Chapter Eleven

Disclaimer: This story is fictional.

“I don’t have a pulse here.”

“Keep trying!”

There is a first for everything.

The first call is made by the manager. His call comes through just as Suho is about to jerk the door open, while still shrugging on his coat and the others are protesting, and Xiu Min is giving directions, and Kris is still deciding whether he should follow or pull back the other leader. The manager is screaming “STAY WHERE YOU ARE” over and over again, not caring to listen to their replies.

The first person to cry is Tao. He doesn’t like how Kris has to slam his entire weight against the door so that Suho would not go out; when Suho is struggling to get past the 1.8metre frame while shouting back into the phone receiver “WHY, WHY AREN’T YOU REPLYING, WHERE ARE SEHUN AND LUHAN”. Suho shouts not because he is angry, but because he is afraid. He has been in the company for a long time, and he has seen accidents and emergencies before occurring to their sunbae groups, and this is exactly what he thought it felt like to be them at that moment; trapped in a nightmare he couldn’t wake up from.

The first person to take matters into his own hands is Xiu Min. The responsibility of being the oldest is keenly felt when Kyungsoo looks torn between reassuring Suho and shouting into the phone too. Chen has his back pressed against the door too, giving Suho a pleading look. The dial tone suddenly echoes loudly… deet deet deet… Jongin is standing still by the side. He is as useful and remarkable and silent as the white wallpaper he stands in front of right then. Baekhyun flies to comfort Tao. Chanyeol looks helplessly at Xiu Min, and it is just so ridiculous that they were arguing about fan gifts just a moment ago. Xiu Min switches on the television, and jabs at the remote so the sound is muted. Anything important would be reported on the never-ending scrolling news bar at the home channel.

The first person to react rationally is, surprisingly, Yixing. He calls Xiu Min’s handphone.

“Hey,” Yixing says drowsily, but there’s the unmistakable tremor of worry. “You answered the phone. What’s happening? Why did the manager stomp off in a panic a minute ago?”

“Yixing, you’re alright!” exclaims Suho, and the other members breathe a sigh of relief that Suho is momentarily distracted.

“Of course I am,” Yixing replies, surprised. “Oh – uhm – hold on –” They hear someone talking to him in the background. He answers back, and there’s some static as he covers the speakerphone with his hand. “The manager came back – he wants to know if anyone knows Sehun’s or Luhan’s blood types.”

“Ohmygod,” Kris curses, before he could stop himself. Chen shifts closer to the phone.

“I think Luhan is Type O,” he calls.

“Sehun is Type O too,” Jongin offers faintly.

They hear Yixing relay the message. There is a pregnant pause.

“Uhm,” Yixing begins hesitantly, “Stay where you are. Don’t answer any calls from the media, if they somehow get to you. The manager is going to pick you up, but don’t open the door to anyone else.”

“Where are we going?” Suho asks firmly. God forbid another one of his questions get unanswered.

There is another pause. “Here,” answers Yixing, and they can all picture his confused face. “The hospital.”

‘ACCIDENT AT T-JUNCTION, 482 APGUJEONG-DONG. 2 FATALITIES, 6 INJURED…’

The first person EXO sees in the hospital, when they are swept from the van to the ICU level, is a tall, skinny man. He has pale skin, and jet black hair, and his face is thin. He looks up when EXO runs in – nobody has the heart to tell them not to – and for a split-second, a few of the members want to shriek “SEHUN!” because there, the man does look like Sehun.

Tao actually nearly does cry out his name, but Chanyeol tugs on the younger boy’s arm vehemently just in time, surprising him into silence, and he bends down to whisper, “That’s Sehun’s hyung.”

A manager is standing by Sehun’s older brother, grim-faced. EXO is told about the car accident in the elevator, with the other manager explaining the situation to them in quick words, as if saying it faster would make it hurt less. Jongin lets the low moan escape when Kris has to ask the manager to slow down his words, eventhough by then Tao is crying so hard that he probably couldn’t hear half the words properly.

Sehun’s older brother does not reciprocate the respectful greetings that EXO initiates. He just stares at them, lingering on each face a little too long for comfort before moving onto the next. The frosty action reminds them forcefully of their maknae, when they met him at first impression. His face is wiped blank.

“His parents are inside –” the manager mentions, noticing the strained silence as questions bubble on the surface, but kept a lid on out of respect to Sehun’s brother.

It is too soon to speak. The door half-opens, and there are bloodcurdling shrieks and choked sobs coming from a distraught mother, and angry yells targeted by a grieving father to a nonplussed manager, and calm, firm voices of doctors. Sehun’s brother turns to the sound. His shoulders sag in dismay. He falls back down hard onto the white bench in the corridor, staring at the floor.

Then, everyone remembers how young EXO is when they start crying out, or simply cry.

They are not allowed to see the body, because it is too broken.

Sehun’s brother raises his dead eyes from the floor to gaze at the members dully. There is a torrent of emotion spilling from the boys. The boy with the tanned skin has turned around and he ran down the corridor blindly, almost knocking into a nurse. Almost immediately, the boy with the big, round eyes that was b with tears does a tailspin and runs after him.

“I- I can’t,” Suho stammers. Sehun’s brother has met him before, when he dropped Sehun off at the SM building occasionally for training. Suho is naturally pale, but now he looks sick. He is breathing too fast and too shallowly, and he backs away a step or two, before running off too. He has abandoned his leader post, but there’s nothing a leader of a pop/dance group has to command authority over this.

There are three boys Sehun’s brother does not recognise. The Chinese boy is leaning against the wall, looking inside the half-opened door, pushing his sleeve to his eyes every other second. Then, it hits him that the boy is trying to listen and comprehend the garbled Korean language. What happened? It is on everyone’s minds. Xiu Min is still standing upright, the impact of the news not fully registered yet. Chanyeol – he has met Chanyeol too – slumps onto the floor; he missed the bench by a few centimetres but despite the hard landing, he remains there. The unknown boy, rather short, crouches down beside Chanyeol. The third stranger, with high cheekbones, just walks out. Kris is looking at all of them, hands out of his pockets as if he wants to help them, but he, like everyone else, is helpless.

“Luhan is in surgery.”

It is the first time that Kris has played hide-and-seek in a long while, and it is the most twisted, horrible game in the hospital as he gathers the other members. There is security they did not notice before that cordon off part of the level, but there are still a surprising number of places a person can be in. Kris stops following his logic. His brain has stopped functioning, there is no point trying to think so hard anyway. EXO is made up of boys, and little boys don’t think of very elaborate places to hide in. Kris swallows, as he admits to himself. All he is doing, really, is listening hard for the sound of someone crying.

This crude method is heart wrenchingly successful.

The last pair he finds is Jongin and Kyungsoo.

Jongin is screaming at Kyungsoo in the bathroom. “I’M NOT GOING BACK!” he shouts, his voice cracking an octave higher. An hour ago, he would have been teased mercilessly. Now, it just makes Suho cover his mouth and turn away.

Suho falls abruptly silent. Then, he says very quietly, “Actually, after all that’s happened, it’s surprising all of you still think of us as leaders.” We have done an abysmal job of protecting all of you.

“What are you talking about?” Chanyeol asks, and his deep voice is frightened. A grown man’s voice is frightened. It is unbelievably unnerving. “You’re not- s-suic –”

“Shut up!” hisses Baekhyun fiercely. It is unclear whether he is directing it to Chanyeol or Jongin.

Jongin’s eyes widen as if it’s the first time the thought occurs to him. There is a sudden glint in his eyes that unease them. “I’m not going back in the van,” he says, taking in a shuddering breath, pointing a finger to nowhere.

There is a dull bang! like something heavy colliding with something solid. There is screaming within the distance, but Jongin begins screaming long before and it took time for EXO to realise what the incessant noise was.

“You can’t make me go back in,” he whimpers like a petulant child. “I don’t want to. Please.”

Maknaes usually get what they want.

And.

 Jongin is now officially EXO’s maknae.

EXO is supposed to be taken to a room to wait for Luhan’s status, but half of them recoil at the sight of the familiar waiting room. It is the first time they see Suho fire at a member of the public. He is standing protectively in front of Jongin, so that he cannot turn the corner to see the familiar plastic chairs. Suho has lost all his perfected, taught mannerisms as a gentle-mannered leader, but he hasn’t stopped being EXO’s guardian yet.

There is nothing to do in the waiting room. Absolutely nothing. The surgery will take hours. They refuse to go home, and taking out the electronic devices is a habit a little too close to doing something normal, and the last thing on everyone’s minds is to pretend as if nothing has happened.

The pattern goes like this. A sniffle, a snipe, an apology, a reassurance, full-on waterworks. It repeats every few minutes. They take turns, as if it is some sick version of the roundtable discussions that Suho holds with EXO-K previously. There are some ‘what happened’ and ‘what if’. The second one gets shot down instantly, because the first time it happened, of all people, Kyungsoo got the hysterics. The former, they finally allow Xiu Min to read the news reports that come pouring in. Xiu Min is the only one with a stable voice, because he still hasn’t fully digested what happened yet. It will take a while, for him. A video link is accidentally pressed, and the sound of an innocent vehicle zooming past vroom, vroom! has Jongin crying for it to stop. He puts his hands childishly over his ears, squeezing his eyes shut. The morning plays for him again behind his eyelids. Chanyeol grabs back his iPad so that it doesn’t get smashed in the heat of things. They stop reading the articles.

They are all sitting on chairs, pushed together in a smushed circle. They are in a conference room, in a vacated wing of the hospital, which doctors have moved from to a fancier office in another wing. They have settled into a dulled silence. It gets difficult to breathe sometimes, with the suffocating depression in the air, but they have come to an unspoken consensus to stick together.

The door opens, and they all go rigid, bracing themselves for unwanted news.

Then, they see Yixing standing by the door, his hand still on the handle, and salty streaks trickling down silently on his pale cheeks. He comes with no news, but he has just heard what happened. Apparently, such news even needs to pass through the consensus of doctors before they can be told to the patient. He is still wearing his patient’s clothing, and there is a white tape on his arm.

This is the first time they see Kris’s face crumple. The morning hits him back with full force. Kris is probably the last person apart from Sehun to talk one-to-one with Luhan. He didn’t say anything of significance to him. All Kris did was tell Luhan to keep his suspicions under wraps. Finally, Kris understands the sudden failing of Luhan’s power. But it’s too late. Yixing stumbles into Xiu Min’s open arms. Suho touches Kris’s shoulder lightly.

“It’s okay to cry,” Suho whispers gently.

They cry together.

It is the first time they see Luhan’s parents. The journey by plane from Beijing to Seoul only takes two hours. They have taken the first available flight.

Luhan’s mother is classically beautiful. She has long straight black hair, and doe eyes which she constantly dabs with a silk handkerchief. Luhan’s father has a slim frame. He refuses to cry, but blinks too rapidly to act properly.

They talk in Chinese.

Kris has become the translator.

The head surgeon of Luhan’s surgery comes out to whisper to Luhan’s parents. They look at Kris. Kris doesn’t think – he is on autopilot since a long while ago. He repeats it in his normal tone. His voice carries through the corridor.

It is the first time Tao understands everything faster than everybody else.

They say that you can only cry a maximum of thirty-eight tears at once. Then, they stop. No matter how much you gasp for air, how much you want the gut-churning emotions to translate into physical entities, they won’t come. There are no more tears left. Tao settles for punching the wall suddenly.

At least, the bloody knuckles distract the rest of them before they understand too.

It’s time to go home.

Yixing’s parents are arriving in Seoul in a few hours. There are some important matters to discuss, and Yixing has taken to staring vacantly at the doctors when they ask him questions. He cries for someone to stay with him. Kris volunteers.

“We could punch him,” Chen suggests, very, very weakly. Jongin remains resolutely at the seats. The van is right in front of them, beyond the glass doors in the car park basement. There will be two vans, as usual. Xiu Min, Tao, Baekhyun and Chanyeol are ushered into the first one, and they are probably halfway back to the dormitories already. They want to stay, anxious for Jongin, but they are too tired to fight the orders anymore. Baekhyun was already curled onto Chanyeol’s lap, fast asleep, when the van took off. The manager doesn’t yell at Jongin. He has other things to worry about.

“Come on,” coaxes Kyungsoo for the umpteenth time. “We really have to go.”

“No,” Jongin repeats.

And they give up again. It is very hard to convince Jongin that it was an irrational fear, given what happened to the small boy and two of their members. Suho notices that Chen has been casting doubtful glances at the van for a while now too.

“One step at a time,” Suho says, and he crouches down at the seat beside Jongin’s so that Jongin is looking down into his face. Jongin swallows, as he sees the tear stains and the bloody lip which Suho chewed on too hard. “We’ll ask the driver not to speed. He’ll put blinkers and signal when he turns and stuff. We’ll wear seatbelts. You can sit between me and Kyungsoo.”

It is not only his words that take effect. Suho’s eyes are still glassy, and his hands are cold and trembling in Jongin’s. Yet, Jongin feels… safe. Safer. The world had turned ugly, in just these short hours. But someone is looking out for him.

Chen’s watch beeps, while they are in the van.

It is twelve. Twelve midnight, when the hour hand is up.

A/N: I legitimately stopped typing in shock when I typed out this line: Jongin is now officially EXO’s maknae.

The word ‘omg’ appeared nine times in the comments. Wow. Thanks for subscribing and commenting to this story. The vocabulary is simple and there is no romance, and people usually read stories on AFF/LJ for these two. Your comments move this story. Uh, next chapter is the last chapter. Pls comment on what you think of the story as a whole.