It’s on Jongin’s third bite of Junmyeon’s birthday cake that he feels his lips start to tingle. He pauses mid-chew, the noise of the others laughing, teasing and chattering fading out as he focuses in on the sensation. The tingling grows rapidly stronger and spreads into his mouth, painting a metallic taste across his tongue, the inside of his cheeks and the back of his throat.

, Jongin thinks.

He wants to spit the cake in his mouth out, but he can’t. That would be so rude, and draw everyone’s attention to him, and he’d have to try and explain why he’s just spat out the cake Kyungsoo baked. Worst of all, he’d surely hurt Kyungsoo’s feelings, and that is something Jongin would rather die than do.

He swallows the rest of his mouthful and moves his tongue around the inside of his mouth, trying to clear it of crumbs. He can feel his gums are already swelling, growing itchy and rising away from his teeth, and his throat is tightening. He looks in dismay at the cake on his plate. He’d asked Kyungsoo what kind of cake it was, and Kyungsoo had just said “chocolate”. Jongin had given the cake his usual careful inspection and hadn’t seen any nuts sprinkled on top of the icing or hidden inside the spongy interior. A chocolate cake is a chocolate cake, right? It all seemed perfectly safe.

It still seems safe on second inspection. There are no nuts hiding inside this cake as far as he can tell. He can’t figure out what’s gone wrong. Could it have gotten contaminated somehow when Kyungsoo was making it back at the dorm? It’s almost impossible. The nuts he’s allergic to are the expensive kinds; hazelnuts, walnuts, brazil nuts, chestnuts. None of the guys ever buy them, and even if they did, how would they have made their way into Junmyeon’s birthday cake?

His throat is starting to itch and his stomach lining feels like it’s burning. Jongin has felt these sensations often enough throughout his life to know what they herald, and his heart starts to beat faster. If he doesn’t do something, he knows the fiery feeling in his stomach will turn to nausea and then vomiting, and the itchy throat will grow ugly red weals and swell until he can barely breathe.

This cannot happen. But it’s not only the impending medical emergency that has Jongin near panic. It’s because he's so ashamed of his allergy.

He knows this deep sense of shame is illogical, yet is none the less powerful for that. The idea of having to tell his group members that he’s having an allergic reaction makes him feel like a stupid kid who can’t take care of himself. He can’t bear the idea of the dramatic reactions he’ll get if he explains to them that this allergy is not just going to give him a rash or make him puke, it’s going to swell up his airways and lower his blood pressure and maybe even stop his heart. He can’t bear to have Kyungsoo find out that the cake he made is killing Jongin. He can’t bear to ruin Junmyeon’s birthday party with his stupid condition and wreck the first opportunity his group members and best friends have had to relax and hang out together in months.

The panicky thoughts keep crashing through his head, but he manages to keep his face calm. He pulls his wallet from his pocket and hides his hands under the table while he opens it and finds the small pack of pills he keeps inside—they're antihistamines, allergy relievers intended for sufferers of hay-fever. In his backpack under his chair is a glasses case which does not contain glasses, but instead hides an automatic injector called an Epipen that will deliver him a pre-loaded dose of the drug epinephrine—but Jongin is not going to use that. The Epipen could save his life if his body goes into shock, but if that happens, he needs to go to hospital, because anaphylactic shock could kill him.

He's not going into anaphylactic shock. Not here, not now. He refuses to believe it. It's not happening, and he doesn't need to use his Epipen.

He slips two of the tiny pills into his hand, and when everyone is laughing at a joke Baekhyun has just cracked, he pops them into his mouth and dry-swallows. The pills are the strongest you can get and the dose is one pill per 6 hours, but he doesn’t care. Two pills isn’t enough for a critical overdose, and his body needs the drug. The allergy symptoms are progressing too fast. He needs to stop them right now.

“Don’t you like the cake, Jongin?” Sitting next to him, Junmyeon has noticed his barely touched slice, where everyone else has already demolished theirs. Across the table Jongin sees Kyungsoo’s eyes go to his plate too. He sees the faint disappointment cross Kyungsoo's face, and a pang of guilt strikes him.

“No, I love it,” he says quickly. “I’m just making it last.” He hesitates, trying to find a way to ask his question that won’t sound weird. “Does it taste a bit different to usual, hyung? It’s so good, but I think it tastes a little different to normal chocolate cake?”

Kyungsoo smiles at him, one of the rare bow-shaped smiles that lightens his serious face and always makes Jongin’s heart feel warm—at least, when it’s not trying to flutter its panicky way out of his ribcage the way it’s doing now. “I used a blend of flours,” he says. “I mixed hazelnut flour in with the regular. I’m glad somebody noticed! This lot just inhale anything in front of them without even tasting it.”

Hazelnut flour. Jongin’s heart plummets into his shoes even as he finds a smile to send back at Kyungsoo. Trust Kyungsoo to get all fancy and mix hazelnut flour into an innocent-looking chocolate cake. But it’s not like he can blame him. It’s Jongin’s fault for never telling anyone about his allergy. He’d thought he could manage it by being careful, but he hadn’t counted on being caught out like this.

The one other time in the years he’s been with EXO he felt the first sign of an allergic reaction, the antihistamines had been enough to prevent the symptoms from progressing. But that had been from only touching a piece of seed-bread with his fingers—he hadn’t even put it in his mouth because he’d seen the walnuts baked into the crust in time. This time he’s swallowed three full mouthfuls of hazelnut flour. Are antihistamines—even a double dose—going to be enough to save him?

They have to be. They just have to be. The shame is so crippling that he feels like he would rather die than admit to needing help. He tries to calm himself down. Nobody can tell what’s going on inside him. They can’t see the fiery burning in his stomach, the swollen gums behind his teeth, the itchy red welts rising up underneath his high-necked sweater. Nobody will know if he keeps quiet. He just has to endure the suffering until the antihistamines kick in.

His eyes are itching like crazy and feel like they’re full of sand when he blinks, but he can tell they’re only swelling a little so far. Nobody will notice that, not unless they look at him carefully. He desperately wants to rub them, but he knows that once he does that it will really be the end. Rubbing his eyes will make them swell into huge, puffy balls that he can barely see out of, impossible to miss by anyone who even glances at him. He has to resist. The antihistamines will work soon. They have to.

He tries to join in with the laughter of the others, but it’s hard to focus when his body is so itchy, his mouth and throat and stomach are so extremely uncomfortable, and panic is making his heart pound and his hands shake. At least, he hopes it’s just panic that’s doing that and not a more serious symptom. He takes a careful breath and tries to assess his airway. His throat feels tight and swallowing is painful, but he can still breathe. The symptoms aren’t getting worse. The antihistamines must be starting to work.

“Aren’t you going to eat that?” Sehun, on his left, is eyeing his leftover cake. Jongin feels a surge of relief. Maybe he can swing this so that he can get out of eating the rest of the cake without hurting Kyungsoo’s feelings. He glances at Kyungsoo and when he sees he's engrossed in an intense-looking conversation with Yixing, he slides his plate along the table and swaps it with Sehun’s empty one. He gives his friend a conspiratorial smile, and Sehun grins back at him and begins demolishing the rest of Jongin’s cake.

“Feeding the maknae, huh?” The quiet voice on Jongin’s other side is Junmyeon. The leader smiles at him. “You don’t have to give him everything he wants, you know. He’s only a couple of months younger than you.”

“I know, but he looked hungry,” Jongin shrugs, glad it’s Junmyeon that’s noticed and not one of his louder hyungs like Chanyeol or Baekhyun. Those guys seem to just blab out the first things that fly into their heads at top volume.

Five minutes later, Jongin can still breathe, and nobody has gasped in horror when they look at him, so he assumes the reaction hasn’t caused his face to swell up into the classic anaphylactic balloon. This is typical of his reactions, especially now that he’s an adult. He tends to get more internal symptoms than external ones. Speaking of internal symptoms, though, the acidic burning in his stomach is starting to convert to nausea. His body does not want that hazelnut flour inside it, and Jongin knows with a growing sense of inevitability that he’s going to throw up before long. It’s not uncontrollable yet, but it’s going to happen.

He stands up, and when Junmyeon glances up at him, he mumbles “bathroom”. Nobody pays any attention as he makes his way out of the private room in the restaurant and down a quiet corridor into the men’s room. He leans close to the long mirror above the sinks to inspect his reflection and is relieved to find that his face looks almost normal. His eyes are red and a little puffy, but he could easily excuse that with tiredness. He bares his teeth and inspects his swollen gums, then pulls the neck of his woolen sweater down. What he finds there is not so reassuring. There are multiple long, raised red streaks all the way down his throat and up behind his ears, where they’re hidden under his hair. The welts look livid and painful.

Jongin pulls the neck of his sweater back up, goes into the nearest toilet stall and locks the door. He leans against the cold wall of the stall and closes his eyes. Why did this have to happen—and on Junmyeon’s birthday, of all things? He’s done so well up to now.

His stomach lining feels like it’s on fire, and sweat breaks out across his temples as his nausea increases and acid rises in his throat. He bends over the toilet and retches experimentally, but nothing happens. Sighing a little, he rolls up his sleeve and sticks two fingers into his mouth. It’s going to happen anyway, he might as well get it over with. He pushes his fingers against the back of his throat and hits the gag reflex. Combined with his already unsettled stomach, it’s all the encouragement his body needs to begin rejecting hazelnut-flour birthday cake with a vengeance, along with the rest of the birthday meal he’d eaten before it.

Such a waste, he thinks vaguely amidst the horribleness of repeated vomiting. Still, it’s definitely better out than in. His body thinks hazelnut flour is poison. Getting it out of him must be a good thing. Perhaps he should have induced vomiting earlier. But then he’d have thrown up the antihistamines too. Though he’s probably thrown them up now anyway.

He hangs onto the toilet bowl, his body shaking. He’s a little lightheaded, but he thinks it’s just from throwing up so much. His eyes and nose are streaming, and he grabs some toilet paper and wipes his face. He sits down on the floor to regain his composure and the toilet automatically flushes. It’s probably just his throat feeling sore from vomiting, but he thinks it’s a little harder to breathe.

He tries to decide whether it’s safe to take another antihistamine. Some of the drug will h