.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“He needs to.” You shook your head in disapproval and in pain. Though you hadn’t known Baekhyun for too long, you didn’t want to see him die at such a young age. No one as young and promising as him deserved death so quickly. Thinking about him in that sense saddened you, so you opened your mouth to ramble. “And he’s your best friend, Seul. You have to help him before he kills himself or does something this stupid again.”

“I-I don’t know…” Seulgi hung her head low and refused to look at you. She slumped a shoulder against the wall and took a sigh before her teary gaze founds yours once more. “I feel like this is my fault.”

“Huh?”

“I told him I wanted him to die,” Seulgi mumbled. She bit her lip multiple times, and you realized that she was on the verge of crying for what felt like the hundredth time that night. “What if he knew exactly what he was doing when he—”

“Seulgi!” you hissed. “Shut the up! Why would you say that?” You wanted to shake Seulgi by the shoulders and tell her to stop thinking such terrible thoughts, but you had no energy left in being angry. For now, you had to come up with a plan to save yourself, Baekhyun, and Seulgi. “He wouldn’t do that. He’s into hurting other people, not himself.”

“Exactly. What if he did this to hurt me? To prove—”

“Seulgi, shut up before I smack you,” you snapped harshly. Thankfully, Seulgi closed , but she was back to hanging her head low in what you saw as either guilt or shame. “This isn’t our fault, and it’s definitely not yours. He brought this upon himself.” You paused and looked at Baekhyun’s face through the doorway again. “And we have to help him get out of it.”

“Do you think he’ll even listen?” Seulgi mumbled in question. “He’s never listened to me.”

“We’ll force him to,” you promised despite your own worries. “And if he doesn’t, then he can sign himself out of the hospital.”

- - - - -

You returned to the hospital at around 9AM. Despite having gone home at 2AM, you couldn’t sleep because the thought of Baekhyun plagued you and rendered your mind with so much worry that even Hani told you to get a grip. The truth was, you wanted to hate him and wanted to see him suffer, but you didn’t want to see him die. Part of that was Seulgi; you didn’t want to see her in agony if her best friend went down this destructive road that would eventually culminate in his own death.

So it was 9AM, and you were dressed simply in sweatpants and a hoodie when you practically ran down the hospital wing where Baekhyun was resting. Seulgi was already there, of course, since her apartment was closer to the hospital. Like you, she was dressed plainly, and she sported the same eyebags you had.

“Has he woken up yet?” you asked Seulgi as you took a seat opposite of her. She sat on Baekhyun’s left bedside while you sat on his right. From your angle, sunlight filtered through the windows in such a way that reminded you of the first time he allowed you inside of his room. You remembered that day fondly, and it was heartbreaking to think of it compared to where he was now.

“Not yet,” Seulgi replied. “But I talked to the doctors, and they said he might wake up soon.” Her eyes drifted from Baekhyun’s still face to yours. “You good?”

“I’ll be fine,” you said, shrugging a shoulder. “I couldn’t sleep much. I just feel bad.”

“Same. I thought my life could only get better if he was out of the picture, but…” Seulgi took a shaky breath. “But not like this. Not like this.”

The two of you were quiet for a while as you looked at Baekhyun’s face again. Usually he sported a familiar smirk or was too busy running his mouth since being quiet was never really his aesthetic. In fact, the only time you ever witnessed him quiet was when you were him off, and even in a scenario like that, he was quite vocal.

“What’s the best memory you have of Baekhyun?” you asked Seulgi, breaking the silence.

Seulgi arched a brow. “Best memory?”

“Yeah. What’s one memory you have of him that makes you happy when you think of it?”

“Probably when I came out to him,” Seulgi answered almost immediately. She laughed a little too which told you enough. “I think I was still in high school, and he was about to leave for his military service when I told him I was gay.” Seulgi was speaking to you, but her eyes were on Baekhyun, undoubtedly reminiscing. “I told my other friend, but you know how it is in Korea. They’re traditionalists, so I kinda got a load of . And I didn’t want to tell Baekhyun because he was about to leave, and I didn’t think he should leave upset…” Seulgi paused and took a deep breath. “But I told him.” She looked back into your eyes. “You know how he reacted?”

“I’m guessing he reacted well otherwise you probably wouldn’t still be friends.”

Seulgi grinned. “I thought he would tell me that it was a phase. Or that I’d get over it. But he didn’t.” She pressed her lips into a thin line—or tried. A smile crept up onto Seulgi’s lips, and they quickly turned into a light laugh. “He said, ‘well now we can fawn over girls together.’ He said that.” Though she had been laughing, Seulgi’s face crumpled up, and it wasn’t hard to tell that she was on the verge of more tears. “I never felt so accepted when he said that, and I always knew he was a good person, but that made me realize just how good.”

The room went silent and only Baekhyun’s breathing and your wordless awe filled the space.

“Do you think he’s still in there?” Seulgi whispered after a minute.

“Yeah, I do.” You looked over Baekhyun’s still face with a smile. “He just has to fight his way out of the bull that he’s buried himself in.” Seulgi scoffed at your choice of words, and you chuckled at them too. “Seul, when did you realize that he was changing?”

“Changing? Into what? Into an ?”

You laughed and covered your mouth to make sure you didn’t wake Baekhyun up with a cackle. “Yeah. When’d you realize it?”

Seulgi paused, and her eyes scanned Baekhyun’s face before travelling down to his arm. “When he stood me up to go to a party,” she mumbled. “I waited all night at the library because he was supposed to help me with English 1 homework, but he never came.”

Ouch, you thought to yourself. Though Baekhyun had never stood you up, you were familiar with the soft hurt of getting forgotten—or ignored. On purpose. It never got any easier when people did things without explanation. In fact, it only ever got worse. Getting stood up was like getting ghosted; it made you feel inadequate, like you weren’t even good enough to receive an inch of closure.

“What about you?” Seulgi asked, breaking the silence. “Why don’t I ask you stuff about Baek?”

“What do you wanna know?”

“How’d you end up with this ?” Seulgi asked bluntly. “He’s not the best looking one in his frat, let’s be real.” Seulgi arched a brow, and you grinned at the subjective nature of her assertion. “He’s one of the shorter guys in my opinion,” she continued, “and he’s far from being one of the nicer ones. So why him? Did you lose a bet?”

“No,” you replied with a chuckle, “there was no lost bet. I just really liked how confident and bold he was. I mean…” You motioned towards Baekhyun’s hair. Although the red streaks in his raven-colored hair weren’t as prominent as they were a few months ago, they were still there. “I don’t know a single guy who could pull that off. And he has a ing mullet,” you gushed. “I figured that a guy who could rock a look like that was a guy with a personality as… As flamboyant,” you finished. “He just has that effect, you know?”

Seulgi, who had been looking at you the entire time you were talking, smiled like she already knew. “Yeah,” she said. “I know exactly what you mean. He knows how to pull you in, right?” You nodded profusely, and Seulgi laughed, nodding as well. “When he starts quoting Hemingway…” Seulgi threw a hand up in the air. “I swear to God, I actually listen. Like out of all the bull he says, I listen to him when he quotes stuff.”

“Really?” you exclaimed. “Me too! I mean, I never really thought I’d like it if a guy ever started quoting stuff to me but with Baekhyun…” You shook your head, still in disbelief that you allowed a man to get away with it. “I listen,” you confessed, “and I actually like it too.”

“He could sell Bibles to an atheist,” Seulgi remarked. “Or at least get them to listen to his entire sales pitch.”

“What’s he doing studying English and literature then?”

Seulgi shrugged. “Passion, I g