Kyungsoo has a 12-hour night shift starting at 7 tonight, and he’d prefer to be spending the day before it relaxing, but instead he’s on the subway at 3 pm, surrounded by crowds of uniform-clad teenagers on their way from school to hagwon. His mom wants to meet him for coffee at some cafe her friends have told her about. Kyungsoo would usually have made up some excuse to avoid this, but he’s hoping meeting her for coffee now will mean he can worm out of a bigger event like going over for dinner another time. Meeting in a cafe, where she can’t go on at him too much because they’ll be in public and there’s a legitimate time restriction because of his shift tonight, is definitely the lesser of two evils.

He wishes it wasn’t like this. Once there’d been a time when he didn’t dread seeing his parents, when he didn’t have to constantly walk the tightrope of how much he can get away with without hurting his mother’s feelings or causing a confrontation. His mother doesn’t often lose her temper, but when put to the test she has a screech that could raise the dead. Kyungsoo doesn’t need to hear that directed at him. Conflict is one of the things he hates the most, and he avoids it as much as he can.

It’s getting harder, though. The stress he feels when he’s with his mother is creeping into the rest of his life. He used to be able to put it away, out of sight, out of mind, but now he’s started feeling the weight of their expectations at all times, and it’s just getting heavier and heavier.

His mom gave him the address, after offering to pick him up, which Kyungsoo refused. He can’t drive and he has no intentions of learning, but there’s no way he’s going to sit in a car with his mom again if he can possibly help it, not after the car journey from hell on his grandmother’s death anniversary. Public transport is another thing that’s the lesser of two evils. Kyungsoo gets off the subway and makes his way up the steps. As he does, he gets a message from his mother telling him that she’s arrived and waiting. Kyungsoo checks the time, but he’s not late, not yet. She’s just early.

The cafe is in Hongdae, home of several universities, trendy with its funky cafes, unique markets, buskers and nightlife. As he dodges clusters of students and follows the dot on his phone GPS through the maze of small, twisting streets, Kyungsoo wonders why his mother wants to go to a cafe in Hongdae, of all places. It doesn’t seem her kind of scene at all. She likes class, the more upmarket, the better.

Shrugging it off as just another unfathomable thing his mother does - it’ll be easier on his wallet, anyway - Kyungsoo navigates until he finds the building. A cosmetic shop and a clothing store sandwich a narrow stairwell leading to the businesses on the upper floors. He squints at the sign in the gloom of the stairwell, finds that Sajju Cafe is on the third floor, and starts to climb. The second floor holds a second-hand bookshop specializing in manhwa, and Kyungsoo’s eye is caught by the displays of some classics he hasn’t seen in a long time through the glass door and window. He stops longingly outside for a moment before forcing himself on. He doesn't have time now, but maybe if his mother doesn’t keep him too long, he can stop there on the way back down.

Sajju Cafe, when he reaches the third floor, seems to have been influenced by the design of a temple. It has clean, modern lines, but with golden elephant statues in recessed nooks and traditional painted paper on the walls. One wall is entirely covered with small square shelves, each one holding a little glass jar with a different kind of tea. There is a faint smell of incense in the room, and Kyungsoo’s nose starts to itch almost immediately. He groans inwardly as he looks around to find his mother. Who thought burning incense in a cafe was a good idea? He can already tell it’s a scent he’s allergic to. Now not only does he have to make polite conversation with his mother, he has to do it with watering eyes and a sniffly nose.

The room isn’t big, but he doesn’t catch sight of his mother until she stands up and waves at him. She’d been sitting in a booth across the other side of the room, just out of his line of sight. Kyungsoo gives an awkward wave back and crosses the cafe. It’s very quiet, only a couple of other people drinking tea from elegant ceramic tea sets. There are three booths and he notices that each of them has curtains, currently drawn to the side, but apparently able to be closed, hiding the occupants from view of the room. It seems like an odd idea for a cafe, but Kyungsoo kind of likes the idea of being able to hide. He’s always preferred privacy over busy spaces.

His mother gives him a hug, which Kyungsoo stands stiffly for until she lets go, and sits back down. Kyungsoo starts to sit opposite her, but his mother stops him by catching his wrist and pulling him towards her.

“Sit on this side with me,” she says. Kyungsoo stares at her. Why? is on the tip of his tongue, but he bites it back. He knows it would come out sounding rude, even if he didn’t intend it. He sits down on the long booth seat next to her and immediately buries his face in his elbow to sneeze three times in quick succession. She’s not wearing her perfume this time, it’s just the incense is stronger on this side of the room. If she’d been wearing it he might have actually had a legitimate excuse to leave. Between the incense and her perfume he’d probably have started wheezing.

“You didn’t order?” he asks, glancing around for a menu. There’s nothing on the table, but neither is there a tea set.

“She’ll be here in just a moment,” his mother says. She sounds oddly nervous, and Kyungsoo goes cold.

“Mom,” he says, turning to her. There’s so much sudden dread in him that his voice comes out completely flat. “You didn’t - this isn’t a blind date, is it?” She couldn’t. Surely she didn’t. Not again.

“Oh, no,” his mother shakes her head. “Nothing like that. I can’t trust you after what you did to poor Taeah.”

Kyungsoo’s stomach clenches. She was the one who set him up on a date he didn’t want, and she knew he wouldn’t want it, or she would have told him. He wants to tell her so, but there’s no point. Nothing he says or does gets through to her. She’ll never see him through anything but her own filters.

“Then what -” he starts, but is interrupted by the arrival of someone at the booth. His mother’s face brightens as she focuses on the newcomer, and Kyungsoo turns around to look too. He gets a colourful impression of bright, swirling fabrics as a woman about his mother’s age sits gracefully across the table. She’s wearing a traditional silk hanbok, hair pulled back into a bun, and once she’s seated she begins to lay out some squares of coloured cloth on the table between them. Kyungsoo takes one look at her and knows who she is. Or, what she is. This woman is a shaman.

Kyungsoo finds that he’s on his feet without any recollection of having stood up. His mother exclaims his name and takes his wrist again to try and pull him back down, but there’s a roaring in Kyungsoo’s ears, and he ignores the shocked tone in her voice that tells him just how badly behaved she thinks he’s being.

“No,” he says, cutting her off. He means to sound firm, but his voice shakes, betraying him. The shaman looks up at him and their eyes meet without Kyungsoo intending it. She looks very calm.

Kyungsoo drags his eyes away from her before she can try and read his soul or something and turns to face his mother. “I will not do this,” he says, and his voice is still shaking, and his ears are still roaring.

“Kyungsoo, darling, just sit down,” his mother wheedles. “I already paid for the session. Ms. Kim will be able to help you, see if there’s anything blocking you, I told her all about your problems with finding a partner and -”

“I said no,” Kyungsoo says, and his voice breaks painfully, jumping an octave like he’s a teenager again. At the break, his mother, incredibly, closes , the first hint of uncertainty coming into her face. But it’s too late for her to regret now. She’s gone too far this time.

Kyungsoo doesn’t even know what to call the emotions tearing through him right now, but whatever they are, they are strong. They’re so strong they’re shaking him, not just his voice but his hands too. “I cannot do this anymore,” he says, his language going formal in his distress. “Can you not see what you are doing to me?”

She stares at him, and Kyungsoo clenches and unclenches his fists and tries to breathe. “You are crushing me," he whispers.

“Darling...” she starts, and that’s real worry he sees in her eyes now, but Kyungsoo jerks away from her reaching hand. He bows stiffly to the shaman. His throat has locked up so tight that he knows if he tried to say the apology he wants to give her, nothing would come out. It doesn’t matter anyway. He will never be seeing this shaman again.

He turns and leaves the cafe without a backward glance. It’s the rudest thing he’s ever done to his mother. He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes fiercely as he goes down the stairs towards street level. His eyes are watering. He tells himself it’s the incense.

He doesn’t put his glasses back on, walking almost blindly towards the subway station. The world feels safer as a blur right now.

He feels hopeless. After his conversation with Yifan as they’d battled zombies on their Minecraft server, he’d actually felt better about himself for a while. Yifan had shown him an online LGBTQ+ community where there were other people who felt exactly the same way he did, and Kyungsoo had finally understood that he wasn’t actually alone in this. He wasn’t the freak he’d always thought himself to be. Coming to this understanding has been like something that had been wrapped way too tight around his chest for his whole life is slowly but surely easing.

It’s such a relief, and Kyungsoo had been starting to believe that maybe Yifan was right about his personal happiness being more important than what his parents want from him. But now his fragile new seedling of self-acceptance has been crushed right down into the earth again. What’s the point in learning about auality and aromanticism and giving himself a tidy little label (ace-aro, the people in the online community who sounded like him had called themselves) when his mother will just keep on looking for more and more outrageous ways to fix him? When she’ll just keep burying him alive in humiliation and guilt and despair?

It takes Kyungsoo nearly the entire train ride back to his house to calm down. He doesn’t often respond to things in such a physical way. As his emotions slowly ebb away, he closes his eyes and tries to forget about what just happened. Forget about everything. He’s escaped for now, and soon he’ll be at work. He doesn’t have to figure out what to do right now. He can just push it all away, like he always does.

He spends the next few hours lying on his couch with the lights off, playing Zen Koi on his phone. He needs to focus on something, but he doesn’t want to play one of the intense games he usually plays. Guiding a few koi through their evolutions to dragons is soothing. He evolves three koi before the shaky feeling all through him that had come from the shock and the distress of fighting with his mother in front of a stranger has calmed. He can put it away and think about it later. Maybe never.

He cooks himself dinner, and finds more calmness in the careful chopping of vegetables, stir-frying them with translucent glass noodles to create a japchae. Then he changes and heads back out into the solid wall of heat to go to the hospital. Night shifts for radiology aren’t usually too bad. The department closes for anything but emergencies at 10 pm, and often he can get quite a good night’s sleep in the small radiology call room, depending, of course, on whether there are any emergencies overnight.

The first part of the evening goes without anything significant happening. At 10 Kyungsoo nods to the tech when she tells him she’s shut down the MRI computer. There’s nothing urgent that can’t wait till morning at the moment, so Kyungsoo heads to the call room and lies on the bed to evolve a few more koi.

He’s woken from a sleep he hadn't intended to fall into by the ringing of his phone from where it had fallen out of his hand onto his chest. He rubs his hand across his face as he sits up, glances at the time - just after 1 am - and answers the call. Min Jiyong in the ED has a pregnant patient with acute abdominal pain, and that's all Kyungsoo needs to know before he's standing up and shrugging his arms into his white coat which he’d left draped over the chair. There are some things that are always seen immediately, and this is one of them.

He heads down to the ED, nods politely to the nurse at the triage station, and is directed to a consultation room, where he finds someone has already brought the portable ultrasound trolley in. The patient is lying on the examination bed, a young man of a similar age who is probably her partner sitting on the chair against the wall. Dr. Min is still there, and so is Jongdae, evidently the consultant ob-gyn tonight. The sight of his friend takes Kyungsoo straight back to seeing him stand up from the table in that meeting room and just collapse without warning. Kyungsoo had hid it well, but it scared the living daylights out of him. It's been over a month now, and Kyungsoo is glad to see that Jongdae looks a lot better than the last time Kyungsoo saw him. If he's honest, it would have been hard for Jongdae to look worse.

Jongdae may have colour in his cheeks again, but he still seems tense as he examines the patient. She's 25 years old and at 9 weeks gestation, information Dr. Min gave him over the phone, and is faintly in pain as Jongdae does a physical exam on her abdomen. Kyungsoo knows pregnancy complicates a lot of things, including his own options for imaging - anything involving radiation puts the foetus at risk - and it complicates clinical diagnosis too, as the baby displaces the normal position of internal organs as it grows, and it's hard to know whether symptoms like nausea and vomiting are due to the pregnancy itself or an underlying condition. No wonder Jongdae looks tense.

Jongdae steps back and the nurse prepares the patient's stomach for ultrasound with clear aquasonic gel while Kyungsoo gets the machine ready. Jongdae smiles at Kyungsoo despite his visible stress.

"Hey, you're here," he says quietly. "Did we wake you?"

"Yeah, but it's fine, I actually fell asleep by accident," Kyungsoo admits. "How about you? This isn't one of your insane three-day shifts, is it?"

Jongdae smiles more easily this time and shakes his head. "No, things have been much better lately," he says, and then the image comes up on the monitor and their conversation is immediately forgotten as they both focus on the screen.

"Any thoughts?" Kyungsoo asks as he orients the probe.

"There's no bleeding or uterine contractions," Jongdae murmurs as they watch the grey tones of the image shift beneath Kyungsoo's probe. "I found involuntary guarding and rebound tenderness on physical exam and the history is vomiting for several days with a severe increase of abdominal pain a couple of hours ago. I don't think it's obstetric. I'm leaning towards gallstones or appendicitis." He turns to Dr. Min and asks him to call the general surgery resident.

Kyungsoo carefully locates the liver on the ultrasound, watching the monitor intently. He's looking for the masses that will indicate a gallstone. Jongdae's thinking makes sense to him. Being pregnant doesn't mean you can't also get gallstones or appendicitis, it just makes it way more difficult to diagnose them. The nurse soothes the patient who can't be given pain relief until they know what it is, keeping her still while he works.

He finds no liver or gallbladder masses and no dilated bile ducts. "No gallstone," he tells Jongdae, who sighs a little as he nods. Kyungsoo knows he would have preferred a gallstone, which could probably have been treated with pain relief and diet changes, because now the diagnosis is likely to be appendicitis, and abdominal surgery gets a lot more tricky when a patient is pregnant.

The on-call general surgery resident arrives, and Jongdae turns away from the monitor to talk to her while Kyungsoo looks for signs that might suggest appendicitis. He listens as Jongdae gives her his suspected diagnosis.

"Are you confident with appendectomies?" he asks.

The resident hesitates. "Yes," she says, "but not in pregnancy. I've never done one on a pregnant patient. I wouldn't want to try it without a CT or MRI."

Well, she won't be getting either of those, Kyungsoo thinks to himself as he narrows his eyes at the monitor. A CT abdomen is too much radiation for the baby unless it's the most life-threatening emergency, and an MRI for appendicitis is complete overkill. Besides, it’s 1 in the morning. The MRI unit is closed until 7 am.

"I have intra-peritoneal free fluid," he announces. Jongdae and the general surgery resident turn to look at him.

"Appendicitis, then," Jongdae says. The resident grimaces.

"Can we wait a few hours until radiology is open?" she asks. "I'm really not confident doing it without an MRI."

Jongdae does not look happy about this idea at all. "No, I don't think we can," he says. "The history of suddenly increased pain a few hours ago suggests the appendix might have already ruptured. We can't risk waiting until morning."

"I'll have to call my attending," the resident says unhappily.

Jongdae nods at her. "Then do it."

The attending general surgeon, when she arrives 15 minutes later, agrees with Jongdae’s diagnosis and takes the patient to surgery for an appendectomy. The patient is wheeled out, and Kyungsoo knows that’s probably the last he will see of her. He glances at the wall clock, then at Jongdae, catching him in the middle of rubbing his eyes with both fists.

"You okay?" he asks, rather more anxious than he'd ever admit, even to himself. He never wants to see his friend collapse like that again. Ever.

"I'm fine," Jongdae says, turning to smile at him. "Just normal 1 am tiredness."

"Are you sleeping here tonight?" Kyungsoo asks.

"Yeah," Jongdae says, "but there was a flood in the ob-gyn call room today, something burst under the sink or something. The whole place is soaked. I'll probably sleep on the couch in my office, it's going to be better than the resident dorm on the top floor."

Kyungsoo frowns. "No, don't sleep on your couch, that's not restful," he says. "You can come sleep in the radiology call room."

"That would be amazing," Jongdae says, looking relieved. "But what about you? Aren't you going to sleep?"

"Nah, I'm fine, I already slept this evening anyway. You need it more," Kyungsoo says, and takes Jongdae's wrist to lead him out. Jongdae laughs, sounding a little embarrassed as they head to the elevator.

"You're as bad as Chanyeol and Baekhyun," he says. "Everyone's been treating me like I'm made of glass."

"Can't blame them," Kyungsoo mumbles. "You scared the out of Baekhyun, you know." And me, he thinks, but doesn't say it aloud.

"I know," Jongdae says, very quietly. "I didn't mean to."

"Nobody thinks you meant to," Kyungsoo says. "All the same, you can't blame us for wanting to make sure you're okay."

"I don't," Jongdae says, smiling at him. "Not really. I mean, it's a bit embarrassing, but it's nice to know people care."

Kyungsoo leaves it at that as the elevator takes them up. Jongdae does look better. Like he'd said, he just looks the normal tired anyone would be at half past 1 in the morning on a night shift.

In the small radiology call room Jongdae sprawls face-down on the bed with a muffled groan. Kyungsoo holds back his smile as the ob-gyn wriggles all his limbs, then rolls over to look up at him with slightly dishevelled hair. "Come talk to me," Jongdae says, sitting up and leaning back against the wall as he shoves his scrub-clad legs under the quilt. He pats the blanket beside him.

Kyungsoo goes to sit beside him, and is completely startled when Jongdae leans sidewards and rests his head on Kyungsoo's shoulder, wriggling a little as he makes himself comfortable. Kyungsoo is not one for physical contact, and he tenses momentarily, but then finds himself relaxing as the warmth of Jongdae's body goes into him. It's actually not that bad. Almost comforting. Jongdae is apparently the physically affectionate type, perhaps more so when he's tired.

"We haven't talked for ages," Jongdae says, sounding sleepy. "How are you? You told me your mom was pressuring you about marriage a while back. Has that gotten any better?"

Kyungsoo sighs. "No," he admits. "Worse, actually. Do you know what she did today? She pretended she wanted to meet me for coffee this afternoon, and secretly invited a shaman to come and...I don't know, scare off whatever evil spirits she thinks are stopping me from getting married." He bites his teeth together to stop himself talking. He hadn't meant to say all that. Jongdae asking him was like opening a floodgate.

"Oh no," Jongdae says sympathetically. His head is still on Kyungsoo's shoulder. "If you don't want to get married, you don't have to, whatever your mom thinks."

"The problem is, it's not just not wanting to get married right now. It's never. I'm aual," Kyungsoo blurts out, and freezes. He's never said it aloud, never admitted it so plainly like that, not even to Yifan. Barely even to himself. What is it about Jongdae that makes him so easy to talk to?

"Ah," Jongdae says softly. His arms slip around Kyungsoo's waist, hugging him. "She doesn't know?"

Kyungsoo snorts. "No, she doesn't. I only figured it out recently myself. I’d never even heard of it a year ago, but it makes complete sense to me. I don't want romantic relationships either so apparently that makes me something called ace-aro. But I'm the only child in my family, and my mother is desperate for grandchildren, and my father's line is going to end with me. Even if they believe auality is real, I don’t know if they’d accept me being it. They’d probably just try even crazier things to try and fix me."

He feels Jongdae's bony ribs move against him as he sighs. "I guess you f