Yixing stands at the end of a long, empty, silent hospital corridor. The walls are the familiar pale green most of the non-paediatric areas of the hospital are painted, and the shiny white vinyl floor reflects the fluorescent lighting set into the ceiling above, a repeating blurry sheen that stretches into the distance. At regular intervals on each side are ward room doors, interspersed with seating or equipment pushed against the walls. It’s a familiar sight, and yet somehow unfamiliar, almost surreal in its empty repetitiveness, in the way the corridor stretches on and on ahead of him, like it has no end. It makes Yixing feel strange. It’s almost like he’s getting déjà vu, which doesn’t make sense, because he knows he’s at work, where he always is.

Without his conscious decision, he’s walking down the corridor. It’s so long that it seems like it would take an eternity to reach the end of it. His shoes squeak against the vinyl and he looks down to find he’s wearing navy scrubs and rubber clogs. He doesn’t usually wear scrubs to work in, because he doesn’t regularly perform tasks that would make wearing normal clothes impractical. But here he is, in scrubs and clogs like he’s a junior resident again, and he supposes he must have had a reason to wear them today.

The doors are all closed, but Yixing knows there are patients waiting inside them. The sense of déjà vu grows more powerful. He has been here before. He has done this before. Each room holds a patient with cancer, sometimes with their family and friends, sometimes alone. They are all ages, from young children to working people to the elderly, from every kind of background imaginable - but here, they are all the same. They are all dying.

Yixing opens the first door and steps inside. The patient waits on the bed. Their family sits around them. Yixing doesn’t take in the details. He knows why he is here. He knows what he must say.

He delivers the news, and watches their world collapse.

He steps out, and resumes his walk down the endless corridor.

A second door. A second patient. A second world to destroy. Yixing leaves them sobbing, and continues his journey.

It is not Yixing who has given them this illness, but it is Yixing who, when the treatments do not work, has failed them. It is he who takes on the tears and the accusing looks. It is he who listens to the pleas to save me, doctor, save him, save her, save my mother, my brother, my wife, my child. It is he who must tell them he cannot.

Yixing’s heart feels like it is made of paper, and with every room he steps into, it is ripped a little further apart. He walks down the endless corridor, green walls on either side, blurry reflecting lights repeating beneath his feet. A distant wailing follows him down. It is the sound of grief.

In the next room there is a pregnant woman whose cancer is aggressive and progressing rapidly. Yixing tells her that she has a choice: she can abort her baby so that she can receive the radiation therapy that will save her life, or she can carry her baby to term, and die herself.

“How can I make that choice?” she begs him. “How?”

Yixing knows the correct medical answer. He must advise her to have an abortion. He doesn’t want to tell her this, but he knows he has to. This is what he was taught. But as he opens his mouth to speak, he realises that the woman in front of him is Songmi, and the child - children - he is telling her to kill to save herself are his own sons. The horror is so great that it wakes him.

He’s on his feet before he even realises he’s standing up, staring around his quiet office, taking in his bookshelf filled with medical texts and the artistic anatomical sketches on the walls and the blinds half-closed over the window without really seeing them, his heart pounding, his hands shaking. His eyes blur, and when he rubs them his hand comes away wet. He collapses down again in his desk chair and scrubs his face with his hands, rubs them through his hair, heart pounding and breath coming hard as he tries to control himself.

It was just a dream, but the emotions it raised in him are only too real. He doesn’t have to tell people they’re dying every day and definitely not all in a row like that - that was just a creation of his unconscious mind - but it happens often enough. Yixing is an oncologist, and many of his patients die.

He doesn’t really fear that Songmi will get cancer either. That’s another dream-fear, his subconscious messing with him. He knows the statistics, and the disease doesn’t run in her family - it’s so unlikely that it’s ridiculous to even think of it. His perception is affected by his job because he sees it so much. But he knows it could happen. It’s not impossible. It wouldn’t be the first time an unexpected health crisis has been thrown on him. From his near-death as a child because his haemophilia nearly made him bleed uncontrollably during a simple tonsillectomy, his father dying of a when he was still a teenager, the unexpected blow of his azoospermia and the recent internal bleed also caused by his haemophilia, Yixing has been through far too much to take anything for granted.

Yixing doesn’t talk about his patients who have died. Not once they’re gone. There are too many. It would be too depressing for anyone. But he remembers them all. Every one. They are a burden he carries within him every day, and every patient who dies adds a little more.

His eyes have stopped leaking, but his throat still aches, and so does his heart. He wants to see Songmi. He knows she’s fine, knows there’s no truth to the dream, but he still wants to see her. He wants the physical reassurance of holding her warm body in his arms. If they weren’t at work, he would tell her that he was struggling right now and let her comfort him, because he knows it’s not good for him to bottle things up when he feels like this. But she’s on shift down in the ED, and even though it’s lunch time, Yixing knows she won’t have time to look after him right now. The ED staff eat at the most random times, and Yixing falling asleep in his office chair and having a bad dream isn’t a good enough reason to pull Songmi out of the important work she’s doing. He can pull himself together. He must. He’s well-practiced at it, and even though it feels harder today than he can remember it ever feeling before, he must still do it.

He glances at the time in the corner of his computer screen. He’d nodded off for barely ten minutes. He’s not really surprised that he fell asleep. His insomnia has been brutal to him lately, stacking sleepless nights on top of each other until he’s walking through the days in a haze of exhaustion, eyes constantly burning with the lack of sleep. He picks up his phone from the desk, opening the gallery and tapping the folder where he’s saved the photographs he took of Songmi’s scans. He looks at the grey blurs, the earlier ones which had just shown one fetus, and then the more recent ones where Jongdae had circled the two babies for them. His children. For a while Yixing thought he would never get to have any, and now he is going to have two at once. He smiles through the dampness on his lashes.

“Baby A,” he whispers, echoing Jongdae’s words as he touches the little grey blob on the screen with a gentle fingertip. “Baby B.”

His mother had cried with happiness when Yixing had told her the news over the phone. Now he is doubly grateful that she’ll be coming to help them. Two newborns is going to be a huge challenge, but it’s one Yixing could not be more eager to tackle. Jongdae has told them the babies share a placenta, which means they are identical. He wonders what they will look like. He prays they will be healthy.

He swipes to the latest scan. The babies are now at 5 months gestation and they’re both positioned head-down. Their bodies are clearly formed, still tiny, but Yixing can zoom in on a visible hand, an ear, a nose. He loves them so much already, with all his heart, and because he’s already shaken from his dream, he feels his eyes tearing up again. The sadness and the happiness tug him in two directions, making him feel off-balance.

His phone rings in his hand, startling him a little. It’s the hospital switchboard, and when he answers it the calm voice of an administrative staff member tells him he’s wanted in the emergency department. Yixing tells her he’ll be down right away and stands up, grabbing the corner of his desk as a brief hit of exhaustion-induced vertigo makes the whole room spin. Once it passes he makes his way out of his office and towards the elevator. The corridor with its ward room doors reminds him of the dream, and he’s hit by the same disconcerting sense of déjà vu. He blinks hard to clear it. It doesn’t make sense, he knows where he is, this place is not strange to him. He needs to focus on reality, not the depression inflicted on him by his own subconscious.

The elevator arrives and he steps in, gazing emptily at the pharmaceutical poster on the wall advertising a new type of vasodilator as it descends, not really taking in that it stops two floors later and the doors open to let another person in until the new arrival is standing right in front of him and putting a hand on his arm. Yixing belatedly realises that the person has been saying his name, and that it is Joonmyun.

“Are you okay?” Joonmyun asks when Yixing finally manages to pull himself together enough to properly see his friend. Joonmyun looks worried, forehead furrowed, head tilted slightly up so that their eyes meet.

“Yeah, sorry,” Yixing says. “I zoned out.” He smiles. “Hi, Joonmyun.”

“You’ve been doing that a lot lately,” Joonmyun says. “Is something wrong?”

Yixing hesitates. He doesn’t know if it’s accurate to say that something is wrong. Nothing is any different to usual. His job is the same as it ever is; he has his victories and his defeats, he goes up and down with his patients, feeling their joy and despair as if it were his own, grieving when they die. He’s always been this way. Why does it seem so hard to deal with these days?

“Yixing?” Joonmyun’s hand tightens a little on his arm, and Yixing realises that he has just zoned straight out again, right in front of Joonmyun. No wonder his friend looks so worried.

“No, nothing’s wrong,” he says, rather than pointlessly apologize again. “I’m just tired.”

“Have you eaten?” Joonmyun asks. “I’ve been called to the ED but I haven’t had lunch yet. Maybe if my consultation doesn’t take too long, we could eat together.”

“That sounds good,” Yixing agrees, rather relieved, because he doesn’t like to be alone when he’s feeling like this. It just makes him worse. “I have an ED consultation too, actually.”

Joonmyun smiles at him. “I’ll message you when I’m done, then?”

Yixing nods as the elevator doors open on the foyer, and they fall in step as they cross the busy foyer and enter the emergency department, only separating at the triage desk where the head nurse directs them to the rooms they’re wanted in. Yixing knows his way around the ED well enough, having sought out Songmi in pretty much every maze-like corridor and random corner over the years, and it doesn’t take him much difficulty to navigate his way to room 13-B. There doesn’t appear to be a room 13-A or 13-C, so he’s not entirely sure of the significance of the B, but he’s long since given up on expecting the emergency department to make sense.

He knocks on the door before opening it and steps inside a windowless examination room. It’s one of the smaller rooms and the minimal floor space is almost filled by a wheeled gurney that's been pushed in next to the fixed examination bed. What stops Yixing in his tracks is that the patient on the gurney has a white sheet covering their body and face, and is as still as death beneath it.

He stands still for a moment, rewinding through his memory. Surely he hadn’t missed the switchboard staff telling him that he was being called to see a corpse, had he? He’s tired, but he's not that out of it. He supposes it’s possible that they wanted him to clinically confirm the death and fill out the death certification, but any ED resident or qualified nurse could have done that. Why would they call him, specifically, all the way down from oncology? It makes no sense. There’s nobody else in the room, no nurse to ask what’s going on or any family member present. Yixing doesn’t have a clue what’s going on. Did he come to the wrong room? But he’s sure Aecha told him 13-B. He’s inclined to think that there’s been some kind of mix-up. He’ll have to go back to reception and find out where he’s actually supposed to be.

Unless the patient is not actually dead but for whatever unknown reason has pulled the sheet over their face and is playing dead. It wouldn’t be the weirdest thing a patient has done. Yixing clears his throat and steps over to the side of the bed. “Hello? Can you hear me?” he asks the sheet-covered body loudly. He’s going to feel like a total idiot when there’s a corpse under there, but at least there’s nobody here to witness him making a fool of himself. There’s no response from beneath the sheet, no twitch of movement, so Yixing takes the corner of the sheet and pulls it back.

He physically flinches, shock bolting through him like a punch straight to the heart. His hand twitches, dropping the edge of the sheet, leaving the face revealed. He blinks several times, for a second thinking that he must have made a mistake, this person must just look similar - but the wishful thinking lasts only for a second. The dead patient beneath the sheet is Mr. Lee.

Yixing stands still, heart slamming against his ribs, sending shockwaves of adrenaline through his veins. He doesn’t understand. Well, no. He does understand what must have happened. Mr. Lee’s cancer has progressed rapidly over the last few months, and his death from it, while earlier than Yixing had predicted, had been expected. But to come across him like this feels so surreal that for a moment he seriously questions whether he’s dreaming. Why is he alone in an emergency department examination room with the dead body of one of his patients? Where are the nurses? Why had nobody told him what he was coming to see? Why did they even want him here?

There’s a quivering feeling in Yixing’s chest as he stares at what was once a spirited, lively man, fighting with his wife, driving the entire oncology ward staff to distraction every time he was admitted, and letting only Yixing see through to the fear that lay behind his eyes. Yixing had never thought on first treating Mr. Lee that he would grow attached to the cranky old man. But over the months of his intensive treatment, Mr. Lee had somehow slipped into Yixing’s heart. Behind that bad temper lay a person, a human being who had his faults and flaws and his good sides too. As the throat cancer had begun to affect Mr. Lee’s voice and he’d known he would lose the ability to speak, he’d begun to tell Yixing all about his life, as if he knew that he was running out of time and wouldn’t get any more chances to tell his story. Yixing knows the things that molded and shaped Mr. Lee into the man he’d become. He knows stories of a childhood during the immediate aftermath of the division of Korea, of fighting in Vietnam, of his arranged marriage to Mrs. Lee, of their single child, a son who had died of cystic fibrosis at the age of sixteen, more than thirty years ago now.

Yixing knew Mr. Lee was going to die. But he wasn’t ready. Not like this. He’s been trying not to feel responsible for Mr. Lee's fate, but it’s impossible to overcome. Yixing hadn’t been able to convince Mr. Lee to stop smoking. He hadn’t been able to cure him. He was helpless in the face of an old man’s stubbornness and a disease that shows no mercy. His grief surges and mixes with the powerlessness and self-doubt he always feels when he loses a patient. There’s guilt, too, and a terrible sense of failure. It’s so overwhelming that he almost completely loses himself in it for a moment, tumbled and tossed in a storm of grief.

“Dr. Zhang?”

A male voice from the doorway makes his head go up. He turns, numbly, and sees a nurse he vaguely recognizes but doesn’t remember the name of. “Have you confirmed the death?” the nurse asks.

Yixing slowly shakes his head. “Not yet,” he says. The quivering feeling in his chest gets stronger. It makes him want to crumple around it. He bites down on his back teeth, forcing the emotion down. “Why - why did you call me for this?”

“You’re on his record as his consultant oncologist,” the nurse says, sounding a little blank, as if this should be obvious. “He died at home, probably about an hour ago, and was brought in by ambulance. Nurse Hong said you’d come down and do the certification for us.”

Yixing manages a nod. It’s routine for the consultant to be informed if their patient dies, but he doesn’t have to be the one to pronounce the death, and he shouldn’t have been called here without being warned, to discover his dead patient on his own. There’s been a communication mix-up somewhere along the line. He doesn’t say anything. It obviously wasn’t intentional, and complaining now won’t change the situation.

He turns back to Mr. Lee’s body, trying desperately to get a grip on himself. It’s his fault he’s feeling like this. He wouldn’t be so devastated right now if he hadn’t failed, yet again, to keep himself emotionally detached enough from his patient that losing him doesn’t break his heart. He has to take this in his stride, like the other oncologists do. He can’t let it get to him.

But it’s far too late for that, Yixing knows, as he starts the process for clinically confirming a death. He’s supposed to observe the patient for signs of life for one minute, which he’s basically already done just by being in the room for so long, but he does it again, just to give himself a chance to try and get a grip. When his watch timer beeps at the end of the minute, he puts his fingers to the cold neck, scarred from Mr. Lee’s previous surgery and lumpy with cancerous growths, and confirms that there is no carotid pulse. He uses his stethoscope to listen for the absence of heart and breath sounds. Then he takes out his small flashlight and holds back Mr. Lee's eyelids with a thumb to shine the light into his eyes and rule out brainstem activity. It’s all pointless. Mr. Lee has been obviously dead for more than an hour. But he still has to do it. The pupils are fixed and do not respond, so Yixing steps back and replaces the sheet over Mr. Lee’s face. He holds out his hand for the clipboard with the record of death form and the nurse passes it to him.

“Have you called the mortuary?” Yixing asks as he fills in the boxes. His voice sounds weirdly calm. Much calmer than he feels.

“I’ll do that now,” the nurse says. “His next of kin is in the family room if you’d like to see her, a Mrs. Lee. His wife, I believe.”

“Is she expecting me?” Yixing asks. To ask the question feels brutal. Mrs. Lee is doubtlessly grieving and it might help her to talk to him, to get the facts from a doctor she knows. But Yixing isn’t sure he will be able to keep his composure in the face of another person’s grief, and witnessing him break down won’t be good for anyone.

“I don’t think so,” the nurse tells him.

“Then would you please ensure the head nurse is aware of the situation,” Yixing says, and the nurse nods, not appearing to judge him as he takes the completed certification of death form back and goes to the wall phone to call the mortuary staff.

Yixing feels wrong in so many ways as he leaves the room, almost blindly navigating the corridors as his mind goes around in circles. He’s barely holding on to the last shreds of his self-control. He knows he’s not in a fit state to be talking with grieving family members right now. He doesn’t have any obligation to either, because Mr. Lee didn’t die while admitted under Yixing’s care. He was already sent home to die, and Yixing should have been notified properly, by phone call or by an admin coming to see him, not like this. It doesn’t stop him from feeling terrible. He can’t even hold himself together to give comfort to a grieving family of his own patient. Instead, he has to retreat, run away from the difficult situation, because if he doesn’t he’s going to fall apart and cry in front of everyone.

His feet have taken him to the nearest exit, a fire door opened by a horizontal bar. Yixing presses down on the bar and pushes the heavy door open, stepping out onto a short flight of concrete steps that lead down to a narrow back street only used for deliveries to the hospital. The sky overhead is heavy and slate grey, and the air is freezing, winter’s harsh fingers clawing at him. Even here, half-sheltered by the tall surrounding buildings, the wind cuts straight through Yixing’s white coat and his jersey and shirt below it, stinging his cheeks and ears, but he welcomes the shock of cold, because it clears his head a little.

He lets the door swing itself closed behind him and sinks down against the wall, back scraping against the bricks. He buries his head in his hands, scrubbing at his eyes. He’s suddenly so exhausted that he barely knows what to do with himself. He doesn’t like taking sleeping pills because they make him drowsy in the daytime, but he’s getting to the point where the insomnia-related sleepiness is worse than the sleeping pill-induced type.

He hears the door open, but he doesn’t have the willpower to even drag his head up from his hands. Somewhere among his bleak depression he hopes it’s just someone coming for a smoke break and that they’ll leave him alone, but his hope is dashed when he feels someone sit down right beside him. This is enough to make him lift his head from his hands and look around, and he finds that the person beside him is Joonmyun.

“Yixing,” Joonmyun starts. “I know you said before you were okay, but...are you sure? Because this...you look...” he trails off, forehead creasing as he bites his lip in what looks like worry mixed with uncertainty. Yixing knows Joonmyun well enough to know that he’s probably doubting himself right now, wondering if he’s crossing some invisible line, misjudging a boundary in their friendship. He knows Joonmyun will probably blame himself if Yixing doesn’t talk, so even though Yixing doesn’t really want to put his feelings into words right now, he drags them up from the depths as best he can.

“I just found out that I was called to certify the death of a patient I’ve been treating for about a year,” he says. “I knew he was terminal. I just didn’t expect to see him dead out of the blue like that. It was a shock.”

“Oh, no. I’m so sorry,” Joonmyun says. “But do you mean they didn’t warn you what you were called down for?”

“Yeah,” Yixing says. “I just turned up to an empty examination room and discovered my deceased patient there.”

Joonmyun gasps aloud, and it almost makes Yixing smile, only it doesn’t quite make it through the layers of sadness to his face. “That’s terrible,” his friend says. “That’s completely unacceptable. You should have been warned.”

“Probably just a communication mix-up,” Yixing says. He hasn’t got the energy to be mad about it.

“All the same, it’s not good enough,” Joonmyun says. “It’s affected you. It’s not okay. You should let Minseok know. Communication protocols exist for a reason.”

“It’s not like anyone else would react like this, though,” Yixing says heavily. “I’m too sensitive. I really tried this time, Joonmyun. I promised myself wouldn’t get attached again, but it happens anyway, and I just keep going around in the same circle. I don’t think I can trust my own promises anymore.”

“I remember we talked about this once before,” Joonmyun says. “You don’t really have a coping strategy to deal with patient loss, do you?”

Yixing slowly shakes his head. He knows many of his colleagues compartmentalize, using denial and dissociation to keep grief over patient loss separate from the rest of their lives. Others are good at treading the fine line between growing close enough to care about the patient but remaining distant enough to avoid the pain of loss when the patient dies. But Yixing cannot figure out how to do any of it. His grief has a smokelike quality, intangible and invisible, yet asive, sticking to his clothes when he goes home from work and slipping under the doors between patient’s rooms.

“I’ve tried so many times to remain distant, but I just can’t seem to do it,” he says. “I don’t...I don’t know how much longer I can keep on like this.” He sounds wretched, even to himself. He feels like he’s being torn apart inside, and it’s showing in his voice.

“Yixing…” Joonmyun starts, then stops and just leans forward to put both arms around him. Yixing closes his eyes, letting his head rest on Joonmyun’s shoulder.

“Do you really feel like that?” Joonmyun asks gently. He doesn’t let go of Yixing, and Yixing is grateful for it. Joonmyun is not Songmi, but he’s a good friend, and Yixing can sense how much he cares. “You feel like you can’t go on?”

Yixing wants to say yes, because that is truly how he feels right now, but he knows how alarming it sounds, and he also knows it’s probably only because he’s very emotional right now.

“Not always,” he says. “I’m just shocked. I’ll feel okay again soon.”

“You shouldn’t have to feel like this any time.” Joonmyun sits up a little, pulling back to look at him, and Yixing feels the loss of the warmth of Joonmyun’s body along with the physical comfort. It’s really icy today, and sitting on the cold concrete isn’t helping. “You said it’s a cycle? You keep repeating the same pattern with your terminal patients?”

Yixing nods. “I shouldn’t be like this. I know what the reality of cancer is. I thought I’d learn how to deal with it eventually, like everyone else does, but it’s only getting worse. Or maybe I’m just getting worse at coping with it. I don’t know.”

“You’re tired,” Joonmyun says, looking right into his eyes, and there’s such sympathy in his voice that Yixing could cry if he let himself.

“Yes,” he says softly.

“Do you think you might be experiencing burnout?” Joonmyun asks.

Yixing slowly shakes his head. Burnout is common among medical professionals, especially those who see a lot of death, but Yixing has always been like this. He’s always gone up and down with his patients, always suffered more than he should when he loses them. It’s just that it’s getting more and more difficult to deal with.

“I’m okay,” he says. “I mean...I will be okay. It’s not that bad, Joonmyun. I’m just being melodramatic.” He should smile to prove it, but it’s so hard when he feels this down. His face doesn’t want to obey him, and he doesn’t have the energy to fake it.

“No, you’re not,” Joonmyun says. “You’re grieving, Yixing. It’s okay to feel sad.”

Yixing swallows and blinks, the tears trying to come to his eyes again. He doesn’t want to cry. He’s at work, on shift. He can’t let his emotions get the better of him.

Joonmyun gives a visible shiver, and Yixing suddenly realises how cold Joonmyun looks, shoulders hunched, lips tinged faintly blue. He’s only wearing scrubs beneath his white coat. “You’re freezing,” Yixing says, dismay and remorse filling him. He’d been so caught up in his own emotions that he hadn’t even noticed. “Let’s go back in, you don’t want to get sick.”

Joonmyun smiles and shakes his head, standing up as Yixing does. “You know getting cold