Deer Luhan,

I will admit to being an idiot this once, but in my defence I was probably still high.

Leigh

It was with disappointment and confusion that I discovered the screen of my phone had cracked quite dramatically when I’d fallen down the stairs.  Or possibly when I’d been stabbed.  Nobody was entirely sure.  But according to Suho, I had discovered the cracked screen before, only I’d forgotten about it just as quickly.

“I can’t see everything,” I complained, tilting it upwards in the hope that the missing bottom corner would scroll into view.

“It’s okay,” he told me.  “You just need to get the screen replaced and it’ll all be fine.  You said it was still under warranty.”

“Did I?”  I frowned.  “Was I lying?”

He chuckled and ruffled my hair.  I scratched at the fractures in the screen, trying to pull it apart.  Maybe if I got the ruined bit off, I’d be able to see more.

“Careful.”  He took it off me again.  I promptly forgot about it and looked around for a new distraction.

“Where’s Luhan?” I asked.  “Can I get up?”

“No you cannot,” Kai butted in.  “The doctor said you’ll need crutches to walk, and your arm is currently in no condition to support your weight.”

“In any case,” said Suho, “you fell over yesterday when you tried to get out of bed, and didn’t they have to x-ray your leg?”

I grinned sheepishly.

“They said your shin was fractured,” Sehun put in from the corner, where he was reading a newspaper.  “You don’t want to injure yourself anymore.”

“But I want to get out of bed!” I whined.

Folding the newspaper, Sehun got to his feet.  “Fine.  Where’s the wheelchair?”

“But I want to walk!”  I kicked my feet petulantly.  Sehun stopped and gave me a judgemental look.

“If you say one more thing about it just being lying vertically, I swear…” he warned, trailing off ominously.  I gulped.  How had he known I was about to use that as an argument?

In between trying to escape from my room to get outside and the boys taking it in turns to look after me, I must at some point have decided to teach Suho some English.

“Little Lyra Reynolds likes Luhan’s rhinocerous and running along long runways,” he told Luhan one day when my double walked in.  Luhan halted and stared at him in surprise.

“The did you just say?”

Suho merely pointed at me.  “She’s been teaching me to differentiate my Rs and Ls,” he announced.

“Is the rhinocerous supposed to be an innuendo?” asked Lay, coming in behind Luhan.

“She shook some soot out at sea when she saw sheep on the ship sh*tting where she sat,” Suho continued.

“Sitting,” I mumbled, yawning as the morphine began to kick in again.

Suho glanced over at me.  “I just swore, didn’t I?”

I nodded.

“Has she been good?” Luhan asked in an undertone as I turned away and closed my eyes.

“Oh, she’s been highleigh entertaining.”  Suho sounded very smug.

There was a long pause.

“You’ve been infected,” concluded Sehun’s voice.  I immediately opened my eyes and turned to look for him.  “Not you, Leigh, go back to sleep.  I mean, you have been infected, but… anyway, we have to put up with Kris’ puns, for God’s sake don’t teach Suho.”

“I’m a good student!” Suho defended himself indignantly.  “She even told me so!”

I yawned again, and my blood pressure abruptly dropped, sending all the machines haywire with beeps and flashing lights.  It appeared to be something that had happened many times before, because the boys were moving before a nurse could appear, and through my fuzzy vision, I could make out a tall, very good-looking guy around my own age crouching down beside me so that he could put the itchy scratchy thing back in my nose.

His hands closed over mine when I tried to protest and pull it away, forcing them flat against the bed again.

“No.  Don’t touch.”

“You’re handsome,” I told him.

“I know.  You’ve said before.  Now just breathe deeply and try to get to sleep so you don’t notice the nose tube.”

“I want to sneeze.”  I tried to reach for the itchy scratchy thing again.  Handsome wasn’t at all fooled, and he grabbed my hand.

“God, I swear you’re so stubborn on morphine.”

“I’m on the bed, not morphine,” I grumbled.  I didn’t want to be on the bed.  “And you’re handsome.”

“You just said.”  He sounded a little amused.  Or possibly annoyed.  Either way, there was emotion and I wasn’t sure what.

“The handsomest of all the handsomes that there are,” I mumbled.  There was an outbreak of chuckles that probably needed treating from all round the room.

“Sehun, I think she likes you.”

“No sh*t, Sherlock.”

“Shut up, hyung, and you too, Luhan, it’s just the morphine speaking.”

“Is it the morphine speaking when you kiss her forehead every time before you leave, or is that hormones?”

“Hyung!”

“Wow, Suho.”

“I never thought I’d see the day you’d join in, oh mighty and sensible leader of EXO.”

“I’m just asking!  It’s a—”

“Morphine,” I interrupted.  Silence fell.  “Can’t… I’ve forgotten what I was going to say.”

“—Legitimate question,” Suho finished up.

“Thinking is hard,” I grumbled.  It was the last thing I concretely remembered for a while, but even that wasn’t really saying much.

I woke up to my mirror image sitting at a ninety-degree angle.  It smiled when I smiled at it, and I raised my hand as much as I could to wave.

It didn’t wave back.  Instead, it lunged forward and forced me to keep my arm straight.

“You’re not my reflection,” I told it.  It rolled its eyes.

“We’ve had this conversation before.  I’m Luhan.  We look like each other.”

“Yeah…”  I scanned him.  “We do.”

There was a pause as he fussed with the blankets on top of me.

“You’re a boy, though.”

Luhan glanced across at me.  “Was the morphine dose stronger than usual this time?  You seem more out of it than normal.”

I just shrugged.  I really didn’t have much of a clue as to what was going in and out of my body in terms of medication.  Most of the names the doctors spouted at me were in Chinese anyway and my vocabulary didn’t really allow for the more obscure medical terminology.  English worked much better.  It had sensible words for everything.  Like cuttlefish.  Which actually meant cuttlefishfish if you looked into its linguistic roots.  Kind of like how Pendle Hill translated to Hill Hill Hill.

“You’re giving me weird looks again,” Luhan said.  “What are you thinking about?”

“Dismembering whoever invented the English language.”

“Hey, you had the luck of growing up speaking it natively.”

“But it’s insane.  It’s even more insane than Kris and Lay combined.”

“Okay, now I feel offended you remembered them when you didn’t remember me and we’re practically twins.”

“But Kris is a dragon and Lay is a unicorn, so it’s not hard to remember them.  They don’t actually exist.”

Luhan gave me a thoroughly judging look before getting to his feet and crossing the room.  I looked up at the blank thing a couple of metres above.  I knew I’d been able to name it yesterday.  There was a black spot swimming in it that followed my line of vision wherever it went.

“Luhan, do you reckon they forgot?”

“Forgot what?”  He turned with a jug of water in his hand.

“To get on the arc.”

There was a very, very long pause.  He was probably being judgemental again.  I didn’t bother looking: I was too scared of his expression.

“You’ve lost me.”

“The arc.”  I tried to gesture, but it was difficult to go big with the cannula on the inside of my elbow.  “Noah’s arc.  Do you reckon the unicorns and dragons didn’t get in and that’s why they don’t exist anymore?”

“They never existed in the fi—”

“I think it’s really sad,” I went on.  “Dragons are supposed to be really intelligent, too.  Why didn’t they get on the arc?”

“Do you want food?” he asked, cutting me off.  I pouted.

“Do you reckon the animals ate each other on the arc?”

He called a nurse anyway and asked for a lunch tray for the pair of us.  Then he came to sit beside me, taking my phone out of my hands as I began to fiddle absently with it.

“Where are the others?” I asked with some effort.

“Lay’s sleeping and the rest had to go back to Beijing.  Lay and I are on leave for family matters, but there’s a photoshoot and then we’re expected to go back to Korea later in the week.  We’re trying to work out what to do about you.”

I held up my hands in surrender.  “I’m going nowhere.”  I pouted again.  “Sehun won’t even let me out of bed.”

Luhan smiled at me and ruffled my hair.  “I spoke to the doctor before I came up.  They’re going to give you a CAT and an MRI to check on your condition and then hopefully we can move you so you’ll be closer to us.  They said you’d need another few weeks in hospital anyway because of that fall where you almost burst your spleen again.  W