Sehun stands in front of a glass shop window, hands pushed deep into the pockets of his black woolen coat, nose and mouth buried in a soft, orange plaid scarf. It’s the last day of October, and the air temperature seems to have finally realised what season it is and decided to take a sudden plunge of a good fifteen degrees overnight. The air is cold and crystalline, and he’s grateful that Mikyung messaged him this morning and made him promise to wear the new scarf she mailed him a couple of weeks ago. The 10-minute walk from home to work would have been a heck of a lot colder if she hadn’t reminded him. He rarely remembers to check the weather forecast before leaving his apartment. A smile softens his eyes. Mikyung is busy travelling all around the southern region of Busan, finding stories to report on, but somehow she always finds the time to check the weather in Seoul and warn him if it’s going to be particularly hot, cold, or rainy. For what must be the thousandth time, he wonders what he ever did to deserve her, and the usual ache of missing her tugs at his chest. It’s close to four months now they’ve been living in different cities, and it hasn’t gotten any better. If anything, it’s worse.

The iciness in the air is stinging his ears. He burrows his chin deeper into his scarf and continues on his way. The display that had caught his eye was a Halloween-themed one, with carved pumpkins, spider-filled cobwebs and a multitude of bats. He’s aware that it’s Halloween today, thanks to that crazy paediatrician, Park Chanyeol, who had staggered into dermatology two days ago with his arms stacked so high with decorations he couldn’t see over them, fake cobwebs trailing behind him like a bridal veil. He’d dumped the lot on the dermatology reception desk, to the chagrin of the receptionist, and roped Sehun into helping him decorate the dermatology floor. Chanyeol must have given up an entire day off to make every department ready for the Halloween event he’s staging for the ward kids.

Trick-or-treating ward kids are fine, but Sehun has something more in mind. It’s only with the greatest difficulty that he has managed to stop himself mailing an envelope to Mikyung containing a toy spider that he picked up at a market stall a couple of weeks ago - it wouldn’t be the same without being there to see her reaction, he consoles himself - and his pranking instinct is feeling very thwarted by his own rare show of self-discipline. He needs to play a trick on someone or he’s going to end up doing something to Mikyung that he’ll definitely regret. She always punishes him by refusing to speak to him for whatever she deems is a length of time proportionate to his crime, and it’s the one punishment that can really make him regret his many misdeeds. He needs to talk to her every day, and she knows it.

Arriving at the hospital, Sehun makes his way through the entrance lobby and joins a small group of nurses waiting for the staff elevator. His ears start to sting as the warm air inside starts to warm them up. There’s a certain prank he’s been wanting to play for ages, and it’s Halloween today, so it’s the perfect excuse. All he needs is a partner in crime; someone who isn’t too serious and grown-up and weighed down with the troubles of work and life, like way too many doctors seem to be. Also someone who isn’t so exhausted by the demands of their specialty that they’re not willing to give up some free time to stay at work late for a bit of fun.

Sehun’s specialty is one of the least demanding when it comes to pulling long hours, because emergency dermatology cases are rare. He thinks about the other departments that are known for being easier on their practitioners, at least in comparison to things like emergency medicine or cardiology, and comes up with psychiatry and plastic surgery. He doesn’t know any psychiatrists personally, but he does know a plastic surgeon, and when Dr. Byun pops into his mind, Sehun hides his grin in his scarf. If there was ever a perfect partner-in-crime, it has to be Byun Baekhyun.

He has time before his first patient, so he rides the elevator up to the plastic surgery floor near the top of the hospital and checks Baekhyun's schedule with the plastic surgery receptionist. Baekhyun’s last surgery should be finished by three, so Sehun leaves a message with the receptionist asking Baekhyun to come down to his office when he’s done.

The day’s patients are over and he’s going through some notes when there’s a tap on the frame of his open office door. He looks up and grins in welcome at Baekhyun.

“What’s up?” Baekhyun asks with a brilliant smile. He crosses the room in a rapid gait that’s more like bouncing than walking and grabs the first thing he sees on Sehun’s desk - which happens to be the plastic pumpkin-shaped container filled with Halloween-themed candy. He fishes a couple of candies out and sticks them in his mouth, mumbling his words as he talks through them. “I see Chanyeol has descended upon dermatology too?”

“Yeah,” Sehun agrees, eyeing Baekhyun’s happily chewing face with trepidation. “Um, how much candy have you had today?”

“I’ve lost count!” Baekhyun says blithely. He holds out his hands flat in the air over Sehun’s desk. “Look. Sugar rush.”

Sehun looks. Baekhyun’s hands are actually trembling slightly.

“I pity whichever patient you were operating on today,” he says.

“Don’t worry, I waited till afterwards to get started,” Baekhyun tells him. “I have to make up for lost time. My girlfriend only lets me eat candy twice a year, on Easter and Halloween. I have to make the most of it.”

Sehun laughs. “Why only twice a year?”

“Apparently it makes me too hyperactive to handle on a daily basis,” Baekhyun says with a grin that’s just slightly too wide, and Sehun can’t help but think that Baekhyun’s girlfriend has a point.

He takes Baekhyun’s hands while they’re still in front of him and turns them over, inspecting the pale skin at the base of his wrists. This is how they’d first met. Baekhyun has chronic eczema, and he comes to Sehun when he gets flare-ups.

“Looking pretty clear,” he says. There are only a couple of small scaly patches on the left wrist, and the right is nearly perfect. His fingers are clear, too. “How are your arms?”

Baekhyun rolls the sleeves of his doctor’s coat up to show Sehun that the skin of his forearms and the inside of his elbows is as smooth and pale as most of his wrists. “Really good. I can’t remember it ever being this clear,” he says. “Scrubbing in is almost pain-free these days. But you didn’t call me over to check my skin, did you?”

Sehun grins. “How would you like to break your Halloween tradition of getting high on sugar and be my partner-in-crime instead?”

Baekhyun looks intrigued. “I always thought I’d make an excellent sidekick,” he says. “What do you have in mind?”

“I want to play a truly epic prank.”

---

Joonmyun watches the ultrasound monitor nervously. He’s brought his wife with him to the hospital this morning for her seventh-month pregnancy checkup. As usual, Yejin is calm as a tranquil ocean while the obstetrician moves the gel-covered probe over her rounded belly, while Joonymyun feels like he’s sitting on pins. How Yejin isn’t anxious is beyond him. To look at her, you’d never think this was her first pregnancy. She takes everything in her stride with the same quiet confidence that she brings to everything, while Joonmyun jitters.

He catches his breath as the ultrasound picks up a tiny curled-up hand, the side of his child’s head, the shell-like curve of his ear.

“Your son looks perfect,” Jongdae tells them with a smile, and Joonmyun lets out a sigh of relief. There’s been no reason to think otherwise, but Joonmyun has operated on far too many extremely sick babies to take anything for granted. He knows far too well just how many things can go wrong. Only two days ago he’d done heart surgery on a newborn with an atrial septal defect, and Joonmyun can’t help but worry that his own child might end up on an operating table.

“See? I told you everything would be fine.” Yejin squeezes his hand from where she’s lying on the exam bed and smiles at him. Joonmyun smiles back. Maybe it’s weird that his wife is the one comforting him over her own pregnancy, but that’s just the way they are. Joonmyun may be a surgeon, able to remain calm and collected in situations unimaginable to most people, but when it comes to his dear ones, nothing he can tell himself can quell his anxiety.

“Yejin is right,” Jongdae adds reassuringly. “The baby is healthy, and Yejin is fine too. There’s no reason to expect any complications.”

They hadn’t known each other before Yejin’s pregnancy, but over the past seven months Joonmyun has found a new friend in the obstetrician. Jongdae is so caring with all his patients, giving each one of them his undivided attention, remembering their names, the names of their partners, families, existing children, jobs or hobbies without even checking his notes, and he brings that caring nature into his friendships too. “Have you decided on a name yet? You were thinking Chinhwa or Yejoon, right?”

Joonmyun smiles. It’s another sign of how much Jongdae cares for his patients, remembering the potential names of their son from the last appointment a month ago.

“I’m leaning towards Yejoon,” Yejin says. “My parents are pushing for Chinhwa because of the auspicious meaning, but I like the combination of our names in Yejoon.”

“It’s a good, strong name,” Jongdae agrees. “What about you, Joonmyun?”

Joonmyun honestly doesn’t mind. As long as he’s born healthy, and Yejin is healthy too, she can call him whatever she likes, but he knows it’s better to be seen as having an opinion. He starts to say that he likes the name Yejoon too, but is interrupted when his pager goes off. He glances at it and his heart sinks.

“Is it an emergency?” Yejin asks.

“Yes. I’m sorry, I really wanted to stay, but -” he’s already getting up as he speaks. It’s a STAT call to the ED and he needs to run.

“Don’t worry. You know I understand.” Yejin smiles up at him, and he plants a quick kiss on her head and nods at Jongdae before heading quickly for the door.

When he gets to the emergency department a couple of minutes later, he finds it in an unusual state. Most of the time, the hospital runs like clockwork, every doctor, nurse, orderly or technician performing their specific set of tasks relating to their own patients, regardless of what’s going on elsewhere. Today, though, what looks like at least half the ED team have ground to a standstill, staring at the patient that’s just been wheeled in. It’s like there’s been a momentary time freeze.

Joonmyun walks past staring staff members until he comes into view of what they’re all looking at. When his eyes land on the patient, he finds himself, too, coming to a shocked halt. For a second he can’t quite believe what he's seeing, and his thoughts seem to echo with the murmurs of the gathering ED staff.

The patient is lying very still, eyes open and gazing at the ceiling. His respiration is slow and shallow, and there are multiple abrasions and lacerations on his face and on the muscular forearms exposed by a construction worker’s shirt rolled up to the elbows. None of that is what's drawn the shocked attention of every free nurse, tech, orderly and resident in the department. Like Joonmyun, they're all fixated on the 2-metre metal rebar penetrating the man’s chest. There’s a clear metre of rebar rising out of the front of his chest and another metre exiting out his back. How this man is even alive beats Joonmyun, but not only is he conscious, he sees from a glance at the monitor that his vital signs are currently stable.

He shakes off his temporary shock and steps forward. The emergency department chief sees him and begins to relay the information he’ll have gotten from the paramedics. Joonmyun isn’t surprised that Minseok is taking charge of this case. In his ten years of cardiothoracic experience, he’s never seen anything like this, and he doubts anyone else in the room has either. Minseok certainly won’t be entrusting this one to a resident.

He starts a brief examination while Minseok explains the history. 32-year-old Yoon Sungyong fell approximately six metres at a demolition site and landed on a pile of scrap metal, the rebar penetrating his chest on impact. The paramedics have applied a bulky bandage to his chest in an attempt to stop the rebar from moving and causing more damage, and two interns are kneeling beside the gurney and holding the back end of the rebar steady. Joonmyun knows why they’re doing this. The rebar is heavy enough that if it’s allowed to hang without support, gravity will cause it to fall right through the patient and out of his back. The presence of the rebar in Sungyong’s chest is currently blocking most of the damaged blood vessels, but if it falls out, he’ll bleed out within minutes.

Joonmyun’s first thought is that the bar must have miraculously missed the heart and lungs, slipping through a gap between the vital organs and not damaging anything crucial. From the position alone, it looks like it’s gone right through the heart, but Joonmyun can’t see how the heart can still be beating the way the EKG says it is if that’s true. He crouches down beside the interns and touches the rebar lightly. Even with them stabilizing it, he can feel a faint pulsatile sensation through his fingertips. He shakes his head in disbelief. Being able to feel the pulse through the rebar tells him that it has at least penetrated the mediastinum, probably the heart too, and the heart has, incredibly, decided to keep beating anyway.

Minseok has already ordered an emergency CT scan and an operating room for Joonmyun. While the patient is carefully transported to radiology, Joonmyun briefs his rapidly assembling surgical team on what’s to come. Everyone is tense and quiet, and the patient arrives a few minutes later. He’s intubated and prepared for surgery while Joonmyun, Minseok, and the radiologist, Do Kyungsoo, study the CT scan.

“The rebar has penetrated the left lung, see the left hemothorax and contused left lung,” Kyungsoo says, pointing at the relevant parts of the imaging. “As for the heart, you can see it transfixing the right ventricle, just adjacent to the interventricular septum. There’s also a small contusion at the diaphragmatic surface of the right liver lobe.”

“Unbelievable,” Minseok murmurs. Joonmyun’s feelings exactly, but the contrast CT isn’t lying. He gets the imaging directed onto one of the screens in the OR and lets out a long, slow breath.

“CPB?” Minseok asks, and Joonmyun nods. A cardiopulmonary bypass - purposefully stopping the heart and lungs and letting a machine take over their function while he gets this thing out of Sungyong - is the only way he has even a remote chance of survival.

“Staked through the heart.” The mutter comes from Kyungsoo. “Hope he’s not a vampire.” Joonmyun sees a flash of a smile cross Minseok’s face at the dark humor. He’d normally crack a grin himself, but he’s too focused on the long and complex surgery he has ahead of him.

He’s aware that he has an audience as he performs the CPB. The operating theatre has an observation room on an upper level, a long window above Joonmyun’s head giving onlookers a good view of the working surgeons and the surgery screens. He doesn’t think much about it. Doubtless the senior surgeons and hospital directors are interested in this extremely rare case, and how he, as one of the youngest attending surgeons on the hospital staff, will handle it, but Joonmyun only has thoughts for what he’s doing. The CPB is a standard procedure, one he performs regularly when he’s doing heart surgery. The chest impalement, though, is a whole other story. He's trained for it in theory, but actually doing it is a once in a lifetime event.

When the CPB machine is set up and doing its job, Joonmyun and the senior resident assisting him open the chest and drain nearly a liter of blood that has collected in the left pleural cavity surrounding the damaged lung. Now he can see exactly where the rebar has gone. Through the pleura, between the upper and lower lobes of the lung and into the side of the pericardium, through the anterior wall of the right ventricle of the heart, then exiting through the other side. Across the table, his senior resident’s eyes are wide behind their binocular loupes.

“Come and have a closer look,” Joonmyun tells the two interns on their internal medicine rotation who are standing against the wall. At this stage in the procedure, the patient is as stable as he’s likely to be, and there’s time for the junior doctors to get a good look at something they’re unlikely to see again in their careers.

It’s time for the most dangerous part of Joonmyun’s task. A couple of nurses brace the patient’s chest and torso, and Joonmyun and his senior resident carefully pull the bar upwards on the same diagonal angle it went in. Hand over hand the bar comes out, and once it’s removed and safely handed off to waiting assistants, Joonmyun and his resident thoroughly wash the ventricular cavity and begin the long process of finding and repairing the multitude of injuries the rebar has made. As time passes by, his audience slowly decreases, the excitement of seeing the rebar removed replaced by long hours of careful, careful probing, patching and suturing. Every so often a theatre assistant dabs the beads of sweat away from Joonmyun’s forehead with a towel. He barely notices her do it. He’s locked in, intently focused of finding every damaged area and putting it all back together. Impalement i