EXOPLANET

It was chaos after the D.O. passed out.  Everybody else in the cell wanted to know what the princess was doing there, and then what Sehun had to do with her, and suddenly Gaia was bombarded by various requests for her to endorse a particular view on what to do with the D.O., and also with supporting their various departments and jobs.  The poor princess ended up shrinking behind Sehun as he attempted to clear everybody out, but she was still shooting nervous glances towards the unconscious captive in the corner.  Sehun noticed she was also absently rubbing the hand with which she’d touched the D.O.’s face, and he swallowed thickly.  It probably wasn’t a good sign.

“We should leave,” he told her quietly as things began to calm down.

“I don’t feel good leaving Kyungsoo like that,” she admitted in a small voice, jabbing her thumb over her shoulder at the D.O.  Sehun turned around and raised an eyebrow at her.

“Kyungsoo?”

“He’s called Kyungsoo.  He said.”

Sehun chewed the inside of his cheek.  Gaia was the first person that the D.O. had spoken to, and he must have felt safe in her hands if he’d actually told her his name.

“Shouldn’t we call a doctor?” Gaia added.  “He was in so much pain.”

Sehun looked around for a guard and beckoned him over to ask him to call a healer as quietly as he could.  The man hurried away without question and Sehun looked after him, wondering about how he was going to get Gaia out of the magic-infused area.  Particularly when a healer came, she couldn’t be there.  It might trip her powers, and in a space this small, the results of that would be absolutely devastating.

Eventually, he decided that it would be best to ask for the D.O. to be moved to another room, where the lingering magical residue wasn’t so strong (and also one in which the princess didn’t feel he was being oppressed) and then – he internally winced – to get her to go on an errand, such as asking for food for the D.O., or clothes.  He was sure she wouldn’t refuse.

Half an hour later, the healer on the way, he and Gaia and the various officials and officers were up in one of the nicest bedrooms in the inpatients ward and the D.O. was just coming round.  The officials were muttering among themselves, complaining about various different things and Gaia was asking Sehun anxious and inane questions, like wouldn’t it be better if the bed sheets were silk, and was he really going to be comfortable with a light blanket covering his upper legs and torso instead of a duvet (Sehun pointed out that his shins were broken and that the last thing the D.O. wanted was extra weight on them).

“Did he really kill people?” Gaia asked as the D.O.’s head turned fretfully from side to side as his consciousness began to surface.  “He looks so sweet and harmless.”

“The slow loris looks adorable,” said Sehun, “but it will poison you if you rub it up the wrong way.”

Gaia looked up.  “Is that the really cute animal with the huge eyes we were looking at?  The one I want as a pet and Mother won’t let me have?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t tell me that yesterday.”

Sehun hadn’t felt capable of putting a dampener on her spirits with that news the previous evening.  “It keeps its venom in its elbows.”

Gaia looked crushed.  “But it looks so cute.”

“So does he.”  Sehun nodded to the boy, whose eyelids were now fluttering open.

It took a few minutes for the D.O. to process his surroundings, and if anything, he looked more terrified at being in a comfortable bed than he had been on being put into a cell.  Though, Sehun reminded himself, the boy had been informed on numerous occasions that he was being kept in a mental institute, so he guessed that being moved from a cell to a bed probably signified to the boy that he was no longer classified as dangerous and just as insane.

The D.O. sat up in a panic, attracting attention from everybody else in the room and causing Gaia to reach out to steady him with a hand.

“Are you all right?” she asked in concern as he cried out with pain, her hand landing on his shoulder.  He looked up at her with frightened eyes, and then around at everybody else in the room and shrank back, his fingers curling around Gaia’s sleeve.  Sehun felt himself bristling protectively, but he knew that the last thing he wanted to do right now was scare the boy even more.  He looked from Gaia to the policeman and the NMS officials, and then cleared his throat.

“I believe the princess would like to speak to him privately,” he directed at the men in the room.  The policeman departed at once with a deep bow, as did the institute official who had accompanied them, but the men from the NMS lingered.

“Sehun,” began one of them in a tone that Sehun could only describe as patronising, “it’s not safe—”

Sehun drew himself up and put on his coldest expression, hand on the gun holstered at his hip.  “I’ll decide on that, thank you.”

The man gulped, but still persisted.  “With respect, you’re still very young and I don’t believe that you’re best placed to make these kinds of decisions as somebody who can’t use ma—”

“I said I’ll decide.”  Sehun turned his back on them before the man could protest further, showing them that they were dismissed.  Gaia was fussing around the D.O., propping pillows up behind him so that he could sit up properly.

The door finally clicked shut as the men left the room, and Sehun let out a breath that he hadn’t even been aware he was holding.

“There’s a healer coming,” he told the D.O., not that he was expecting the boy to respond in any way, because he usually didn’t.

As he’d expected, the D.O. silently looked from him to Gaia, whose hand was on his broken arm as she leant across behind him to untwist the chains attached to his wrists from around the bed posts.  Bizarrely, it didn’t seem like he was in pain at all.

Then Gaia straightened up and let go of him, and he let out a silent grim