It's not yet the start of Minseok's  official work day, but he's already in his office, having never left the hospital the night before. Behind him, a pillow is propped up on the couch, with a tangled blanket strewn across the cushions. He sleeps here when the loneliness of his apartment gets too much and the nightmarish thoughts start to close in on him. It happens more often than he'd ever admit, even to himself.

He’s just woken his computer from its slumber, but he’s not looking at the screen. Instead, he’s staring at a framed picture on his desk of a young boy, smile radiating and eyes gleaming with mischief. He holds an ice cream cone in one hand and a teddy bear in the other. His new clothes suggest the first day of kindergarten.

Next to the picture of the boy is one of two older girls in school uniform, laughing and smiling as they hug each other. The picture of the girls is more recent, taken at their most recent school awards ceremony. He tries to be there for their more special occasions, but he’s never really present in their lives.

Jangmi has told him that he’s a bad father multiple times, but she doesn’t understand. Minseok wants to be there. He wants to cheer Nayoung in her soccer matches, he wants to attend Eunbi’s cello recitals and see how she progresses. But every time he watches sees daughters, he’s reminded of what he's lost. And he’s reminded that it is his fault; it is all his fault everything fell apart. It’s so much easier to just forget it all, push the feelings away and remain distant. It hurts less.

Minseok turns his attention back to the photograph of the boy. Unlike the one of the girls, this photo will never be replaced with a newer one as the child in it grows up. He picks the photograph up to hold it closer, and a lump fights its way up from his chest cavity and lodges in his throat, squeezing so tight it hurts. His sweet boy who’d been so enthusiastic about everything in life. His boy who would max out his library card with picture books about dinosaurs and spaceships. His boy who loved ice cream and teddy bears and whose favourite thing at the local playground was the slide.

The wall clock ticks over to six am. Minseok is officially working. He puts down the picture of the boy, stands up, and grabs his doctor’s coat from the chair, shuts  his office door behind him and walks into the emergency department. It’s quiet, but it's six am on a Tuesday morning and this is normal.

“Anything new?” he asks the nurse at the nursing station. She looks up and sends him a cheerful smile.

“Good morning, Chief Kim. Just a few lacerations and broken bones, nothing the residents can’t handle.”

Minseok mumbles a belated good morning back and mentally scolds himself for not starting with a greeting. He doesn’t mean to be rude to his coworkers, but sometimes he’s too eager to get to work and forget his life. Today is one of those days. Instead of sticking around the nursing station, he takes a round of the ED and greets the residents and nurses. The night shift residents look drained, and Minseok can’t help but think back to his own time in residency. He probably looked the same, trying to balance fatherhood and overtime.

The large screen that keeps track of their current patients lets him know that they have a few older teenagers in for lacerations. Minseok guesses it’s a fight of some sort. He lets the residents deal with that. An elderly lady arrives with the ambulance, having been found on the floor when the aid came in the morning. She suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and scolds the paramedics loudly as they wheel her in. Minseok lets the residents have that experience as well. In the break room he gets his first cup of coffee and closes his eyes for a second to focus on the day ahead. The thoughts of his children slowly fade to the back of his mind as he drinks his coffee and observes the place he has put all his energy into for the past eight years.

A 53-year-old man arrives in the ED at a quarter past eight, presenting with a strong headache, confusion and poor coordination. Minseok jumps on the case, following the paramedics as they wheel the patient into the room. A quick conversation with the paramedics reveals that the patient had been seizing shortly before the ambulance arrived. The credit card in his wallet says Park Bonhwa. They can’t get the confused patient to tell them whether that is indeed his name, but with no evidence to the contrary, Minseok assumes it is. A quick neurological examination doesn’t reveal any further symptoms, but there’s plenty of reason to suspect , and he sends Bonhwa to radiology for a CT scan.

While he waits for Bonhwa to come back from radiology, he finds a computer and looks up the patient's journal. He hasn’t had prior symptoms like the ones he shows now, but there’s a lung cancer diagnosis from about a year ago with chemotherapy as the primary treatment. Minseok notes it all in the back of his mind, but when he gets the radiology results, there’s no hemorrhaging and nothing that suggests a thrombus. is off the list. As he walks the hallways of the ED to get back to Bonhwa, he considers whether it could be metastases from the lung cancer.

“How are you?” he asks as he enters the small room Bonhwa occupies. Bonhwa looks towards him with a droopy smile and tries to answer, but hasn’t gained any more clarity than when he arrived. He doesn’t know what day it is nor where he is. There is definitely something wrong in that brain of his.

“My head hurts,” Bonhwa repeats over and over again. Minseok believes him, but he can't give analgesia yet, or he won’t be able to assess whether or not Bonwha's condition worsens. It’s a dilemma of emergency medicine, but the challenge of diagnosing difficult cases like this was the thing he fell in love with many years ago on his first ED rotation as an intern.

Minseok presses two fingers down Bonhwa’s cervical spine to assess whether or not the symptoms might stem from there, but Bonhwa doesn’t react much. Okay, so not a spine injury. His cancer spreading seems most likely now that he has ruled out .

Another call to radiology and he begs his way to an MRI as quickly as possible, but an hour later when it’s done and the results are clear, he’s not any closer to a diagnosis than he was when Bonhwa first arrived. The MRI is negative, there are no metastases in his brain and is now definitively ruled out. Nurse Seo enters and sends him a curt nod before she turns to the patient. She has always been a little straightforward and severe, but Minseok likes working with her. There’s never any nonsense with her.

He leaves Bonhwa with Nurse Seo and walks back into his office to get a journal he keeps stored. He could call neurology for a consult, but he’d rather not. He likes challenges, and though he has ruled out the two most common causes of Bonhwa’s symptoms, he’s not ready to give up yet. He has only just left his office with the journal in hand when his pager goes off with a code blue, indicating the room he left Bonhwa in. He sprints down the hallways, sliding as he turns corners, and arrives 30 seconds later to see Bonhwa seizing violently.

“,” he mutters and hurries towards the bed to help Nurse Seo manage the seizure. Another resident comes running but is needed elsewhere a minute later when a traffic accident is announced. For a few moments, Minseok is torn. As the chief of the ED, he wants to go and manage his employees and make sure every patient is seen in a reasonable time, but his heart as an emergency attending can’t leave Bonhwa alone now to make managerial decisions, and besides, he can trust his staff to handle the TA. His head nurse is excellent at assigning staff where they’re needed and the triage nurses are well-practiced at explaining wait times to less urgent patients.

When Bonhwa stops seizing he’s unconscious but his vitals are stable. Minseok makes sure Nurse Seo calls the respiratory technician to manage his respiration. He leaves the room for a moment and stands by the wall. There are staff rushing around him in every direction, but he doesn’t meet their eyes, just stands there and lets his mind run through every possible diagnosis that can cause Bonhwa’s symptoms. Minseok likes to think like this, likes to just observe the chaos as patients and relatives alike rush in and out of his department, getting treated for everything from sore throats and small cuts to life-threatening conditions.

An infection, he thinks. The signs of cerebral dysfunction could indicate encephalitis, an acute inflammation of the brain that could be caused by any one of a multitude of viral or bacterial infections. It’s rare in a man Bonhwa's age, but it’s the only possible explanation to his symptoms now. He turns on his heels and returns to Bonhwa’s room.

“Nurse Seo, call the lab and get me a CRP as fast as possible. I also need a spinal tap.”

She nods and turns back to what she was doing. Minseok turns his attention back to the patient. His chemotherapy must have lowered his immune system enough to make him vulnerable to an infection. It has already been too long since he first arrived. They need to get to the bottom of this, and they need to get there soon.

Nurse Seo hangs up the phone to the lab and turns back to what she was doing. Minseok sees she’s gotten the patient’s wallet and is pulling out the contents and laying them on a table.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“Looking for relatives. There are no details in his journal.”

Minseok nods and is about to turn away when something she places aside catches his eye. He turns back and picks up a photograph. It’s taken from above, of two kittens curled up in the lap of the person taking the photograph. The connection that’s been nagging just below the surface of his mind strikes him.

“Toxoplasmosis,” he says, and curses loud enough for Nurse Seo to raise a disapproving eyebrow.

30 minutes later he stands with the results in hand. The encephalitis is caused by toxoplasma gondii, a parasite carried by cats. He has just asked Nurse Seo to put up a combination of pyrimethamine and sulfadiazine in his IV line and some folinic acid. That will kill the infection that’s causing his encephalitis and help Bonhwa’s immune system fight the parasite. It doesn’t take long before Bonhwa starts regaining consciousness.

It’s not often Minseok meets a rare case like this and he smiles a little as he leaves the room. There’s nothing that beats the feeling of succeeding in treating a patient with a less common illness without having to consult other specialists. He nods to the nurses he meets on his way back to the large screen that oversees their patients, only to find it’s gone down. Oh well. Just another normal day in the ED.

“Have anything less intense for me?” he asks his head nurse. 

“Less intense?” she questions and looks through her computer screen. “Is anything the matter? You don’t usually take the smaller cases.”

Minseok brushes her question off without even really registering it, the way he always does when anyone asks him something approaching personal. It’s a habit so deeply ingrained he doesn’t even realise he’s doing it anymore.

“Everything’s fine.”

---

12 straight hours of having to be constantly available at a moment's notice is both inconvenient and, if it’s a busy shift with a lot of calls, can be very draining, but Yixing never minds his on-call shifts, because they give him an extra chance to see Songmi. Though they work in the same hospital, Yixing is usually on the oncology floor while his wife is in the emergency department, so their paths don’t cross unless Yixing is on call or they manage to make their breaks coincide. Despite this, Yixing knows that he and Songmi are famous in the hospital for being the “work couple”, and when they’re seen together, they often get fond smiles or knowing looks from colleagues who have followed their hospital romance. Luckily, neither Yixing or Songmi mind being the subject of gossip. If one of the first stories new interns are told is how they fell in love at first sight on Yixing’s first day as a first-year oncology resident freshly-arrived from China, his eyes meeting those of the pretty ED nurse over the feverish body of a neutropenic patient, and how they got married two years later, and now, nearly a decade on, are still just as in love as they were on day 1 - well, it’s all true, so what’s the problem?

So when Yixing is hauled from the depths of a research study by the obnoxious beeping of his pager, instead of the irritated sigh one might hear from another on-call doctor, a little smile tugs at his lips. Songmi is on shift today, and though they’re unlikely to have time to do more than exchange smiles, that’s still enough to make Yixing’s day ten times brighter.

His pager says STAT, which indicates an immediate assessment is needed. There’s a whole list of conditions an oncologist might have to handle in the ED, but a STAT call, as opposed to simply an urgent call, narrows down the list somewhat. He jogs down the hall and manages to catch an elevator by sticking his foot between the closing doors. They bounce off his polished shoe and slide open again, and he nods apologetically at the startled visitors inside. As the elevator descends to the ground floor, he runs through the possibilities in his head. He’s probably looking at a neutropenic fever or a hemorrhage that the patient’s cancer is making complex to control with surgical intervention. While neither of these things is good, he’d prefer the neutropenia. Uncontrolled bleeds are both messy and very difficult to solve in an immunosuppressed cancer patient.

He arrives in the ED and finds it nearly as busy as he’s ever seen it. There are doctors, nurses, radiology technicians, orderlies, patients and family members everywhere, there are several ambulances with their lights flashing outside at the ambulance bay, and it’s extremely loud. A glance towards the trauma bay tells him there’s probably just been a traffic accident with multiple victims, putting extra pressure on the ED, who aren’t staffed to handle as many patients in the typically quieter mornings. That’s not his concern though. He looks around to find someone who’ll tell him where his patient is, but the only person who’s not rushing around like the entire world depends on where they’re going is another doctor who’s just walked in behind him and is looking rather how Yixing feels - stunned.

“What’s going on?” Dr. Byun asks him. Yixing’s met the always-friendly plastic surgeon a few times here and there, and Songmi knows him quite well through ED work. She’s told him Dr. Byun is the best in the hospital at closing c