It’s a little past five in the morning when Kyungsoo is woken by his cellphone ringing on the bedside table in the radiology call room. He sits up and fumbles blearily for the phone, accepting the call and holding it to his ear while he s for his glasses with the other hand.

“On-call radiologist,” he croaks, uncaring that he sounds like he’s just woken up. He has, after all. The emergency department resident on the other end tells him they have a hit-and-run victim and passes on the basic details of her age, history and suspected injuries. They’ve already ruled out abdominal bleeding via FAST scan - the ED staff can perform the rapid ultrasound on their own without waking Kyungsoo up - but the resident is worried about the patient’s head injury, and wants a CT scan to confirm there’s no significant head trauma that might need neurosurgical intervention.

“We incidentally discovered that she’s pregnant while doing the FAST scan, so we got an obstetric consult,” the resident tells him. “Dr. Kim thinks she’s around nine weeks. The patient wasn’t even aware of being pregnant. So far she hasn’t shown any symptoms of traumatic miscarriage, but Dr. Kim will accompany her to radiology just to be safe.”

“Sounds good,” Kyungsoo says, pushing his blankets aside and shoving his feet into his rubber slides. “Send her up.”

He wakes up the radiographer, then wanders out into the department and turns on the monitors for the computers he’ll need to view the CT head scan. It’s been a quiet night and he’s gotten a solid five hours of sleep, unusually good for a night shift, so it’s not too hard to wake himself up along with the monitors. The patient arrives a couple of minutes later on a wheeled bed, accompanied by an orderly and the on-call obstetrician. Kyungsoo sighs a little when he sees that this particular Dr. Kim is, as he’d suspected, Jongdae. It’s probably coincidence that they so often seem to be on night shifts at the same time, but sometimes he can’t help wondering whether the other man ever sleeps. Jongdae smiles a greeting at Kyungsoo as they take the patient into the scanning room. She is conscious and appears calm and stable.

Once the patient is in place, they clear the room and the radiographer takes the images. Jongdae keeps his eyes on the patient through the viewing window. Kyungsoo is pleased the emergency department resident thought to call him. They’ve been a lot better with this kind of thing in the last few months, he realises. Less pointless requests for imaging, more consulting with him rather than just ordering, and he hasn’t had a repeat of an unstable patient being sent through without medical supervision. It seems Minseok has finally drummed some sense into his staff. Jongdae’s presence is reassuring in case the patient does suddenly start to have issues with her pregnancy due to the impact trauma, though she probably would have shown signs of it already by now, if she was going to.

The nurse and orderly head back into the room to collect the patient. Jongdae stays beside him, glancing at the screens when the images come up, then looking back at the patient. Kyungsoo carefully reads the image slices, following his usual process and clearing each system methodically.

“How’s it looking?” Jongdae asks when he’s looked through all the slices.

“No brain swelling or bleeding, no skull fractures,” Kyungsoo replies. “Everything looks fine.”

“Oh, good. No surgery then. Much safer for the baby if we can avoid general anaesthetic.”

Kyungsoo nods and calls the ED to let them know the result. Jongdae gestures for his phone when he’s done talking, and Kyungsoo goes back to the computer and describes the images in the system while Jongdae talks, one ear taking in the obstetrician telling the ED resident that the patient is stable and it’s been long enough since her accident that he’s reasonably certain she won’t miscarry due to the impact trauma, so he won’t need to accompany her back to the ED. She’ll probably be able to go home with painkillers for her bruises and minor abrasions. She’s very lucky, Kyungsoo thinks.

With all his tasks regarding the patient done, he switches the monitors off and takes his cellphone back from Jongdae. He looks tired despite the smile he gives Kyungsoo, and there’s a worried upwards slant to his eyebrows that Kyungsoo doubts is due to the patient he’s just cleared.

“Busy night?” he asks.

“I’ve been in the labour ward all night,” Jongdae tells him. “Three back-to-back deliveries, and then this call. No time to sleep.”

“You going to get some now?”

“No, it's already morning,” Jongdae says, glancing at the clock which is ticking close to 6 am. “There’s only an hour left of my shift anyway.”

“Same here,” Kyungsoo says. “Want a coffee?”

“God, yes,” Jongdae says fervently, so they go down to the radiology break room and Kyungsoo makes coffee for them both in the mismatched mugs while Jongdae flops down on one of the couches around the coffee table. By the time Kyungsoo brings the drinks over, Jongdae has pulled a sheaf of what looks to Kyungsoo like hand-written cue cards from the pocket of his coat, looking rather battered around the edges, and is frowning down at them, lips moving silently as his eyes flick along the lines of cramped handwriting. Kyungsoo puts Jongdae’s coffee on the coffee table in front of him and sits beside him, leaning over to read what’s on the cue cards. Fetal heartbeat monitoring, he recognizes the information easily.

“What’s this for?”

“I’m speaking at the continuing education session next month,” Jongdae says. “I have to do the December one as well. I want to memorize my whole presentation, because I’m terrible at them and the better I know the material, the less chance I have of screwing up.” He looks up at that, meeting Kyungsoo’s eyes with a rueful smile. “You probably remember me trying to present that case at the Morbidity and Mortality conference last year.”

Kyungsoo does remember, very clearly. It had been painful to watch. He’d had difficulty right from the start, and as the presentation went on his breathing had gotten messed up and his voice had begun to shake so badly that Kyungsoo had thought he was going to break down and cry in front of the whole lecture theatre. The idea of Jongdae going through that on a regular basis is alarming, not to mention how awkward it is as an audience member to watch someone struggle so badly.

“You told me back then you have difficulties with public speaking,” he says. “Why are you doing education sessions?”

Jongdae bites his lip. “My new chief asked me to. I couldn’t really refuse.”

“I’m sure if you explained, though, he’d understand?”

Jongdae gives a hollow laugh. “I tried, but he just said I can’t back out of things I don’t like doing, that I have to pull my weight on the team. He’s right, too. I shouldn’t make other people take up my slack just because I find something hard.”

“If anyone pulls their weight on that team, it’s you,” Kyungsoo says, feeling rather heated about anyone even implying that Jongdae doesn’t do his fair share of work. It’s so blatantly untrue that it makes him kind of mad. “It’s not fair for him to make judgements like that when he doesn’t even know you. He doesn’t have any idea what you went through this year trying to keep your department running.”

Jongdae sighs. “Maybe not, but the fact is that I have to give these presentations. He’ll never respect me if I don’t face up to it.”

Kyungsoo frowns. The situation doesn’t seem right to him, but there’s really not anything he can do but sympathise. He’s not even in Jongdae’s department.

“Would you mind if I practiced a bit on you?” Jongdae asks after a few moments of silence.

“Sure, go for it,” Kyungsoo says. He sips his coffee while Jongdae stands up and goes to the other side of the table to face him, and begins reciting the information that is evidently written on his cue cards. He seems okay with presenting the information just to Kyungsoo, though he doesn’t make eye contact and his speech is rather jerky, like he’s focusing on getting individual words out rather than the meanings behind the sentences. He’s obviously memorized almost all of it already. The way Jongdae has structured the information and the things he’s included are interesting and useful, but he’s being let down by reading it out so robotically.

Jongdae finishes up and takes a deep, slightly shaky breath, looking anxiously at Kyungsoo. Kyungsoo smiles at him as reassuringly as he can. “It’s great,” he says. “Really good stuff. You obviously know the material well. It’d help if you made eye contact or used gestures, but it’s not necessary if you’re not comfortable doing that.”

“It’s okay when I’m just talking to you,” Jongdae says, dropping back down next to Kyungsoo and reaching for his now-cold coffee. “It’s when I have more than four or five pairs of eyes on me at once that I start to lose it, and there’s going to be about 60 people at this education session.”

“Maybe get a few more people together to practice on,” Kyungsoo suggests. “You often hang out with Chanyeol and Baekhyun at lunchtimes, right? Tell me when you guys are together and I’ll come too, and you can practice it on us over lunch. I know Minseok would be happy to help too, I’ll ask him.”

“Oh, that would be amazing. Thank you so much,” Jongdae says, looking so intensely grateful that Kyungsoo almost feels guilty. It’s such a simple thing to offer, it doesn’t deserve this much gratitude. “If you’re sure you don’t mind giving up your lunch break.”

“Of course not. We can still eat while you’re talking, anyway.”

“True,” Jongdae says, a smile flashing over his face. “Anyway, enough about me. Are you doing anything for Chuseok?”

“I have today and tomorrow off. Both sides of the family are from the Jirisan area. We’re going to drive down this morning and stay the night with my grandparents, and then stop by my grandmother’s grave to do the rites on the way back.”

“Oh, Jirisan is lovely,” Jongdae says wistfully. “I love the mountains. Are things any better with your mother?”

“I’m not really sure,” Kyungsoo says. “I haven’t actually seen her since the whole shaman debacle, but she hasn’t said anything to me related to marriage since then. I think I’m going to talk to her about it, though, if I can find a good time this holiday.”

“Are you going to tell her you’re aual?”

“No. I doubt she’d understand, and the label seems unnecessary. I just hope we can come to an understanding that she stops trying to set me up, lets me live my own life, and maybe drops some of her expectations. I’d like her to understand that I don’t need a romantic or ual partner to be happy, but that might be pushing it.”

“I hope it goes well,” Jongdae says. “You’re lucky to have parents who care. It’s sad that you feel uncomfortable with them because of this.”

Kyungsoo looks at Jongdae, rather surprised at the melancholy he hears in his voice. He feels like that statement has more weight behind it than simple concern for a friend. He tries to remember if Jongdae has ever mentioned his parents to him, and draws a blank.

“What are you doing for Chuseok?” he asks.

“I’m working the nights so I can spend the days with the kids while they’re off school,” Jongdae says. “Ahreum’s parents are here in Seoul and they’re not traditional, so we don’t have to do any rituals or go to ancestral lands. We’ll just take the kids over to their house on Friday. I think Ahreum has some activities planned too, not sure what. I’ll just go along with it.” He laughs, swallowing another mouthful of cold coffee.

“Take care of yourself, okay?” Kyungsoo says, and Jongdae gives him one of his sweet smiles.

“Don’t worry, I’m pretty good at getting by on a couple of hours’ sleep. Lots of practice.” Kyungsoo narrows his eyes at him, but doesn’t push it.

Jongdae gives up halfway through his coffee - it can’t be pleasant cold - and heads back up to his department, and Kyungsoo busies himself getting ready to hand over to the day staff who’ll be arriving soon. Once clocked out, he heads home on the subway. He has a couple of hours before his parents come to pick him up so they can drive down to Jirisan to his father’s parents’ house, and he has to shower and throw together an overnight bag.

It’s been over a month since he’s seen his parents. It’s not really that long - he’s an independent adult, after all - but Kyungsoo feels like there’s something heavy in the air between them when he comes down to where they’re waiting in the drop-off zone in front of his apartment building, dressed in his most comfortable jeans that have gone soft with too much washing and a plaid shirt. Kyungsoo’s mom gives him her usual squeezing hug, but doesn’t bring up anything he doesn’t want to talk about. Maybe Kyungsoo is imagining it, because he’s feeling awkward, and - not anxious, exactly, but apprehensive about the promise he’s made to himself to bring up the topic at some point during the holiday. He’d always rather let sleeping dogs lie, brush problems under the rug and pretend they don’t exist, but he remembers clearly what Jongdae had said to him after the shaman incident, and the impact those words had made. He can’t expect his parents to know how he feels unless he tells them, and he doesn’t want this rift between them to grow until it’s a vast chasm that can’t be bridged.

After he’s finished answering the usual questions about how work is going and whether he’s had any opportunities to advance in his career, he sits quiet in the back of the car, gazing out of the window and listening to the classical CD playing on the car stereo. Unusually, his mother doesn’t ask him if he’s met anyone recently. Kyungsoo remembers again the shock and yes, the worry that had come to her face as he’d refused to stay for the shaman’s psychic reading, or whatever the woman had been going to do for him, and wonders if it’s possible that his uncharacteristic flat refusal to go along with the ridiculousness has actually broken through some of the illusions she’s created around him.

The car ride from Seoul to his mother’s family’s home village in the Jirisan mountains takes about three and a half hours. They leave the city far behind and drive between smaller and smaller towns until they’re surrounded by some of the largest mountains on the Korean peninsula, clad in a thousand shades of green and diminishing into the distance in rows upon rows of misty blue peaks. Kyungsoo opens the window a little and closes his eyes, letting the cool mountain air play across his face. The hours of sleep he missed and the early start this morning catch up with him, and he falls asleep for the last hour or so of the journey, only waking up when his father drives onto the crunching, steeply-inclined gravel driveway of his maternal grandparents’ home.

The house clings to the slopes of a steep hill deep in the Jirisan mountain range. The village is tiny, only a single-lane road leading up the hill with simple houses branching off each side - mostly small farm holdings - and a well-facilitated community centre where the elders mostly spend their days, gossiping, playing go-stop, or relaxing in the massage chairs. There aren’t many people living here under the age of 60. There’s ancestral farm lands surrounding his grandparents’ house too, a couple of steep fields above and below the house itself. The upper slopes are planted with a variety of vegetables and the slopes below hold a small orchard of black chokeberries. Kyungsoo’s grandmother makes a very healthy juice from the chokeberries, terribly bitter, and Kyungsoo resigns himself to swallowing a few shots of it to make her happy before he escapes back to Seoul again.

Three people in their late sixties to early seventies appear on the wooden veranda at the front of the single-storied house at the sound of the car arriving, smiling and waving. They’re his mother’s parents and his father’s father, who lives in the nearest town and has driven over for the holiday. After the required round of hugs and grandparents squeezing his cheeks, Kyungsoo carries their bags inside, and then his mother goes into the kitchen to help his grandmother with the food while his father and two grandfathers talk over homebrewed beer. Kyungsoo looks out of the window at the vegetable plots. He spends the minimum amount of time with the older men he can get away with without being rude before escaping outside. He finds a couple of straw conical hats in one of the sheds and puts one on his head, then heads up the back hill with a bucket to do some weeding and insect-catching. He knows what to do. He usually spends most of his visits here, in the small terraced fields on his own. It’s quiet and peaceful in a way the city never is. Usually he gets his quiet time by shutting the city out, sound-proofing and light-proofing his apartment, but out here, nature is a sanctuary all of its own.

He’s halfway along a row of lettuces, pulling up weeds and squashing the bugs he finds that eat vegetables, when his phone buzzes in the pocket of his jeans. He pulls it out and finds a message from Baekhyun. Tapping on the notification, he finds it’s a selca taken with one of his CT techs, Chanmi, who’s laughing while Baekhyun sends the camera an expression Kyungsoo can only describe as betrayed. It looks like Baekhyun’s in the radiology department - he can see a glimpse of the smooth white donut of the CT scanner through the window behind them. Kyungsoo blinks, mystified, at the selca, until a moment later a message comes through. I came all the way from plastics to visit you for morning break and you’re not even here, you little traitor! I gave Chanmi your coffee as revenge, I hope you’re super jealous.

Kyungsoo can’t help but smile at the typical Baekhyun dramatics. Plastics is only two floors above radiology, it’s not exactly a mission. Recalling how Baekhyun had about being out in nature at the Busan beach party, he turns the camera on himself and takes a picture of himself under the conical straw hat with the rows of vegetables behind him. He sends the photo to Baekhyun and waits. Seconds later, his phone blows up with excessive punctuation marks and emojis expressing Baekhyun’s shock and great amusement, and Kyungsoo laughs to himself before tucking his phone away again and focusing on the weeding. When he reaches the chilli pepper vines, he finds that they’re ready to harvest, so he spends the rest of the afternoon harvesting them, then cutting them open, deseeding them and spreading them out to dry on the wooden veranda. It takes the entire afternoon, and when he’s done the veranda is more red than the brown of the wood below. His grandmother will make them into gochujang when they’re dry, enough to last the whole year.

The evening goes the same way as every Chuseok in the village goes. The meal is huge, the low table crammed with a vast variety of dishes, and several of his grandparent’s neighbours come over to share, the elders all sitting on the floor and chattering non-stop, reminiscing and drinking makgeolli out of aluminium bowls. Kyungsoo mostly listens, feeling like a child, but it’s not a bad feeling. When the party finally dies down, he lies in his quilts on the heated floor in the same room as his parents, and wonders how it is possible that no difficult subjects have come up for the entire day. It’s practically a miracle.

The next morning, Kyungsoo and his parents go to visit a tiny private temple at the top of another tiny village clinging to the side of another steep hill, half an hour’s drive through the winding mountain roads. It’s a small sub-cult of the Buddhist religion and just two nuns live there, one of them a distant cousin on Kyungsoo’s father’s side. The nuns greet them with their shaven heads and grey robes and beautiful smiles, and feed them citrusy homemade yuja-cheong mixed with Sprite - the juxtaposition between traditional and commercial makes Kyungsoo smile to himself - and black sesame bread. The nuns have a big garden too, even bigger than his grandparents’ land, and rely on volunteers to help them keep it up. They need to plant napa cabbages today, to grow and mature during the frosty mountain winter, and have trays and trays of seedlings ready to go in the ground. Kyungsoo’s father does some maintenance in the temple itself, and Kyungsoo and his mother load up the wheelbarrow with the seedlings and push it up into the terraced back field, where they rip off the black plastic that’s been preparing the ground over summer and start to plant the seedling cabbages.

They crouch opposite each other as they work their way along the furrows, the only words between them about how far the seedlings should be spaced. It’s quiet and beautiful and peaceful in the mountainside temple grounds, and although Kyungsoo would rather not disturb the peace and continue enjoying the refreshing change this makes from being surrounded by technology in the radiology department, he realises that he probably won’t get any better chance than this.

“Can we talk about something?” he asks. He glances up from the seedling he’s patting into the ground and meets his mother’s eyes as she looks up at him. “It’s about...well, I guess it’s kind of about what happened when you wanted me to meet the shaman, last month, and why I reacted the way I did.”

His mother pats the earth around her seedling. “I’ve been thinking about that, too,” she says. She doesn’t meet his eyes, but there’s a note of determination in her voice. “And I think I already know, darling.”

Kyungsoo is taken aback. “You already know?” Has she figured it out on her own, then, just from his reaction at the cafe? “I didn’t expect…” he trails off, scrambling to collect his thoughts. He’s imagined this conversation going in many ways, but this one had never even occurred to him. “Is that why you haven’t asked me anything about...girls and stuff, on this trip?”

His mother looks up to meet his eyes. She looks like she’s nerving herself up to say something difficult, but she’s smiling, too, and it’s a genuine smile, one that touches her eyes and makes the crows-feet at the corners go deep. She reaches out across the furrowed earth and takes his hand. They’re both wearing gardening gloves, so there’s no skin contact, but Kyungsoo is surprised enough at the gesture that it might as well have been. Awareness of the connection of their linked hands shoots up his arm and through his body.

“Yes. I worked it all out, and I’m so sorry, darling,” she says. “All this time I’ve been trying to get you together with a nice girl, but I never dreamed that you might want something different, and so I never saw how unhappy I was making you. Then I brought you to the shaman, and - well, I suppose it was the last straw, wasn’t it? You broke, and I was so shocked by it, because you’re never anything but polite and obedient, going along with whatever I ask of you. But the way you looked at me…you’re always so closed off, but you opened up then. You let me see you, and all I could see was pain, and I’d caused it.” She sighs. “I thought about it a lot after that, and I finally realised why it’s never worked out. Now that I know, I feel terrible for pushing so many girls on you. It’s no wonder you thought you couldn’t say anything. It’s all my fault.”

“No, it’s not…” Kyungsoo starts, trailing off as he tries to find words. He’s so astonished he can barely think straight, let alone form coherent sentences, but a strange sense of lightness is spreading inside him. He’d expected to have to explain and argue his way through this, to face resistance or even rejection. This is more than he’d ever dared to hope for. “I mean, it’s not all your fault. I never tried to tell you, I just pulled away and hoped my problems would disappear if I ignored them long enough. Then something Jongdae said made me realise that what I was doing wasn’t fair to you. He made me see that I couldn’t expect you to read my mind, and that I was creating a rift between us by not communicating, and I never wanted that.”

“Jongdae,” his mother repeats. There’s a softness to her eyes as she smiles at him. “Is that him?”

Him? Kyungsoo wrinkles his forehead a little. “Jongdae’s an obstetric surgeon at Hangang,” he explains, trying to remember if he’s mentioned Jongdae to his mother before. He doubts it. There’s not often any reason to talk about his colleagues by name to his parents, but maybe he’s said something at some point and forgotten.

“Oh my, another doctor! What’s his surname? What is he like? How old is he, where did he study? Tell me all about Jongdae,” his mother says eagerly. Kyungsoo stares at her, completely mystified. He’s getting a strong suspicion that he’s missing something critical here. He only mentioned Jongdae’s name in passing. Why is she fixating on him?

“Why do you want to know?”

His mother smiles at him. “Of course I want to know all about my son’s boyfriend.”

Kyungsoo loses his balance, toppling backwards from his squat to sit down on the earth with a thud. He barely misses squashing the row of cabbage seedlings behind him, but that’s the last thought in his mind as he stares at his mother’s smiling face. He opens his mouth, but the only sound that comes out is a faint croak. It doesn’t matter, because his mom is going on, and Kyungsoo knows from experience that he won’t get a word in edgewise until she’s said everything she wants to say.

“I support you, darling. I won’t lie, it took me a while to come to terms with it at first, but I did a lot of research - did you know there’s a website for parents of diverse children? - and I talked to the priest about it, and he told me the idea of homouality being sinful in and of itself in the Bible is a misinterpretation, and that in Christianity any relationship of mutual love is accepted, and our biology and views of gender make no difference to love. Being homoual doesn’t change you in any way, and it doesn’t change how I love you either. I know our culture is less accepting of this, in general, compared to some cultures, and I understand why you felt like you had to hide it. I’m so sorry that I’ve been making things even more difficult for you by not showing you any understanding.”

“I...well, thank you for that,” Kyungsoo manages to say. He feels like he’s just been hit very hard in the head, and also like he’s probably going to burst into hysterical giggles at any second. It does make sense, in a way, he supposes. He’s very obviously never been interested in women, so it’s not an illogical conclusion for someone to draw that he might be interested in men. What’s more shocking to him is that his mother, who’s been like a racehorse in blinkers for the past few years, chasing after her ultimate goal of getting him safely married off, had the capacity to even suspect that he could be gay. He would have put it beyond the bounds of possibility. It’s so typical of his mother, though, that once having had the idea, she’s seized the bit between her teeth and bolted with it, jumping to every possible conclusion along the way.

“That’s, um…” he tries again. His thoughts feel like laundry blowing away in a too-strong wind, and he’s having to perform mental gymnas