“Daddy! Daddy!”

Jongdae looks up from the breakfast rice porridge he’s dishing into five bowls – two adult-sized, three kid-sized and decorated in turn with elephants, pandas and giraffes - as his eldest daughter comes flying into the kitchen. She’s only wearing her vest and knickers, and she’s clutching her silver and blue Princess Elsa dress in both arms. He doesn’t even have a chance to ask her what she’s doing before she cannons straight into his legs, crushing the Elsa dress against him. He staggers sideways a little and grabs the counter to balance himself. At six years old, Chorong isn’t exactly big, but the way she hurls herself around at top speed all the time has caused Jongdae more than a few bruises.

“Whoa,” he laughs. “Slow down, kiddo. What is it?”

“I want to wear my Elsa dress,” Chorong clings to his legs, gazing up at him with her best pleading expression. “Please, daddy? Please can I wear it?”

“What about your school uniform?” Jongdae picks up the bowls he’s filled for himself and his wife and turns to go and put them on the kitchen table. Chorong slides down his leg to sit on his foot, giggling as he drags her across the floor. It’s one of her favourite games, but she’s getting big enough now that when she does this, walking is a serious challenge.

“Uniform is boring,” Chorong says. “Minah said she’s going to wear her Anna dress today and I want to wear my Elsa dress so we can be sisters. Please, daddy? Pleeeease?”

Jongdae step-drags his way back to the counter and wonders vaguely what the repercussions are for six-year-olds if they break the dress code. Detention? A hundred lines of I must not impersonate royalty while at school? He smiles at the thought of any teacher trying to get Chorong to sit still enough for long enough to write even ten lines, let alone a hundred. Besides, he reassures himself, punishments at the local primary school are bound to be a lot less severe than they were at the elite prep school his uncle sent him to.

“What did mommy say?” he asks. He rather suspects that the reason Chorong is here, asking him, is because his wife has already forbidden her to wear the dress. Chorong may be only six, but she knows all too well which of her parents is the pushover, and Ahreum has explained to him several times that he mustn’t let the kids do things she’s already forbidden. She says it’s not good for their discipline. Jongdae knows it’s a good thing that Ahreum does most of the raising of their three children. If it was left up to him, he’d end up spoiling them rotten. He just can’t resist it when they turn their puppy-dog eyes on him. He’d give them the moon if they asked him for it.

“Mommy said….mommy said…” Jongdae hides a smile as his daughter fights an obvious battle with her conscience. He balances the three kid-size bowls of rice porridge in his hands and hauls her back across the floor.

“She said no, right?” he prompts. “Chorong, we already talked about this. Why are you not supposed to ask me anything mommy already said no to?”

“Because mommy and daddy want to always agree, and it’s wrong to try and trick you,” Chorong says reluctantly.

“Exactly.” Jongdae pats her head. “Now go and put your uniform on. You can be Elsa when you get home from school.”

“Daddy!” Chorong picks herself up from his foot and clutches the crumpled dress to her chest. “Don’t tell mommy I asked you, okay?”

Jongdae can’t help chuckling. She knows she’ll be scolded if Ahreum finds out she tried to play them off against each other. “Okay, I won’t tell her – if you’re a good girl and go help mommy get Bodeul and Mari ready.”

“Okay!” Chorong beams at him and runs out of the kitchen, her small bare feet pattering on the polished wooden boards. Jongdae shakes his head fondly after her and starts getting out the side dishes and cutlery. It’s a family rule to eat meals together whenever they can, though it’s often impossible when Jongdae is on call. Though Jongdae loves his job and would happily work more hours than he already does, he vowed when Chorong was born that he wouldn’t let his kids suffer from an absent parent the way he did. So far, he thinks he’s doing a pretty good job.

He has time to get his four-year-old son, Bodeul, to consume most of his porridge by playing “train-goes-into-the-tunnel” with the spoon before his phone vibrates with the recurring alarm telling him he needs to leave the house.

“Darling, you didn’t eat,” Ahreum protests as he stands up. Jongdae flashes her a reassuring smile. It’s more important that Bodeul eats. His son is small for his age and his fussy eating habits aren’t helping.

“Don’t worry, I’ll grab something from the cafeteria later,” he says as he shrugs into his jacket and puts his arms through the straps of his backpack, but Ahreum is already standing up. She ignores two-year-old Mari’s fussing at losing her mother’s attention and quickly scrapes his portion of porridge into a plastic container.

“Turn around,” she instructs, and he lets her his backpack and tuck the container inside. When she's zipped him back up he turns around to give her a quick goodbye kiss.

“Me too! Me too!” Chorong shrieks from the table.

“I was going to,” Jongdae laughs. He hurries back to the table and gives each of his children a kiss, wipes the grains of smeared porridge off his lips, and waves goodbye.

He arrives at the hospital at the same time as Park Chanyeol.

“Dr Park, what’s up,” Jongdae says as the doors swoosh open for them.

“Dr Kim, that would be the sky.” The tall paediatrician gives him the goofy grin Jongdae knows so well and slaps his shoulder in friendly greeting. They’ve hung out since they were in the same year of pre-med, and though they ended up in different specialties, working at the same hospital means they’ve been able to keep their friendship going strong through the years, where many of Jongdae’s old friendships have fallen by the wayside due to family responsibilities and conflicting work schedules.

“Ew, something’s oozing,” Chanyeol tells him, grabbing the top handle of his backpack and swinging him around by it to inspect it. “What have you got in there?” He leans closer and sniffs. “Smells a lot better than it looks.”

“Oh no.” Jongdae wriggles out of his straps, s his backpack, and finds that yes, as he suspected, the lid has come off the plastic container and coated the inside of his backpack and his folders in a sloppy rice-porridge mess.

“What is that?” Chanyeol peers into the backpack with interest.

“Breakfast,” Jongdae says sadly. “Or it was.” Now he’s going to have to clean his backpack and all his things, and he really doesn’t have the time. He grins suddenly and holds the bag out to Chanyeol. “Want some? There’s plenty to share.”

“Sure,” Chanyeol says. “Pass me a spoon.”

“Who needs a spoon? Just stick your head in,” Jongdae suggests. “You’ll look great in a nosebag.”

“What’s a nosebag?” Byun Baekhyun pops up in front of them, bright-eyed and radiating his usual air of barely contained hyperactivity.

“Horses eat out of them,” Jongdae tells him. “Since Chanyeol eats like a horse, I prepared this for him.”

Baekhyun glances into the backpack he holds out and recoils dramatically. “Gross. Did you puke in that?”

“The insult!” Jongdae gasps. “That’s my famous gourmet rice porridge, I’ll have you know. Even Bodeul ate it. Well, some of it.”

“Must be good then,” Baekhyun says, rather doubtfully. “But the time may have come to throw that bag away.”

“No way,” Jongdae protests. “This is my favourite backpack.”

“You’ve had it since high school! Don’t you think it’s time to move on?”

“I will never abandon you, my faithful backpack,” Jongdae tells his oozing bag, holding it out at arm’s length in front of him as they fall in step towards the elevators. Slow drips of rice porridge leak from the bottom corner, leaving a trail of milky splatters on the floor in their wake. “You’ve done so much for me.”

“You know,” Chanyeol muses as they fall in step towards the elevators. “A nosebag actually isn’t such a bad idea. You could use it to eat during long surgeries, or when outpatients overrun.”

Jongdae snickers at the idea of performing surgery whilst munching out of a nosebag, but his work phone rings before he can comment. Thankfully he’d had it in his pocket, so the device has avoided the rice porridge deluge the rest of his belongings have suffered.

“I need an acute assessment.” The voice of the resident in the ED sounds stressed. “Single pregnancy, 25 weeks gestation, came in with a headache and hypertension, she’s just started seizing -”

All humour instantly leaves Jongdae. “Support ABCs and get a line in for magnesium. I’ll be there in a minute,” he says. Chanyeol and Baekhyun look at him with twin expressions of mild curiosity.

“Eclampsia.” He s his dripping backpack into Baekhyun’s hands. “Deal with this for me?” He doesn’t even wait to hear a reply before turning to sprint down the corridor towards the ED.

The woman is still seizing when he gets there less than a minute later, and he immediately recognizes one of his outpatients, 27-year-old Lee Rijin. The ED staff have gotten a line in and started a loading dose of magnesium sulfate, but Jongdae knows she’s in serious danger, and so is her unborn child.

“We’ll do an emergency C-section as soon as she stops seizing. Get me an anaesthetist and an operating room, and ask NICU to go on standby,” he instructs the resident. At only 25 weeks gestation there’s less than a 50% chance the child will survive the birth, but if he doesn’t get the fetus out of its seizing mother soon, both of them will die. “History?”

The history the resident gives him as they run with the wheeled gurney towards the hastily prepared OR makes him grind his teeth. Rijin presented to her GP twice in the past week with headaches, but she'd lacked most of the common symptoms and the GP had missed diagnosing pre-eclampsia. Why had she gone to her GP instead of coming to him? He would have picked it up immediately. Now it might be too late.

Rijin stops seizing while he’s scrubbing in, but just as he enters the OR she goes into cardiac arrest. Jongdae manually displaces the uterus to the left and the resuscitation team starts CPR. He watches the digital clock on the wall as the seconds blink by. He knows the almost inevitable outcome of this situation. But still, in those four minutes he must allow the resuscitation team before he has to make the decision to abandon the mother and try to save the child, he silently prays to anyone and anything that may be listening that he’s wrong.

The instant the four minutes are up, Jongdae starts the C-section. His world narrows down into an intense focus. He takes the scalpel handed him by the theatre nurse and cuts swiftly through the layers of skin, fat and muscle while the CPR team continues chest compressions in an attempt to keep enough blood flowing through the dead mother’s system to keep the child alive. Thirty-six seconds after his first incision, he lifts a baby girl from the womb. She is blood-slicked, shriveled, and tiny enough that she fits in the palm of his hand.

She is dead, and the CPR team are unable to resuscitate her.

---

Chanyeol wakes up to the sound of coffee cups clinking and the scent of frying bacon drifting in from the kitchen. A vague unease penetrates his sleep-dazed state and he wonders if he’s forgotten something important, because with both himself and his boyfriend working demanding full-time jobs, cooked breakfasts are generally only managed on rare and special occasions. He’s pretty sure it’s Thursday and he has a shift today, and he’s pretty sure that Yeonseok has work as well. Crap, he’s not forgotten their anniversary? No, he remembers with some relief, that’s not till November. Is his boyfriend getting promoted again? No, that can’t be right either. Yeonseok would have reminded him of something like that yesterday when they went to bed, and besides, Yeonseok wouldn’t be cooking for that. He would be complaining that Chanyeol hadn’t cooked for him. Wait, is Chanyeol getting promoted? He almost laughs aloud at himself. No, Chanyeol is definitely not getting promoted. Okay, Sherlock, he thinks to himself wryly. You’ve failed the morning deduction test. Get up and find out what’s going on.

He pushes the blankets off and shivers as the cold air hits him. He throws on the first shirt he finds, realizes it’s Yeonseok’s when the cuffs end up five centimetres shy of his wrists, but he’s too sleepy to bother changing right now. He shuffles into the kitchen on bare feet, eyes half-closed, following his nose to the source of the delicious aromas. He bumps into the kitchen doorway, grabs the doorframe, and closes his eyes all the way. The scent of strong coffee is so perfect that he has to just enjoy it for a few seconds.

Yeonseok’s golden laughter reaches him, more perfect than the scent of coffee. A warm cup is pressed into one of his hands, and he’s guided by the arm towards the table. Chanyeol finally manages to drag his eyes open and raises an eyebrow at his smiling boyfriend.

“What did I do to deserve such a breakfast?” He takes a sip of his coffee and hums in pleasure. It’s hot and strong with a splash of cream, and it tastes like heaven. “Kim Yeonseok, did I ever tell you I love you?”

Yeonseok sits down across the table and warms his hands on his cup of coffee.

“I love you too,” he says instead of answering Chanyeol’s question, and Chanyeol has to fight really hard to look severely at him and not lean over the table and kiss that little smile from his way-too-perfect lips. There’s a short silence, which Chanyeol loses in gazing at his boyfriend’s downcast eyes as he stares into his coffee cup.

“I invited my grandparents over this evening,” Yeonsok finally says. “I want to tell them about us.”

Chanyeol chokes on his sip of coffee. When he’s finished spluttering, he looks up with wide eyes, chest hurting a little from the coffee that almost went into his lungs, but Yeonseok won’t meet his eyes.

“What?” he whispers.

Yeonseok just shrugs. “I want them to know who I’ve been in love with for the past almost five years,” he says. “I want to include them in every part of my life. I want them to meet my boyfriend, and that just so happens to be you, Park Chanyeol.” Now he lifts his gaze to meet Chanyeol’s. His eyes are set in determination and Chanyeol can see there is no talking him out of it this time. He swallows and tries to find something clever to say, something flippant and funny that will show that he’s as cool with all this as Yeonseok is, that he’s totally okay, but his head feels empty, and Yeonseok’s words just echo inside it.

Ever since Chanyeol figured out he was gay as a teenager he has kept it a secret - a very well-kept secret. The only person who knows is his sister, and though she has accepted it fully, he has been unable to take the much bigger and more dangerous step of telling his parents. He’s afraid of hurting them, and if he’s honest with himself, he’s also afraid they’ll reject him. They’ve never been particularly progressive. Having a gay son might well be more than they can tolerate.

He wishes he was more like Yeonseok. Yeonseok doesn’t seem to be scared of what people think of him. He has told his parents and his younger brother, and his family has been open minded about it all, but telling his grandparents is a big step to take. The fact that Yeonseok is willing to risk disappointing his grandparents for Chanyeol makes Chanyeol feel like a total jerk, because Chanyeol can’t - or won’t - do the same for him.

Yeonseok deserves better than him.

“Are you sure you really want to do this?” he tries.

Yeonseok raises an eyebrow, obviously seeing right through him. “Yes. I’ve thought this over, Chanyeol. I don’t want to hide from them anymore.”

Chanyeol feels the slight stab he always feels when Yeonseok is so open about his uality. He wants to be the same. He wants to let the world know who he really is, without hiding anything. He wants his family and friends to meet his amazing, perfect boyfriend, and for them to love him too - but he just can’t. The fear of losing his family is too hard to overcome.

“You’re not on call tonight, right?”

Chanyeol shakes his head no. He isn’t on call, he’ll be back around 5 pm and they will cook together and mess up the kitchen and he will wish that they didn’t have guests over so he can kiss his boyfriend senseless.

“I mean, are you really sure you want to introduce them to me?” Chanyeol asks, making an overexaggerated grimace in an attempt to seem silly. It’s his best way to ignore the feelings that have surfaced. Yeonseok chuckles a little.

“Is that the best you got?” he asks, eyes twinkling, and the conversation is over. Chanyeol knows they’ll talk later, perhaps in the evening, about feelings of disappointment, judgment and fear, but for now, he’s more than happy to push the whole issue aside.

Yeonseok leaves for work first. His blue uniform shirt hugs his sculpted biceps and fits his slim torso perfectly, and Chanyeol wishes their kiss goodbye would last several beats longer than it does.

As he arrives at work he meets Jongdae, whose smile reeks of family life and love and whose backpack reeks of food. They split when Jongdae rushes towards the ED and Chanyeol continues towards his office located on the children's ward. He tries to focus on his job, but the knowledge that he’s meeting Yeonseok’s grandparents this evening hangs over him, and he keeps catching himself zoning out in his brief quiet moments, staring blankly into space.

He has just waved goodbye to a 6-year-old with asthma when a pager beeps. It takes him a few seconds to realise it is actually him being paged; he’s not used to the device going off when he’s not on call. Dr. Park to ED is all the message on the pager says, and Chanyeol frowns. He’s about to call the ED and ask what’s wrong when he receives another message on his pager; STAT. The secretary sends him a questioning glance when he walks out of his office and Chanyeol can only shrug. He doesn’t have the answer to her question.

“Dr. Park!” he hears when he enters the chaos of the ED. A nurse sends him a rushed smile and motions for him to follow her.

“We need you to see a young patient. He refuses to talk to us, even the chief tried, and we figured it was better to try with a paediatrician instead of continuing and failing,” she tells him as she leads him effortlessly between rooms and curtains. Chanyeol has no idea where he’s going, and the further he’s led into this endless maze they call the ED, the more positive he is that he’ll never find his way back out again.

“Where's Dr. Choi? She’s on call today, isn’t she?” he asks, glancing around to try and find anything he can use to remember the way by. The nurse turns a corner and Chanyeol hurries to follow.

“She was busy, and if I’m completely honest, I think you’re the better of you two to deal with this specific patient.”

She opens the door into a room in which a small boy sits on a bed, a woman he assumes is his mother beside him. His hand is wrapped in gauze and he’s supporting it with his other hand, careful not to touch the obviously hurt area. His mother is patting his black hair soothingly. Chanyeol steps into the room and the nurse closes the door behind them. He sits down on the chair in front of the boy and smiles. The boy presses a little closer to his mother.

“Hello,” Chanyeol says. “My name is Chanyeol. What’s yours?”

The boy doesn’t answer.

“His name is Daejung,” his mother says instead. Chanyeol keeps his attention on the boy, not the mother, and sends Daejung a smile.

“Daejung? What a handsome name. How old are you?”

This time he elicits an answer from the boy. Five is the whispered age, but Chanyeol isn’t deterred by the low volume. Words, any words, are progress. They’ll be getting on well soon.

“Whoa, you’re a big boy then!”

Daejung nods. Chanyeol points to his bandaged hand and Daejung responds by pulling it closer to his chest.

“It hurts, doesn’t it?” Daejung nods again. “Can I see it? I promise I won’t touch it, just look.”

The boy pauses, unsure of what to do. Chanyeol can feel his mother get impatient next to him and Daejung obviously senses it as well, because he whimpers and hugs his hand even closer.

“Come on Daejung, let the nice doctor look at your hand,” she says. Chanyeol gives her a quick smile.

“It’s fine, we’ll get there.”

Chanyeol has dealt with many children and even more parents in his career, and he knows what he’s seeing here. There is a story behind Daejung’s injury he’s either ashamed of or scared of.

“If mom helps you unwrap your hand, do you think you can hold it like that but without all the bandages? I’ll stay here and won’t get any closer.”

Daejung takes a deep breath but agrees. He whimpers a little as his mother helps him unwrap his hand and when it’s finally free of the gauze, Chanyeol sees that a third-degree burn covers his entire palm. It’s a mess of red and white in the centre and blackened around the edges of his hand. Now it makes sense that the boy isn’t crying or screaming in pain. Whatever has burned him has damaged multiple nerve endings.

“Does it hurt?” Chanyeol checks. The boy hangs his head and gives it a tiny shake. Shame, Chanyeol thinks. He knows he has to be careful with how he asks his questions and not lead the boy to answer what he thinks Chanyeol wants to hear.

“Daejung, do you know what happened to your hand?”

Daejung looks at his mother and leans up to whisper in her ear. She shakes her head and looks at her son. Chanyeol just observes them. There’s something wrong here. The boy is keeping something from him and his mother on purpose. Something that makes Chanyeol’s stomach churn. A third-degree burn doesn’t turn up on a five-year-old’s palm accidentally. First-degree, sure. Second-degree, maybe. But third?

Daejung looks at his hand one more time bef