The rain hurls itself against the big window in Sohee’s lounge, the wind making a whistling noise as it howls around the eaves. Jongin glances up from his rice congee to watch the branches of the trees that line the suburban street sway. Experiencing the weather in Sohee’s apartment is different from when he’s in his own. Hers is the second floor of a house, but in his inner-city apartment block, he usually can’t even hear the wind unless there’s a seriously bad storm.

Today’s weather is due to an autumn typhoon that’s racing up Japan, the tail end of it just clipping the Korean peninsula. The Japanese are battening down the hatches, but here the winds aren’t high enough to cause anything more than a bad weather alert on people’s weather apps. All the same, as he looks at the sheeting rain falling outside, Jongin feels a faint sense of dread he can’t quite ignore. He always does in bad weather. In any kind of storm conditions, there are always more road accidents, no matter how carefully people drive. Jongin is the on-call orthopaedic surgeon today, so the chances are increased that he’ll have to deal with traumatic injuries.

Sitting opposite him at the kitchen table, Sohee smiles at him, her cheeks pushing her eyes up into the adorable eye-smile that never fails to make Jongin’s heart melt. She’s ready for work in her khaki cargo pants and polar fleece with the zoo’s logo, a thick raincoat with the same logo emblazoned on the back hung over the back of her chair. That’s one thing Jongin should be grateful for; at least his work is performed inside. The animals at the zoo still need feeding even in the pouring rain, and Sohee will spend much of her day battered by the elements.

“What are you doing today, baby?” she asks. “Coming here after your shift, or back to your place?”

Jongin on his lower lip, thinking. “I’ll come here if I can. I’m officially done at seven, but who knows in weather like this. If I’m going to be later than ten or so, I’ll go to my apartment.”

“You can come back even if it’s later,” Sohee says. “I promise I don’t mind.”

It’s not the first time she’s said this. “No, I don’t want to wake you,” Jongin says, like he always does. It’s true. No matter how much he’d love to slip into a warm soft bed with a warm soft Sohee in it after a long and tiring surgery shift, it’s hardly fair to her to be woken by a cold, exhausted doctor snuggling up to her at whatever godforsaken hour it is.

“You should move in with me,” Sohee says. Which is not the usual way this conversation goes. Nor is the uncharacteristic seriousness in her eyes. Jongin blinks at her. She’s half-joked about this before, but never this seriously; she’s always given him an out before. “You basically live here anyway. The only times you’re at your apartment is when you’re on night shifts.”

“Night shifts are a pain though,” Jongin mumbles. “It’s not fair to you if I’m constantly waking you coming or going.”

Sohee nods. “I get it, and I appreciate that you’re thinking of me, but honestly, Jongin, I am serious when I say that I don’t mind. Actually it’s more than not just minding. I miss you when you’re not here. It’s worth being woken up sometimes if it means I get to have you with me more. You being out at odd hours sometimes is something anyone in a relationship with someone working in a hospital must accept, and I want to have the chance to accept that part of you too, Jongin.”

Jongin doesn’t feel remotely prepared for this conversation. He hasn’t even finished his first coffee of the morning. His eyes are still half-closed, his hair still a gravity-defying bed-head explosion. He grabs his mug and takes a fortifying gulp.

“I mean,” Sohee says, “I get it if you still want your own space. I know you’ve been independent for a long time. But from how much we enjoy each other’s company, I’m not getting that feeling. Am I wrong?”

“No,” Jongin says, shaking his head quickly. “I don’t want space, I - I want to be with you more too.” He blushes, and then blushes more because it’s embarrassing to blush when he’s a grown adult. Confessing things like this should not embarrass him. Opposite him Sohee’s eyes soften in that look she gets when she thinks he’s being particularly adorable.

“Well, then,” she says. “It sounds like we’re both on the same page. I know it’s going to be a change, and that can be disconcerting, but there’s really no point in you paying rent on that apartment anymore.”

Jongin nods. He feels quivery inside, and he tries to put it into words, because communication is important. “I agree, I do. I’m just - it’s just that I’m still a bit...” he fidgets with the dangling string of the cotton hoodie he’d thrown on over his bare skin to eat breakfast in. “You know. Last time I lived with a partner didn’t - didn’t end so well. Not that I think that we’re like that at all, but moving in together is a commitment. It means we’re serious - and I am serious,” he hastens to say, not wanting her to think otherwise. His leg is bouncing too now. “I am so serious about you. I love you so much, and I want to take the next step, I really do. It’s just my stupid hang-ups bothering me -”

He stops talking, because Sohee has come around the table and cupped his face in her hands to kiss him. He closes his eyes, sliding his arms around her waist as they soften into each other. Sohee slips her arms around the back of his neck and sits down in his lap. God, Jongin thinks, looking down at her looking up at him, affection swelling inside him until he doesn’t know how he can ever possibly contain it all within him.

“It’s okay,” Sohee tells him. “I know this is a big step. Thank you for explaining your worries. But you know you don’t need to listen to those thoughts, don’t you?”

Jongin nods, already calmed by having her with him, by the soft weight of her in his lap. “I just wanted to tell you why I’ve been evasive about it,” he says. “Because the - the real me wants to be with you all the time. The real me is practically exploding with happiness that you want us to live together right now.”

Sohee giggles and pats his chest. “Then let’s listen to the real Jongin, shall we? Let’s not give power to those old worries anymore.”

Jongin nods, and lets out a slightly shaky breath. “Yeah. Okay.”

Sohee beams, and reaches up to kiss him again. Jongin cups his hand behind her head to deepen the kiss, and Sohee laughs and pulls back, shaking her head.

“We don’t have time for this, we’ll both be late to work,” she says. Jongin pouts, and she stands up and tries to flatten down his hair. A battle lost before it’s begun, as Jongin knows only too well. The only thing that will tame his thick hair once it’s like this is a full force shower-jet of hot water. “Come back here tonight no matter what the time is, and if it’s not too late we’ll talk more about it this evening, okay?”

“Okay,” Jongin says, eyes half-closing as she pats his hair like he’s a cat.

When Jongin leaves, about fifteen minutes before Sohee needs to go to the zoo in the opposite direction, he turns and kisses her goodbye at the door. “Drive carefully,” he tells her. “It’s really wet outside.”

“You too,” Sohee says. “See you tonight.”

Jongin drives carefully through the wind and rain. It’s nothing like as bad as the flooding they’d had in early summer, but the wind is still strong enough to buffet the car every now and again when particularly powerful gusts come through, and the roads are slick with water. Jongin’s heart sinks a little further as he listens to the radio and hears news of an accident on one of the main arterial highways south of the city. They won’t see victims from that one at Hangang, there are other trauma centres closer, but it doesn’t bode well for the day ahead.

He parks in the covered off-site hospital parking and hurries the half-block beneath his umbrella into the hospital, stopping to shake the raindrops off under the cover of the overhanging entrance before he enters the foyer. As he’s pushing the umbrella handle in to fold it up and store it in his bag, he gets a glimpse of someone sprinting umbrella-less up the steps. Just as he glances up the man slips on the wet tiles in front of the doors and starts to skid, arms windmilling. Jongin lunges to catch his arm and haul the smaller man upright before he falls, and belatedly realises the man he’s just saved from a potential trip to their own emergency department is Baekhyun.

“Whoa,” Baekhyun says, clutching at Jongin’s arm to regain his balance. “Sorry, thanks! I didn’t realise the tiles were so slippery.”

Jongin bites back saying that they’re probably only slippery if you’re trying to break the world record for the hundred-metre dash over them in wet shoes. “No umbrella?” he asks, though it’s fairly obvious from Baekhyun’s current state of drowned-rat that this is the case.

Baekhyun grimaces. “I forgot it and I didn’t want to go back for it, I have so much to do. I’m going crazy studying for my fellowship exam, it’s only two weeks away and oh, my god,” he scrubs a hand through his soaked hair. “It’s only two weeks away, enough said.”

Jongin can sympathise. “Exams ,” he agrees. “I had my final residency ones two years ago, and it was so stressful.”

“So stressful,” Baekhyun agrees as they fall in step, walking in through the doors and into the warm, noisy busy-ness of the lobby. “I had to take a bunch of time out earlier this year due to illness which doesn’t help because I should have been preparing all year. I mean, I should be fine, in practice I know everything I need to, but my stress levels don’t want to listen to logic.”

Jongin glances at him as they approach the elevators. He remembers Baekhyun’s illness. He’d been shocked at how sick the other man had looked at the flat party Sehun had brought him along to; a thin, silent shadow of the always-smiling doctor who had always seemed to be friends with every single person in the entire hospital. Now Baekhyun looks like himself again - or, mostly like himself, Jongin amends, a faint hint of unease creeping in as they wait for the elevators. Maybe it’s just the stress from his exams, but Baekhyun seems...off, somehow. Jongin can’t quite put his finger on it. Baekhyun looks cheerful enough, babbling to Jongin about how bad the weather is, and how busy the subway had been on the way here, and segueing into a description of the puppy Chanyeol’s police-officer boyfriend is getting to train into a working police dog - but Jongin senses an almost...well, if he had to put a word to it, he’d say an almost manic quality to Baekhyun’s chatter.

It’ll be the exam stress, probably. Jongin remembers how stressed he had been over his last ones. His hair had been in a permanent state of disaster with all the running-through it of hands he’d done. It wasn’t his normal state of mental health at all.

“Yomchi sounds adorable,” he manages to interject when Baekhyun takes a much-needed pause for air. “I love dogs. Maybe I’ll get one sometime, my girlfriend loves animals too.” He speaks the idea as he thinks it, feeling a rush of excitement and happiness as the possibilities of living with Sohee all the time finally open out to him. All the things they can do together as a couple who share the same space. The split-level she lives in has a back garden, with a big park nearby. It’d be much easier to take care of a dog there than in an apartment building.

“Oh, good idea! My boyfriend has a cat, the cutest cat ever,” Baekhyun says, beaming. “It doesn’t have a name though, Lu Han just calls it cat because he says it’s too snobby to have a name, but he’s from Beijing and speaks Mandarin so he actually calls it māo, which kind of turns into a name in Korean anyway.”

Jongin is still blinking at the news that Baekhyun has a boyfriend now, because he’s pretty sure that wasn’t the case the last he heard, but the rapid-fire chatter after it doesn’t give him a lot of time to process the fact. It’s all he can do to keep up. “Māo is basically a name,” he agrees. “Do you live with your boyfriend now?”

“No,” Baekhyun says, face falling so much that Jongin is startled. “I still live with Chanyeol and Yeonseok. Lu Han and I are still pretty new. But we’re so close already! He’s wonderful. I love him so much.” His eyes shine again, the mood shift so sudden that Jongin feels like he’s getting whiplash.

“I’m glad to hear things are going well for you,” he says as the elevator stops on the 4th floor and the plastic surgery department. “Lu Han sounds like a lovely man.”

“He is,” Baekhyun agrees, beaming at him like Jongin has just declared the man is God. “I don’t deserve him, but he makes me so happy.”

“I’m glad,” Jongin says again, then jams his foot into the closing doors. They bounce off his shoe and open again. “This is your floor, right?”

“Oh!” Baekhyun jumps and jerks around. “Oh yes, it is! Oh god, I have to study. Great to catch up with you, Jongin! We should have lunch sometime!” and he flies out of the doors and down the corridor like a small whirlwind, leaving Jongin feeling somewhat breathless.

He considers the whole interaction as he rises the single floor to orthopaedics and smiles his greeting to the receptionist, heading in the opposite directions to the ward rooms and down to the big shared workroom where the residents and fellows have their lockers and generally do their non-patient-facing work. That mood swing was so rapid it was almost alarming, but Jongin doesn’t really know Baekhyun well enough to know if that’s normal for him. Maybe he’ll ask Sehun. Sehun knows Baekhyun much better than Jongin does, he’d been Baekhyun’s dermatologist for years, but then again, Sehun isn’t around to see Baekhyun’s current behaviour for himself anymore. Jongin wonders if he knows Chanyeol well enough to ask him. The paediatrician always seems very friendly, and he’d taken Baekhyun in when he was ill, after all. A check-in probably wouldn’t be taken amiss.

He’s forced to put his musing aside when he enters the workroom and meets the night shift resident who’ll be handing over the overnight cases and the day shift residents who’ll be accompanying him on the morning ward rounds. They have their regular meeting, with nothing alarming reported from the night on the ward, and then they’re off to do the rounds.

Jongin and his trail of residents are on the second to last patient when his pager goes. Jongin glances at it and his heart sinks. Road accident. Just as he’d both suspected and dreaded. He leaves the senior resident to see the last couple of orthopaedic ward patients and hurries down to the emergency department, mentally settling himself into the clinical, detached mindset he must use when dealing with difficult cases. Trauma victims are always harder to handle, so very different to the scheduled electives he does where the patients are calm and well-prepared for what’s going to happen, and their pain is controlled.

The internal doors to the emergency department slide open for him and he’s immediately spotted by the triage nurse, who waves him over to the nursing station and points him towards a trauma bay. There he finds his patient, a female on oxygen and morphine, closed eyes already bruising above the mask, IV lines established by the trauma team. He can see at a glance that the injury to her legs and hips is catastrophic, and he hides a wince. Nobody’s leg bones should ever be in that position.

He doesn’t get to the patient’s side before Kim Minseok is waving him over to a nearby monitor. She’s been assessed by the emergency department staff already, so Jongin doesn’t need to do that; it’s the detail he needs, and the radiographs Minseok has already obtained will provide him with much of that information.

“Feet on the dash,” is all Minseok says when he glances up to meet Jongin’s eyes, and Jongin thinks, .

The X-rays are some of the most horrific he’s ever seen. He reads the images grimly as Minseok explains the case history he’s been given by the EMTs. Single-car collision, the car slipping on the wet road and hitting a concrete wall head-on. The driver and back-seat passengers have escaped with bruises and minor abrasions, but the woman in the passenger seat, with her feet up on the dashboard, had her knees thrown into her face by the deployed airbag, fracturing her eye socket and nose, dislocating both hips, and driving the necks of both femurs up into her pelvis. Both femurs have splintered from the neck of the bone down.

Jongin gazes at the images, his hands in the pockets of his white coat as he mentally runs through the possibilities for the surgery - or, more accurately, multiple surgeries - she’s going to need.

“I’m going to call my attending,” he says, after a couple of minutes of silence. He is a good surgeon, but this is more than he’s confident dealing with alone.

Minseok nods. “Go ahead. There’s no organ damage and the morphine is keeping her calm, so we’re not immediately concerned.”

Not for her life, perhaps, Jongin thinks grimly as he speed-dials Dr. Cho. But it’s going to be a very long time before this girl walks again. If ever.

Dr. Cho takes the lead on the ensuing complex trauma surgery, and Jongin assists the more experienced surgeon. He falls into his usual state of intense focus as he works, the kind that makes the time roll by unnoticed, marked only by the slowly increasing tension in his neck and shoulders that he barely notices through his focus. When they’ve done all they can in the first go, Dr. Cho leaves Jongin and Hyunshik, the assisting resident, to close up the two surgical wounds.

“It’s enough to make me call everyone in my family as soon as I get out of here and tell them never, ever, to put their feet on the dash,” Hyunshik says to Jongin over the unconscious, drape-covered patient, and the theatre nurse beside him nods, talking about phoning her daughters and passing the message on.

Jongin’s family comes to his mind too. A text to Taehee and Taeah certainly wouldn’t hurt. He can’t imagine Taeyeon ever putting her legs up on the dashboard, but she’ll be keen to hear about the case from the surgical perspective. Sohee, he can tell when he gets home later; she’s driving today, not a passenger. Then he blinks, realising how automatically he just considered his family as the Lees and his girlfriend, without even thinking once of his real parents.

It’s been a long time since Jongin allowed himself to think of his real parents. He pulls his mind away again.

When they’re finally done with closing up, Jongin looks at the clock and sees that it’s nearly six pm - they’ve been in surgery for eight hours. He’s not surprised, not with the extent of the injuries they’d been working on, and the loss of time while he’s focusing intently is something that ceased shocking him long ago. It does make him realise that he’s starving, having missed lunch, and when he says so to Hyunshik the other man grimaces and agrees, so they scrub out and head down to the cafeteria together to find some food.

Hyunshik, as he’d mentioned in surgery, calls his brother while they’re eating and describes the surgery in graphic detail, neither of them even remotely affected from the enjoyment of their food. Jongin shoots off a message to the family group chat with one hand, the other occupied with shoving noodles into his mouth, then calls Sohee. He could text her, but she should already be home, and although Jongin will be home too within the next couple of hours - barring any more unexpected trauma cases, of course - he feels like hearing the sound of her voice.

“Hi, baby,” Sohee says when she picks up, and at the sound of her voice Jongin feels the tension of the difficult and tiring surgery start to ease.

“Hey,” he says. “I’ve just come out of a long surgery, so I probably won’t be asked to go into another unless something really drastic happens. I’ll see you in a couple of hours.”

“Oh, wonderful,” Sohee says. She sounds so happy, and Jongin finds himself smiling. “Something happened at work today - it’s good news, don’t worry - and I really want to tell you all about it in person, so I’m glad you’ll be home tonight.”

“Oh, what is it?” Jongin asks.

“I just said I’ll tell you in person,” Sohee says, laughing a little, then more when Jongin whines about how it’s unfair and she’s made him all curious now, but she doesn’t budge. “I’ll tell you when I see you. Have you eaten?”

“Eating now. I was in surgery over lunch.”

“Okay, I’ll eat too then and maybe bake something for dessert when you get home. You feel like chocolate-chip cookies?”

“Is that supposed to be some kind of rhetorical question?” Jongin asks, and Sohee laughs again and promises to bake some.

When Jongin gets home, it’s stopped raining, though it’s freezing with the remnants of the cold storm air. He tugs his collar up and hurries up the garden path and in the front door, up the carpeted stairs past the ground floor flat where the landlady lives, and to Sohee’s door at the top of the stairs. Even halfway up the stairs, he can smell the delicious aroma of baking cookies. The koshi chime above the door sings its usual gentle song as he lets himself into the light and warmth, and Sohee appears from the kitchen as he’s taking off his shoes, one of Jongin’s hoodies reaching almost to her knees. She wraps her arms around his waist and nuzzles her nose into his chest.

“Welcome home.”

Jongin kisses the top of her head, thinking that yes, this is home for him. Not some lonely apartment in the inner city. Where Sohee is, is home.

Sohee puts her fresh-baked cookies on a couple of plates and makes sencha tea in a Japanese teapot, then carries everything into the living room on a tray. Jongin follows her around the place like a puppy, tired, but so much happier than he would have been if he’d gone to his own place. They sit down on the couch and Sohee crosses her legs yoga-style and turns towards him, her plate balanced in her lap. Jongin takes a bite of his cookie and hums, closing his eyes.

“Heaven. I’ve died and gone to heaven.”

Sohee grins at him. “You’re just hungry because you sk