Happy birthday, Lucy682!  (And a shout-out to your friends Valery L. and Lynnea Z. too!  Hope y'all enjoy this chapter.)

Deer Luhan,

I hate lucid drunks.

Leigh

“Is this normal?” Luhan asked Lay, trying without success to extricate the pair of them from my arms.

“You’re alive,” I repeated, still sobbing hard on Lay’s shoulder.  “Oh my God, you’re both still alive.  How did you get out?”

“No,” said Lay.  He’d kind of resigned himself to his fate.

“I can’t believe this,” I blubbered.  “You were both dead and now you’re alive… you were all dead—”

“I think I’m going to get Kris,” said Chen from the doorway.  “I don’t know what’s happened to her, because she knew we were safe when we rang on our way back.”

I shoved the other two away from me, startling them, and shot off the bed, hurling myself at Chen.

“Chen, thank God you’re alive too!”

He staggered back several paces as I hit him.  “Kris!” he bellowed.  “Help!”

A few moments later, Kris appeared, wiping cake crumbs from the corner of his mouth.  “Wassup?”

I froze in Chen’s arms, and then stumbled backwards, wide-eyed and pointing.  “Y-you—!”

Chen looked like he didn’t know whether it was better to let me go or whether he should have held onto me, especially when I then flung myself at the EXO-M leader and started punching him.

“You b*st*rd, Kris!  Why did you have to make me read the fan fiction which you starred in as a serial killer?”

Laughing, Kris tried and failed to hold me out at arms’ length.

“Oh, is that what this is about?” Luhan asked, rubbing sweat off his forehead.  “I was worried something serious had happened because we came in and found her bawling her eyes out into my pillow and mumbling something about Sehun’s neck being broken.”

“Why fan fiction?” demanded Lay.  Kris shrugged and finally succeeded in stopping me from hitting him by squashing me into a claustrophic bear hug.

“I thought she’d find it interesting.”

“I hate you,” I complained in a muffled voice.  His chest rumbled as he chuckled.

“So this is where everybody went,” said Tao in an equally muffled voice.  “This cake is frikking delicious.  Might need to make another one, though, because Kris ate almost a whole one to himself.”

“Hey!” Kris protested, slackening his arms just enough for me to wriggle out of his grasp, now somewhat coherent.

“Whoops,” I suddenly remembered.  Tao looked at me for a moment and then quickly distanced himself from the cake by balancing it on the door handle.

“You didn’t put poison in it, did you?”

“No.  The cooker died.”

“Died?” repeated the others.

“Died,” I confirmed.  “I don’t know what was wrong with it, but it was like it had fused or something.  Except I couldn’t find a fuse for it when I went to check.  I did manage to make a couple of days’ worth of food before that happened, though.”

“No problem, we can always order in or eat out,” Kris pointed out.  “I’ll get hold of our manager and they’ll probably send somebody round after the weekend to sort it out.  Anyway, cake, anyone?  The non-poisoned version is absolutely divine.”

Tao picked his piece back up from the door handle and crammed it into his mouth before making a beeline back to the kitchen, Chen and Lay hot on his heels.

“Not for me, thanks,” said Luhan, flopping down onto his bed.  “I have a fever right now and need sleep.  And I need to ice my shoulder and ankle.”

Kris shrugged and left the room.  “Your loss!”

Luhan appealed to me with puppy eyes.  “Save me a piece?  Lay says your cooking skills are pretty insane.”

“Oh, they’re not that good,” I mumbled, abashed.  “They just don’t get anybody hospitalised.”

Once everybody had had their fill of cake, Kris sat me down on the sofa to talk to me about the previous day.  I gathered from the way he interrogated me that he’d weasled a fair amount of the story out of Luhan during the train journeys, and to say that he wasn’t best pleased at me lying to him about where I was going and why was a bit of an understatement.

“You were really lucky,” he told me, for once completely serious without being in leader mode.  “This is, what, the third time you’ve pulled through such a close shave, isn’t it?”

“Lucky!” Chen sang, picking up on the English word.  Kris shushed him.

“Chen, serious conversation here,” he told him in Mandarin before returning to me and English.  “You can’t rely on just being lucky next time.  Imagine how your parents would feel if something happened to you.  Obviously I’d prefer it if you didn’t get yourself involved in any more of this before you go home, but if you absolutely have to, can you please at least tell us what’s going on and what you’re doing rather than keeping it to yourself?  We want to know if you’re safe.”

“You’re like my dad,” I grumbled, though his position was entirely reasonable and I knew it.

“Hey,” he said.  “Your dad thought it was funny you ended up in South Korea.”

“True,” I conceded.  “But you’ve got to admit it kind of is.”

“The situation you and Luhan are in now isn’t.”

I squirmed.

“Luhan’s scared something will happen to you,” Kris continued.  “He looks like somebody’s forced him onto a rollercoaster every time he mentions it.  He doesn’t regret meeting you and he said he’d still swap with you again if he had another chance, but he’s very aware that he’s responsible for you and that you’ve nearly been killed more than once.  It’s only making it worse for him that you’re willing to continue doing it.  He knows you’re his lifeline and he doesn’t want to keep putting you under that kind of pressure.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I nibbled on my lower lip and avoided Kris’ eyes as best I could.  Somewhat to my relief, Chen into the conversation before Kris could continue.

“That sounded so profound, even if I didn’t understand most of what you were saying,” he told Kris, scampering out of the leader’s reach with a laugh as the doorbell rang and Kris threatened to swat him.  “I’ll just go get that – don’t mind me!”

Xiumin beat him to it, and I heard them holding a muted conversation by the intercom system in the passage.

“No Korean in the dorm!” Kris and I bellowed in unison.  Tao appeared out of nowhere with shower gel.

“Oh crap!”  Chen’s words were somewhere between a horrified gasp and a giggle as Tao went after him and Xiumin.  “Xiu, open the gates of war before he gets us!”

“Korean amnesty!” Xiumin yelled.  “We have guests!”

Startled – probably because the manager was the only ‘guest’ the dorm ever had – Kris got to his feet, but he’d only taken three steps away from the sofa when the hallway was suddenly abuzz with noise and eight oddly familiar-looking people tumbled into the living room.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tao skid to a halt and hide the shower gel behind his back.  Chen skipped away from him, laughing, and Tao shot him a look that clearly said I’ll get you later.

“Oh, hey!” said the tallest of the guys in Mandarin, looking around him.  “This place hasn’t changed much.  More pictures?”

“Yo, Kris!”  One of the smaller ones pushed his way forward and did a totally awkward-looking shoulder-bump bro-greeting with Kris.  “How’s it going, man?”

I blinked.  He was speaking in English, and he had a Canadian accent.

Apparently, it was the cue for greetings all round, so I got to my feet and tried to follow Kris’ lead.  A lot of the faces looked very familiar, but I just couldn’t place them.

Lay saved the day by appearing with the second cake I’d made and a large supply of alcohol, which he plonked down on the table and told everybody to help themselves to.

“You look lost,” he told me, tugging me away from the sofas.  I nodded.

“They look so familiar, though.  I keep wanting to call that guy over there Ryeowook.”  I pointed to the squishiest-looking of the lot, who reminded me of a teddy-bear version of D.O.

“That would be because he is Ryeowook,” Lay said.  “Beer?”

I shook my head.  He popped open a can anyway and started drinking from it.

“So.  Rundown.  This is SuJu-M.  The monstrously tall guy is Zhou Mi.  Henry’s the one sitting in the corner with Kris chatting in English.  The one trying to steal Chen’s video games is Kyuhyun—”

I held up a hand, squinting at the guy who was indeed removing various of Chen’s favourite games from the table.  “That rings a bell.  Car crash?”

Lay raised his can of beer at me.  “Yes, but don’t mention it.  The super-handsome one is Siwon, and the one that looks like a fish is Donghae.”

“But there are two that look like fishes.”  I pointed to the pair, who were extremely helpfully sitting side by side.

“The one who looks like an anchovy rather than just a generic fish is Eunhyuk, and then the other guy’s Sungmin.”

“‘The other guy’s Sungmin’,” Xiumin echoed, joining the pair of us.  “Great description, there.”

Lay scowled at him.

There was a sudden burst of laughter and Xiumin and I turned to see that Chen had joined Kyuhyun with the games and they were looking at each other with the exact same mischievous expression of “you got me”.

“You robbed me of Starcraft!” Kyuhyun accused.  “You have no idea what kind of hell I’ve been going through without it!”

“Wait, wait, wait!” I exclaimed, holding up a hand.  “That’s EvilKyu!”

“What?”  Lay and Xiumin both looked at me blankly.

“EvilKyu!” I repeated.  “Isn’t he really good friends with Changmin?  They’re, like, the two ultimate evil maknaes.”

Xiumin just shook his head, muttering something under his breath.  Lay didn’t get a chance for input as we were called back over to the sofas by Kris and Super-Handsome Siwon, who had produced a crate of baijiu from somewhere.

“We haven’t had a chance to drink with you all for ages!” Siwon said, pouring everybody shots and handing them round.  “And we heard Luhan needed a little pick-me-up after being ill for so long.”

“Yeah, EXO-K asked us to drop by to check up on you,” Sungmin added.  “They really miss you all and they were acting like Luhan might die at any moment.”

The EXO boys all looked across at me.  Most of them schooled their expressions into straight or non-plussed, but Kris outright grinned and Tao, to my huge surprise, gave me a smile and exhaled softly.  He must have really warmed up to me after eating that cake.  He’d just been a bit awkward around me since he’d found out I was a girl.  I shot him a tentative smile in response and his broadened into a grin.  Cutie pie.

“Oh yeah!”  Kyuhyun flopped down beside me on the sofa and a CD case into my hands.  “Changmin wanted me to give you that, for some reason.  He’s been acting like you’re about to keel over and die at any moment, too.”