In which Onew finally finds out why Jonghyun called the police...

Chapter 25

Onew bolted from the car as soon as it reached Lex’s building.  He didn’t even wait for it to come to a complete stop before he had thrown open the door and raced away.

His heart plummeted at the site of police cars with lights still swirling, parked at odd angles in the parking lot. 

He flitted inside and jammed the elevator button before deciding that it was taking too long and running to the staircase, tearing open the door and leaving dust in his wake. 

He wrenched open the door to Lex’s floor and was startled at the eerie quiet that filled the air.  He had expected noise, he had expected people milling about.  Didn’t they know that this was Lex?!  How important she was?!  But there was no sense of urgency, no orders being shouted, there was just one lone police officer standing outside of her door writing something on a pad, and that was all he could see.

"Ohmygod..." Onew's words all rushed together as he stood in the hallway outside of Lex's place. 

The door was propped open and he could look through to the window on the far side of her living room. 

The place was trashed.  Her pictures had been torn off of the wall, shards of glass and pottery from her decorative vases littered the floor, crunching beneath the shoes of the emergency workers who had showed up to aid her, burying the quickly forming fine dust deep into the area rugs that Onew recognized from one of their random trips to the street markets wherever they happened to be filming. 

The walls were spray painted in a noxious green.  Obscene words deriding Lex dripped down the walls of her home. 

And then there was also blood.  Drops and splashes of it stained the floor just in front of the couch and dots littered the walls and other areas on the floor.

"Lex..." Onew's voice was hoarse with shock.

"Hyung?"  Taemin's voice was weak, but stable.  His slender hand grabbed Onew's elbow and pulled him back out of the apartment and into the hallway. 

Onew noticed that the young man was pale and that his hands shook just the slightest bit, but Taemin was trying to hide all of that.

"Hyung, they took Noona to the hospital." He said slowly, "Jonghyun went with her in the ambulance."

"How bad?"  Onew croaked.

"They didn't seem to think it was too bad."  Taemin said slowly, but his eyes weren't meeting Onew's. "She was unconscious though...they wanted to get her in for x-rays and CAT-scans to make sure there isn't anything more serious going on."

Onew couldn't tear his eyes away from the apartment, the small window of it he could see anyway.

Lex was a neat freak.  She always kept her place clean, aside from the top of a small table that sat just inside the doorway, that was usually covered in mail and keys and spare change and whatever else she pulled from her pockets at the end of the day.

That, Onew noticed vaguely, was still normal.  None of that had been touched.  But the rest of her neat home was trashed. 

"What they hell happened?" Onew asked, his voice lost.

"I dunno Hyung." Taemin answered sadly.  "But we should go to the hospital too.  She shouldn't be alone."  He pulled lightly at Onew's arm again, "Come on Hyung...let's go see Noona."

*****

Onew paced the waiting room at the hospital, waiting for Lex to come out of her test so he could find out how bad it was.  

That was where an officer found them and decided to interview them for possible leads.

“Do you know anyone who would have wanted to hurt Ms. Green?” A nameless police officer asked.  “Would anyone have any grudges against her?  Did she have any fights with anyone lately?” 

Onew shook his head, “No, she’s not that kind of person…”

“A-actually…” head shot up all around and focused on Taemin.  “Charlie Dendriech.” Taemin’s tongue stumbled over the foreign name.

“The entertainer?” The cop questioned.

“Her ex-boyfriend.” Onew answered.  “Ex-fiancé actually…”

“She was engaged to this man?”

Onew nodded, “She broke it off over a year ago though.”

“She broke it off?”

“Yeah…he was cheating on her.”  His eyes traveled to the floor, his mind wandering around the last altercation that he had with the man.  Had Charlie done this?  He turned to Taemin, “Why did you bring up Charlie?”

Taemin looked uncomfortable, hands shoved deep in his pockets and shoulders curled in on himself.  “It was a couple of months ago…I didn’t even remember it until now…”

“What son?”  The cop asked.

“Charlie had pulled Lex aside and they weren’t yelling, but I’m pretty sure that they were having a fight.”  Taemin twitched slightly, looking like he didn’t want to continue.  “He grabbed at her arm…” he trailed off.  “I didn’t know what was going on, but I kind of went and bumbled my way into the conversation…he left and she said it was nothing to worry about…”  The dancer shook his head, “I wanted to believe noona, so I just forgot all about it…until now…”

“Excuse me,” a short, young nurse came in, “Ms. Green is out of her tests, you can sit with her now.”

Onew snapped to attention and allowed the woman to lead him away, not even bothering to see what else Taemin had to say.  He could hear all of that later, right now he had to worry about Lex.  He just had to see her.  Everyone he was talking to had seen her.  They knew how bad it was, they knew what had really happened.  Onew had just been left to wonder.  No one was going to fill the distraught man in on the details of her injuries, he had been made to wait. 

Now finally he was going to get to see her, to confirm to himself that she was still here with him. 

When he walked in the room he hesitated.  She looked…weak.  That was the only way he could describe her, and Lex was not a weak person.  He slowly sat down in a chair that was set up next to her bed.  She had bandages wrapped around the top of her head and a couple of cause squares were taped to her face.  The edges of some bruising could be seen peaking around the edges of those gauze pieces.  Her right arm was in a sling, but there was no cast so Onew figured that it wasn’t broken, just hurt.  The only machine she was hooked up to was a pulse monitor, but that seemed normal to Onew.

She looked like she was going to be okay.  If the tests had showed anything worse, or if they really suspected anything worse they wouldn’t let her be lying here like this, they would be doing something more. 

Onew sighed and sat back, suddenly exhausted as the adrenaline finally stopped coursing through him.  He reached out tentatively with one hand and laid the tips of his fingers on Lex’s arm. 

And then he cried. 

Not huge wrenching sobs, but silent tears started to slip down his cheeks. 

Taemin and Jonghyun walked in then, saying nothing about their leader’s state, they just offered tissues and their silent support as they waited for Lex to wake up. 

A couple of hours later Onew still sat in that same chair, watching Lex’s eyes for any sign, any twitch, saying that she was going to wake up soon.  Taemin and Jonghyun had been switched out for Minho and Key though.  The others needed to eat.  They tried to get Onew to leave as well, but his stomach wouldn’t have allowed any food even if he had wanted to leave. 

“Once she wakes up,” was all he had said then. 

SHINee’s manager entered the room.  He had been updating Onew on what the police were doing.

“So they’ve picked up Charlie?”  Onew asked their manager, his eyes not leaving Lex as he waited by her bedside.  They had said she could wake up anytime and he wasn’t ready to move.

“The police are questioning him.  He says he didn’t do anything, that he hasn’t seen her in weeks.  But he doesn’t have an alibi for last night.  He says he was home in his apartment, alone last night but no one can corroborate that.  The police don’t have any other leads so they’re looking at him.” 

Onew’s blood boiled.  It wasn’t bad enough that he had shattered Lex’s heart.  He’d already hurt her enough and now he does something like this? 

Onew wasn’t an inherently violent person, but it seemed Charlie could bring out those urges in him.  He was already day dreaming in his mind about how he could make Charlie pay, how he could hurt the man just like he had hurt Lex.  How he would make the man bleed more than he had last time. 

But then the hand he held within his own twitched and Onew’s attention was brought right back into focus. 

There was a slight moan, almost imperceptible if you weren’t listening for it, and Lex’s face scrunched up a bit as though trying to keep the light out of her eyes.

“Lex?”  He questioned softly, rising to his feet and standing next to the bed, his other hand now laying itself on her shoulder.  “Come on baby, it’s time to wake up…” he implored.

She let out a small whimper, “Oww…” she moaned softly. 

She cracked open her eyes a bit as Minho ran for a nurse to tell them that Lex had woke up. 

“Welcome back,” Onew tried to smile but he didn’t think it worked, his nervousness spilling over into bubbles of laughter that just seemed wholly out of place.    

It didn’t matter though, because Lex was awake, and that was all he needed to know.

Why do I continually land my main characters in the hospital (I do so in The Showdown -a taekey/keytae story - as well for those who are new to my writing)? 

Comments? Questions? Concerns?  I'm all ears...