Deer Luhan,

Your dad and my dad would probably get on like a house on fire if they spoke the same language.

Leigh

Light exploded into my vision and I let out a silent scream, throwing a hand up in front of my eyes and trying to scramble further back into the closet, but it was too shallow.

“Found her!”

Hands reached for me.  I batted them blindly away as I began to hyperventilate again.

“Jesus.  Oh, sh*t, sh*t, sh*t….”

The man who had found me backed off because of my viciously flailing hands, but then he was back again, climbing into the closet beside me.  I kicked out at him, but he pulled me into a tight embrace.

“I’m safe.  I’m safe, don’t kill me.”

The shriek I let out this time actually had some volume to it and I struggled in the guy’s arms.

“Oh God, oh God….”  One of the arms vanished from around me and I curled up into a ball, trying to push away the other as I broke down in hysterical tears.

The second arm reached around me again and something slipped into my ear.

Tranquiliser was the only thing that made sense to my brain at the time and I desperately tried to pull it out, but the guy was too quick and grabbed my wrists.

“Listen.  Oh, God, I’m so crap at calming people down….”  Another earphone went into my other ear.  “, is there a paper bag – oi!  Get me a paper bag!”

I gradually became aware of a familiar piece playing in my ears, and my rapid heartbeat matched the pace of the agitated strings.

Moments later, something tickled against the lower portion of my face.

“Here,” said the voice of the man who’d found me.  “This should help.”

“Oh my God, what the happened to her?  Is she—?”

“I don’t know.  I honestly don’t— hey, breathe into this, come on.”  He used a gentle hand to turn my head back towards the paper bag, which I’d been trying to avoid.

But I can’t breathe.  The voices sounded familiar.  And the one of the man who’d found me was singing softly along to the male vocal part in Sonera as he hugged me tightly and the song began to wash over me and finally bring me back to some semblance of rationality.

I must have stopped struggling and started to calm down, because Chen took the paper bag away and my hair.

“Cry,” he told me.  “Cry it out.”

“What happened to her?” Xiumin repeated.  “Is she hurt?”

I felt Chen shrug helplessly against me.  “She locked herself into the closet.  I can’t tell you anything more than that.”  He patted my back as I sobbed against his shoulder.  My heartbeat was beginning to return to normal, moving away from the frenetic pace of the strings to the much more languid one of the vocals.

The tears were releasing all the adrenaline and tension, though, and my body began to quiver as Chen just held me close.

“It must have been bad,” Xiumin murmured.  “I don’t think she’s ever done this before.”

Chen petted my head.  I wilted against him, no longer with the energy to try to keep myself upright.  The reality that I was safe – that they’d come back and the mafia were no longer there and I was safe – was finally beginning to sink in.

“What gave you the idea to look in the closet?”  Kris had joined us.  “Oh, God, the poor thing.  Chen, you need to get her out of here.”

“Ge, I’m not sure she’s in a condition to move.”

“There’s a dead body in the kitchen.  I need to ring the police, and it would be a good idea for Leigh not to be in the dorm just in case.  I don’t want her arrested for something she obviously didn’t do and I don’t think she’d be able to handle questions or seeing anything in this state, anyway.  Luhan’s just sent me the address for the flat his father’s in – take her there.  I’ll tell him to wait for the pair of you.”

I lifted my head away from Chen’s shoulder just enough to be able to speak.

“I-I-I….”

“Hmm?”  He pulled away so that he could look at me.  I promptly dropped my head back onto his shoulder and started crying again.

“I’ll go too,” Xiumin volunteered.  “I’m just confused about how and why somebody broke into our dorm and left a body here.”

“That’s for the police to sort out,” Kris said.  “For now we just need to make sure we’re all safe and get out.”

I was considerably calmer by the time we were in a taxi heading across Beijing.  Chen, for all his “I’m no good at calming people down” had actually done a pretty great job, all things considered, even though most of it was through giving me hugs and getting me to listen to some carefully-selected songs.  Almost all of them were by Two Steps From Hell, though we had progressed to a song I didn’t recognise by somebody he called DJ Okawari when the taxi pulled up outside a high-rise building.  Xiumin, who had been speaking in hushed Korean into his phone for the whole trip, moved the device to his other ear, trapping it between his head and his shoulder, as he helped Chen get me out of the taxi.  The trauma might have been fading, but it was being replaced by crushing tiredness.

We were met by a panicking Luhan in the lobby.  He tried to take me out of Chen’s arms, but Chen refused on the grounds that the music was helping me to relax and we were sharing earphones.

“Where was she?” Luhan demanded as he jabbed on the button for the lift.  “I thought she might have been taken when she didn’t answer her phone.”

“She’d locked herself in the closet in the hallway,” Chen replied, turning sideways so that we could enter the lift without him bashing my head or ankles.  “She hasn’t said a word about it yet.  I think she’s still terrified.”

“I figured that much from her text,” Luhan muttered.  He swiped a fob key against something and opened a small panel to access special controls for the lift.  Once he was done and the elevator began to ascend, he reached out for my left hand, which was dangling limply, and gave it a reassuring squeeze.  After a long hesitation, I twitched my fingers against his.

Luhan seemed to have been waiting for some physical response from me for some time, because he exhaled slowly.

“She’s aware of what’s going on around her.  Thank God.”

The lift doors pinged open and Chen carried me out, following Xiumin (who was still on the phone), who was trailing behind Luhan as the Chinese guy headed for a door guarded by two thuggish-looking men and a retina scanner.

“They’re with me,” he told them when one of the men stepped forward to apprehend Xiumin.  Luhan swiped his fob key against a small sensor in the wall and then stood back to allow the retina scanner to do its job.  Then he punched a code into a keypad and swiped his fob again.  A metal door as thick as I was wide slid back to allow us entry into the apartment.

“Whoa,” said Chen as we walked through the heavily-reinforced door and Luhan swiped a different fob to let us past a bullet-proof glass partition.  “Did your dad turn this into a nuclear bunker or something?”

“No, that was my granddad.”  Luhan took off his coat and reached out to relieve Xiumin of his.  “Dad did help, though.  The security at the door is because this place technically belongs to the army now as Dad sold it to them, but they’re letting him squat here for safety reasons.  Apparently there might be a couple of other refugees around, too.”  He hung the coats up on a rack close by and kicked his shoes off.  Chen and Xiumin followed suit.  “Chen, if you put Leigh down on the sofa and I get her a glass of— hey, Dad!  You sure you should be up and about yet?”

A broad-shouldered man who looked like he could have been my own father – and not just because of his age, but because he genuinely looked like me – had shuffled out from behind another partition made from bulletproof glass, yawning loudly.

“It was poison, not amputation,” he grumbled before his eyes alighted on the rest of us.  “Oh, visitors.  EXO boys?”

“Yes sir.  Xiumin.  The other one is Chen.”  Xiumin (finally off his phone) bowed and Chen tried to, but it wasn’t very easy with a deadweight in his arms.

“And the unconscious one is…?”

“She’s not unconscious,” Luhan said quickly.  “She’s just in shock.”

Luhan’s father raised an eyebrow and looked at me again.

“Dear God,” he said after a moment’s careful contemplation.  “She actually does look like you.”

Luhan frowned and threw him a look that I interpreted as no sh*t, Sherlock.  “I’d be dead if she didn’t.”

Luhan’s father nodded in agreement and turned to his son.  “I expect you to spoil her rotten on both our behalfs.  And please convey my sincerest thanks to her.”

“She understands Chinese,” Luhan said.  “You could tell her yourself, but I’m no