Deer Luhan,

I am oscillating between thinking you’re the most normal member of EXO or the least normal.  Most normal because of the way you’re dealing with your whole situation, but least normal because of the way you involved me in it.  Then again, the rest of EXO doesn’t exactly set a high standard for normalcy, so I’m not totally sure that being “the most normal member” is something to be proud of.  So I think I’ll just consider you the weirdest and most badass instead, because even Tao’s wushu doesn’t match up to a dramatic air rescue.

Leigh

I really had to hand it to Luhan.  For somebody with a fear of heights, rescuing a near stranger while attached to a wire from a helicopter is pretty damn brave.  I don’t think I would have been able to do it had our situations been reversed.

He threw up violently almost the instant we were safely inside the aircraft and for a while I thought he was going to pass out, but then he smiled at me, pushing away the sick bucket, and shakily managed to sit up on the ground.  I helped him into a seat and sat beside him, looking around me with curiosity.  It was my first time in a helicopter, and it was also only my second time meeting Luhan in person, and I didn’t know how not to make it awkward.  It was worse that we kind of knew each other through phone conversations but hadn’t met since December in Hyde Park.  Man, that felt like light-years ago now.

Luhan was the first to speak.

“Your cheek is bleeding,” he told me, producing a medical kit out of nowhere and opening it up.  “Here.”

Setting the kit down on his lap, he reached over with one hand and grasped me firmly but gently under the chin in the kind of manner most taller guys would use to kiss a smaller girl, and he tilted my head so that he could attack the long-gone-numb slice on my right cheek with an antiseptic wipe.

Alas, my cheek didn’t stay numb for very long.  Yelping, I tried to jerk my head away, but Luhan’s grip tightened and he frowned in concentration.

“This has got burn marks around it,” he told me in surprised Korean.  “Is it from a bullet or something?  You’re lucky it’s not deep.”

“I don’t even know,” I admitted.  “I’ve spent most of tonight running around like a headless chicken on steroids and about half that time has been with maniacs shooting at me, so it’s perfectly possible.”

He frowned more deeply, letting go of my chin and disposing of the wipe before digging out a large, rectangular white plaster.  His diligence in putting it on my face, tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth and eyes staring at my cheekbones as if he had the ability to give me laser surgery, was somewhat scary.  I wondered if he perhaps had OCD and had to get the plaster absolutely perfectly aligned on my cut.  Then he turned his attention to the rest of my face.

“I don’t think any of this is going to scar,” he told me like it was the most important thing ever, taking out another antiseptic swab.  I flinched as he started dabbing away at my face.  He withdrew the wipe after a moment or so and grimaced at it.

“Ugh.  How much grit and concrete have you got embedded in your skin?”

I didn’t think I wanted to know, and I said so.  He gave me a small smile and continued cleaning me up, that disturbing look of intense concentration appearing on his face again.

After a few minutes or so, he pronounced my face clean and I happily sat back in my chair, trying to ignore how much my skin was stinging.  Luhan began to pack the medical kit away, but then paused.

“Are you hurt anywhere else?” he asked.  I hastily shook my head, hiding my grazed left hand in my coat sleeve.  The way he’d stared at my face was unsettling enough: I didn’t want him looking like that at any other parts of my body.  He smiled again, putting the medical kit away, and then leant back in his chair, closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger.

I looked at him for a moment or so, then around at the interior of the helicopter, which was rather bigger than I would have thought and had so many gadgets lying around on the floor (some of which were being attended to by men in bulletproof vests) I was beginning to wonder how we’d made it over to the seats, and then back at him.

“So how did all this happen?” I asked, gesturing towards all the very hi-tech-looking equipment.

Luhan opened one eye and glanced sideways at me before squeezing it shut again.

“Reconnaissance mission,” he said in a strained voice.  “Went over to Hebei today.  I don’t understand what most of those machines do, though; you’ll have to ask somebody else.”

There was an awkward silence.  I twiddled my thumbs.

“Did you find your aunt, then?”

Luhan just nodded with his eyes still firmly closed.  It might have been me, but he was looking paler by the second.  I waited for him to say something, but he didn’t.  I couldn’t see any other females in the copter with me, so she clearly hadn’t been rescued.  But from what the mafia people had told me on the roof, she clearly wasn’t dead yet either.  Was this a no-go topic or something that had to be broached regardless?

Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore and opted for the latter.

“The guys you just saved me from said to pay the ransom or she dies,” I blurted out.

Luhan nodded again, taking his fingers away from his nose.

“I know,” he murmured.  “I got a letter this morning.”  His voice sounded a little choked, and I found myself remembering him breaking down over the phone to me.  It produced the most overwhelming urge to give him a hug.

“I’m trying to negotiate setting up a drop date,” he told me, “probably for the end of the week.  The amount of money they’re asking for requires a few days for the banks to process and auditors to agree to and such, so it gives me time.”

“You’re actually going to pay them?”

He opened his eyes and scowled at me.  “ no.  If the drop date’s on Friday, I can go in with a small team on Wednesday or Thursday and get my aunt out.  They’re going to be totally unprepared for it because they think I’m wandering around Beijing with the rest of my band.”

I almost chuckled at his indignation.

His gaze flitted past me to the windows and his complexion abruptly went a funny shade of green.  Luhan clapped a hand over his mouth.

“You all right?” I asked him in concern.  He shook his head.

“Distract me, please,” he said in a small voice.  “How did you end up with the mafia chasing you, in any case?  What happened to the others?”

“Lay challenged Tao about needing new clothes, so Tao turned the entire dorm into a floordrobe and the rest of us decided to clear out,” I told him with a shrug.  Luhan nodded vigorously, that intense stare of his back again.  “To cut a long story short, we went to the mall, argued over a film to watch, Chen opted for a lot of PDA which attracted a lot of fans, and I got fed up with being crowded so I may or may not have caused an unintentionally large power outage in said mall and frazzled pretty much everybody’s phone except yours as it was off.”

He nodded even more vigorously, and I felt his eyes boring into my head.

“Anyway, I kind of got lost and separated from the others in the darkness, freaked out when the security guards tried to arrest me, and then spent a lot of time trying to escape from the police and a lot of fans.  Which kind of made me get even more lost.  And then when I tried to lose the SWAT team— can you stop staring at me like that?  It’s kind of creepy.”

He blinked and looked away, flushing.

“Sorry,” he said.  “I’m just… I’m not exactly good with heights and I need to focus on a distraction so I’m not going to throw up.  That’s actually why I rang you earlier.”

“Not good with heights?” I echoed.  “Luhan, for somebody who’s not good with heights you managed a freaking badass air rescue a couple of hundred feet up from a moving helicopter and I think you were calmer than I was at the time.”