Her name is Kang Minseo, and she is nearly eight years old. She's sitting on a chair in front of Baekhyun in his office, small legs clad in hospital pyjamas swinging, and her mother is sitting next to her. Minseo has the kind of strong, angular facial bone structure that looks odd on a child, but portents her eventual development into a beautiful woman; the transformation from an ugly duckling into a swan.

Bone structure aside, right now Minseo is anything but beautiful. Her scalp from her right ear up to the crown of her head is mottled with the shiny, melted plastic-looking scarring of a healed burn. The skin is so damaged that hair cannot grow on the right side of her head at all. For the last three years, Minseo has worn a headscarf or beanie to cover the damage, but she can't wear those any more. They won't fit over the huge, balloon-like deformity that swells up from the left side of her scalp, the side that isn’t scarred. It makes her look like she has a second head bulging out the side of her real one.

Baekhyun regards the deformity with satisfaction. It’s exactly how he wanted it.

Minseo has been Baekhyun’s patient since she was five years old. He’d treated the initial burns she’d suffered when she’d been hit by a misfired backyard firework and put in place a long-term plan to give her a skin graft on the damaged part of her scalp when she was strong enough to take the procedure. Now, finally, the time has come. Eight weeks ago, he performed a small surgery on the good side of her scalp to fit her with a tissue expander - a silicone balloon inserted under the skin that he’s been injecting saline solution into every two weeks. Now he can use the new skin that has grown over the tissue expander for a skin graft. The deformity the tissue expander causes is grotesque, but temporary. When she’s healed from today’s surgery, Minseo will be able to grow hair on both sides of her head.

“Do you understand what’s going to happen today?” he asks Minseo. She nods, her bright eyes eager. She’s an extremely smart kid. Baekhyun’s been consistently surprised over the years by the detail in which he can explain things to her.

“You’re going to do a GATE flap reconstruction, that stands for Gulraiz Advanced Transportation Expanded flap,” she recites. “You’re going to take out the tissue expander and use the extra skin I grew over it to replace my scar tissue.”

Baekhyun smiles at her. “That’s right. Do you have any more questions?” He glances at her mother as well as he asks this, but neither of them do. It’s all been explained to them before, and they’ve had plenty of time to research and ask him questions at previous appointments.

“I’m not scared,” Minseo tells him. “Mom is more scared than I am, right mom?” She grins up at her mother, who gives a soft laugh of acknowledgement.

“She’s excited,” she tells Baekhyun. “She’s been looking forward to it ever since you put the expander in. I never knew a child to be excited about surgery.”

“Because Dr. Byun is going to make it so I’m not ugly anymore,” Minseo says. “I won’t get called egg-head or alien. I’ll have real hair like everyone else.” She beams at Baekhyun. “I’m going to be normal.”

Baekhyun’s heart goes out to her. She’s been through so much, this brave little girl. He sends her through to get prepped for surgery by the nurses. The next time he sees her will be in the OR.

He turns back to his computer and updates her journal. When that task is done, he leans his elbows on the desk, closes his eyes and rests his forehead on his clasped hands. A deep sigh escapes him, but he barely notices it. Now that Minseo and her mom are gone, the bleakness within him makes itself known again. His interactions with patients and colleagues feel like he’s covering a massive sinkhole with a thin layer of asphalt. It looks like a normal road, but as soon as a car drives over it, it will fall through the surface and plunge into the abyss.

Weariness presses over him like a lead weight, but he can’t escape into sleep. He has Minseo’s reconstruction to do, and he needs to be alert for that. She deserves his best work. This is her life he’s setting her up for, and her future matters. He takes in a deep breath and forces it out slowly, trying to push away the aching hollow within his chest. He opens his eyes and looks at the clock. It’s nearly time to scrub in.

He stands up. A wave of dizziness rushes over him and he braces himself on his desk and hangs his head, breathing deeply until it passes. It tells him that he needs to eat something, and fairly soon. He walks out of his office and towards the shared plastics workroom. Lately the residents have taken to leaving snacks out on the table and announcing that the food is free for anyone whenever Baekhyun walks in. It’s not exactly what Baekhyun would call subtle. He's aware they’re worried about him, but he wishes they wouldn’t. He’s not stupid. He knows he needs to eat so his body can function, but he’s never hungry anymore, and forcing food down his throat involves too much effort. He can tell he's losing too much weight, but he really doesn’t have the energy to care.

But he can’t be getting dizzy spells during Minseo’s surgery, so he grabs a muesli bar from the table and forces himself to eat half of it before the thick mush it turns into in his mouth becomes nauseating and impossible to swallow. He drops the other half in the bin and goes to scrub in.

Scrubbing in is never exactly fun, but lately it has become sheer torture for Baekhyun. He kicks the foot valve below the trough sink, wets his hands and arms up to the elbow and lathers them with scrubbing solution. The chemical solution sears into the eczema that covers his inner arms from elbow to wrist, and he hisses between his teeth as his firm circular motions with the scrubbing pad force it deeper into the damaged skin. It’s about the worst thing he could do for eczema, but he has no choice. Everything has to be sterile for surgery, skin conditions or no skin conditions. He watches the wall clock as he scrubs methodically, forcing himself to endure it for the full two minutes. When they’re finally up, he kicks the foot valve again and washes the scrubbing solution off, then pats his arms dry with a sterile towel. A glance at his arms shows them to be cracked and blotched, flaming an angry red.

He walks over to Iseul, the scrub nurse today, who is holding a surgical gown ready for him. She grimaces sympathetically when she sees the state of his arms.

“It’s getting worse,” she tells him as she tugs the gown over his shoulders and goes around his back to tie it. “Do you think you should see a dermatologist?”

Baekhyun thinks of Sehun and what he’d say if he saw how bad his arms have gotten since the last time he checked them. Sehun knows it’s stress-related.

He shakes his head. “No point. Even if I use a topical, scrubbing in will counteract it.”

Iseul is back around his front again, holding out the green indicator gloves. He pushes his hands into them, then into the white gloves that go over the top.

“And you don’t know what causes it?”

He shrugs. “It comes and goes. Always has done. It’ll go away again eventually.”

Jin walks in then, and Iseul leaves him to prepare a gown and gloves for the 2nd year resident. Baekhyun walks down the hall towards the operating room, double-gloved hands held in front of him at chest height, palms inward. He enters the OR and nods at the staff already present; a circulating nurse, the anaesthesiologist, and the theatre nurses who have prepared Minseo for surgery. They’ve covered her in green surgical drapes, shaved her head and sterilized her scalp. Jin walks in after him. When everyone is ready, Baekhyun steps up to the table and begins the procedure.

He goes through the steps mechanically, without much thought. He doesn’t have to say much in surgery, only the names of whichever retractor or scalpel he needs, and apart from those words he works in silence. He neatly cuts away the damaged tissue, then makes the sequence of incisions that will enable him to rotate the new skin around and place it into the gap. Weariness drags at him as he works. This kind of work is Baekhyun’s specialty, he excels at things that involve pinpoint precision, but today, everything feels hard. Not technically hard, just...hard. It’s hard to make his hands move, hard to focus on what he’s doing. Several times he finds himself slowing to a complete stop, just staring blankly down at the exposed scalp in front of him. It takes an incredible effort just to get himself to perform the next action.

“Stop!”

The word is barked out sharply, jolting Baekhyun from somewhere dark and distant. He freezes and looks at Jin. The older resident is staring at him from across the surgical table, eyes shocked above his surgical mask.

“What's wrong?” Baekhyun glances down at Minseo in sudden concern. He wasn’t paying as much attention as he could have been, but he doesn’t see anything wrong with what he’s doing, and the anaesthesiologist hasn’t said anything about dropping O2 sats or other warning signs. All the same, he realises that Jin isn’t the only one looking at him. The theatre nurse at his side is staring up at him too.

“You just rubbed your eyes,” Jin says.

Baekhyun stares at him. “What?”

“He’s right,” the theatre nurse backs him up. “I saw you too.”

Baekhyun is silent. His knee-jerk reaction is to disbelieve them. He does not remember rubbing his eyes. Surely he wouldn’t do that. Not in surgery.

But they wouldn't lie to him.

He takes a step back from the table. If he touched his eyes, or any other part of his face or head, even his mask or cap, then he’s broken the sterile field. He can’t work on Minseo now. He turns and leaves the OR without a word. They’ll know where he’s going. They’ll have to wait while he scrubs out and then goes through the entire process of scrubbing in again.

Baekhyun feels strange as he scrubs out. Iseul is silent as she prepares another gown and glove set for him. She’s probably not sure what to say. Touching the face while working in a sterile field is a mistake so basic that it’s rare for even medical students on their first time in an OR to make it. If anyone working under Baekhyun had done such a thing, he’d have yelled at them and, unless he’d really needed their presence, he’d have thrown them out of his OR and not let them back in. If Jin hadn’t stopped him, he’d have potentially introduced bacteria to Minseo’s wound and put her at risk of infection. But the thing that’s really alarming Baekhyun is that he has no recollection of touching his face. He was so out of it that he didn’t even realise what he was doing.

For the first time, Baekhyun wonders if there might actually be something wrong with him. Something more wrong than the depression anyone would feel over a bad breakup. As the scrubbing solution sears into his eczema for the second time, he pieces things together in his head. He thinks about his constant weariness, his inability to eat normally, how much he wants to sleep and do nothing else at all. He thinks about how much he hates it when his friends try to talk to him and wishes they’d all just leave him alone, how his stress eczema has flared up so badly he can’t even scrub in without hissing in pain. He thinks about how his entire personality seems to have done a 180 degree spin, and how it’s impossible for people not to notice. He thinks about how hard it is to make himself perform a simple procedure he could do in his sleep, and how he was so out of it he rubbed his eyes during surgery without even being aware of it.

It's not right. Even Baekhyun can see that it's not right.

He lets Iseul gown him again and goes back into the OR. Everyone is silent as he steps back up to Minseo and resumes the procedure. There’s really nothing to say. It’s not like he’s a junior doctor who can be reprimanded for such a mistake. He’s the one meant to be doing the reprimanding. He should be mortified, but all he feels is numb.

He finishes the procedure. It’s all gone perfectly, apart from his lapse halfway through. Kang Minseo will have a full head of hair for her eighth birthday. “Good work,” he tells his team, but the words have no real feeling in them.

He scrubs out. Jin is beside him.

“Baekhyun..." the older resident starts. Baekhyun flinches. He turns slightly away from Jin, flinging up mental walls. He can't let Jin ask. He can’t explain. He can’t handle the other man’s concern. It’s all just too much.

He cuts in before Jin can continue. “I’m going to talk to her mom, then take a break,” he says abruptly. Jin can’t talk to him if Baekhyun refuses to let him. He drops his scrubs in the trash and walks out without another thought. As he goes down the corridor, he trails his fingertips lightly along the wall without really processing the fact that he's doing it. The tactile sensation is weirdly comforting. It’s been a long time since anyone touched him.

He reassures Minseo’s mom that the procedure went perfectly. He smiles at her. He knows how to smile. Stretch his lips like this. Crinkle his eyes like this. It feels appalling, but it seems to be convincing enough, at least to her.

He’s still in his surgical scrubs when he finds himself on the ground floor without much conscious recollection of getting himself there. The main entrance is ahead of him. It’s snowing outside.

Baekhyun walks out of the doors and into the snow. It’s dirty and ice-hard where it has been settled on the street for days, but the flakes falling from the sky are fresh and clean. They land on the fine hairs rising up on his bare forearms, soft as feathers. He starts to walk. Odd, perhaps, to go for a walk in the snow dressed only in short-sleeved surgical scrubs, but Baekhyun can’t find it in himself to care. He doesn’t care what people think. He doesn't care that it’s cold. He feels it, distantly, but he can’t make it matter. Snowflakes fall into his hair and lodge there, tiny stars of white adorning the black strands.

There’s a route he's often walked around the hospital, on his breaks when he needs a breath of fresh air. It goes down the side of the hospital block, then along a narrow street with a sports ground on one side and a concrete wall on the other. On the other side of the wall, a busy freeway cuts into the hill below. Baekhyun walks beside the wall until he reaches the footbridge that arches over the freeway. He walks slowly up the zig-zag ramp. Then he starts across the bridge. His route will take him along the edge of the park on the other side of the freeway, then to an underpass that will get him back to the hospital. At least, that’s his intention, but as he walks across the footbridge the lead-lined hollow inside him seems to swell unbearably, and a huge weight of sadness presses down on him. It feels like a giant hand is trying to crush him to the ground. He’s not aware his slowing steps are taking him off-course until he bumps into the railing. He stops walking and leans his forearms on the freezing metal rail, shoulders bowed beneath the weight. Far below him, six lanes of traffic rush, three in each direction. He stares down at them rushing, rushing, endlessly rushing. Snow starts to slowly build up on his shoulders and the back of his lowered head.

Baekhyun knows where he is. He's on a bridge over a freeway. A bridge with a railing easily climbed over. The height is potentially survivable, but falling into freeway traffic is not. He's not really fully processing the thoughts that drift through him, but somewhere in his hollowness, he becomes aware that the idea of dying right now doesn't seem scary at all. In fact, it would be easy. He’s not thinking of actually doing it. He doesn't have an actual desire to die. But at the same time, Baekhyun finds, he doesn't have a desire to live, either. There's not much difference between dying and living, really, when everything is meaningless.

“Baekhyun!”

The shout of his name penetrates his emptiness. He drags his head up. At some point it's started to snow a lot harder without him noticing. The driving white flakes partially obscure the tall figure coming towards him across the bridge, but he recognizes the deep voice. He watches Chanyeol run up to him, feet slipping slightly in the fresh snow.

“What are you doing?” Chanyeol cries. He grabs Baekhyun’s upper arm to haul him away from the railing, and his hand goes right around it so that his fingers and thumb meet. Both of them stare at it. Even Baekhyun knows that adult arms aren’t supposed to be that thin.

“Oh, Baekhyun...” Chanyeol’s voice is a pained whisper. He shakes his head and starts to drag Baekhyun back along the bridge. “Why are you out here in nothing but scrubs? Are you crazy? You’ll freeze to death!”

Baekhyun lets himself be pulled along. He hasn’t the energy to protest. When they get off the bridge, Chanyeol takes his long padded jacket off. He puts it around Baekhyun's shoulders, pushes his unresponsive arms into the sleeves, then pulls the fur-lined hood up over his head and does up the zip. The coat is warm inside from Chanyeol’s body heat, and it finally hits Baekhyun just how cold he is. His skin feels like ice against the warm fabric of the coat. He can’t feel his hands or feet. He becomes aware that he is shivering violently, and realises that he's been feeling his body shake for quite some time now. Chanyeol puts his arm around his shoulders and hurries him back up the street towards the hospital. They’re covering the ground so fast Baekhyun is half-stumbling.

“H-how did you k-know where I was?” His voice is jerky. He’s shivering so hard it’s like having spasms.

“Your resident, Park Jin, saw you leave and called me. He says you won’t talk to him. But you’re going to talk to me.” Chanyeol sounds very firm. Baekhyun shuts up and lets Chanyeol hustle him into the hospital. The warm air inside hits him like walking into a wall. He keeps the hood of Chanyeol’s coat up. It nearly comes down to his chin, and the cuffs reach far beyond his fingertips. From the limited field of vision the hood leaves him with, he finds himself being walked down a corridor that has a mural of animals and rainbows painted on the walls. He hears nurses call cheerful greetings to “Dr. Park”, and sees their scrubs beneath the furred edge of the hood; they're paediatric nurses, their colourful scrubs printed with cartoon characters or other bright designs. Chanyeol stops for a second to talk to a nurse and ask her to bring him a couple of blankets. Then they’re in the paediatric ward staff room, and Chanyeol walks him over to a couch and sits him down on it.

Baekhyun huddles into the corner of the couch inside Chanyeol’s coat. It’s so big on him it feels like being wrapped in a duvet, and it’s oddly comforting. His jerking shivers start to lessen.

He listens to the sounds of Chanyeol boiling a kettle, putting cups on the bench, pouring water. He hears the door open and Chanyeol’s low voice thanking whoever is there. Then he feels the couch dip as Chanyeol sits beside him. He puts the blankets over his legs, then pushes a steaming cup of coffee in front of him. Baekhyun wriggles his hands out of the cuffs of Chanyeol’s coat and wraps his icy fingers around it.

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