They talked randomly through dinner, and afterward, Yixing insisted on doing the dishes. Lu Han sat at the table, chatting with him while he loaded the dishwasher and scrubbed the roasting pan. They carefully avoided discussing any matter of seriousness, avoided allusions to the events that had brought them together.

                In short, they took a break.

                But then Yixing said he had to go back to the hotel.

                “Why?” Lu Han asked. “Why can’t you just stay here until it’s time to go sit on the bench?”

                “Because I feel a compulsion to follow the path. It’s like I have to do it.” He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. “I’m sorry, Lu, but I really have to do this. Maybe I’m nuts, or maybe there’s a reason. I don’t know. I just know what I have to do.”

                Lu Han nodded, and realised he was trying to hang on to something that was only going to go away eventually regardless. He had to let him go because he couldn’t afford to let him stay.

                Yixing took a few moments to check his messages on Lu Han’s computer, but all he heard from Sehun was, “Still looking. Will take a bit longer.”

                “Maybe by tomorrow,” Yixing said after he showed Lu Han the message.

                “It might not be related,” Lu Han reminded him. . .or maybe he was reminding himself. Everything had gone off-kilter, first with Yixing’s arrival and now with his own doubts about the anxiety that had been plaguing him.

                He wasn’t being himself at all. Not at all. Best to take Yixing back to the hotel and try to find his footing again.

                So he did exactly that. But for some reason it didn’t help at all.

At midnight, Yixing was on the bench again, watching Lu Han’s house, exactly as he had every previous night. The compulsion hadn’t weakened at all, which he interpreted to mean that the threat still remained, despite warning him.

                He kept hoping for another vision or a dream. Something, anything that would tell him Lu Han was out of danger.

                But somehow he felt the web drawing tighter around him, as if he were being into the vortex of whatever he had foreseen.

                The night was cooling rapidly, and he zipped his coat as quietly as possible. Haunted by memories of the premonitions that might have saved his family, he could no more have budged from that bench than he could have stepped out in front of a racing train. For some reason he had to be here. Somehow he had to atone, if only by giving witness to his belief that such premonitions could happen, could be real. And if there was a damn thing he could do to save Lu Han from that shadowy figure with the silenced gun, he would do it. At any cost.

                Abruptly the compulsion let go. He glanced at his watch and saw that twenty minutes had passed. It always let go at the same time, which to him indicated that whatever he had been brought here for, it would be over in about twenty minutes.

                And then what? A man saved? Or would he be too late, helpless in the face of a predestined future?

                He could absolutely not bear that possibility.

                He closed his eyes for a few moments, remaining on the bench. Quantum probabilities argued against a fixed future. Instead, they argued for something even more complicated: a future that contained all probabilities. In which case, you had to steer your course, make your decisions, do everything you knew how to bring about a particular outcome.

                Somehow, some way, a murderer had become a high probability in Lu Han’s life. Somehow he had been dragged into the whirlpool of that probability. But he had to believe it was just a probability, not a certainty. He had to.

                Sighing, he opened his eyes and levered himself up from the bench. The instant he did so, Lu Han’s porch light came on and he stepped out. Yixing waited, but felt nothing wrong, so he started to cross the street.

                “At least come in for a hot drink,” Lu called as he neared.

                He couldn’t for the life of him find anything wrong with that idea. The compulsion was gone, the nightmare darkness that hovered around the edges of his mind had withdrawn. Somehow he knew tonight was not the night.

                “Thanks,” he said as he reached his steps. A painful climb with his hip stiffening, but he made it. Just four steps.

                And then they were back in Lu Han’s kitchen and he was offering him hot chocolate.

                “It’s the instant kind,” Lu Han said almost apologetically.

                “That would be great. It’s the only kind I’ve ever had.”

                “Remind me someday to make it for you from scratch. But it’s too late at night now. I don’t want to fuss with much except heating water.”

                “That’s plenty of fuss. Am I turning you into a night owl?”

                Lu Han shook his head as he put the kettle on. “Anxiety is doing that. Otherwise I would never have seen you on that bench.”

                All of a sudden Yixing asked, “Did you reply to that e-mail from your CFO?”

                “Suho? No, not yet.”

                “Good. Don’t. Use vacation as your cover. Leave him wondering.”

                Lu Han sat facing him, waiting for the kettle. “What brought that on?”

                “I don’t know. I guess it must have been niggling at me somehow.” He spread his hands. “I can’t really explain any of this, Lu. I wish I could.”

                “I know.” Lu Han took a paper napkin from the wicker basket he always kept on the table and began folding it with origami skills nearly forgotten, but learned with great enthusiasm as a child. He doubted he would make anything other than a mess, but it kept his hands busy.

                And he needed to keep his hands busy, because his fingers kept wanting, as if they had their own mind, to touch Yixing. To his hair. To feel his skin. To trace the muscles and scars until they had discovered every inch of him.

                He forced his wandering mind back to matters at hand. The kettle began to whistle, so he rose and quickly poured water into the mugs that already held the mix, then topped them with a little bit of cream to make the cocoa richer.

                With habit so old he didn’t even think about it, he stuck a teaspoon in each mug and carried them back to the table.

                Yixing sat stirring his cocoa with his head slightly down. “This stinks.”

                “Any part in particular, or all of it?”

                He looked up, weariness etched all over his face. “Any part of it. All of it. Take your pick. My visions are vague. The compulsion to be out in front of your house every night is overwhelming. But none of it tells me enough.”

                “So now you want high-definition precognition?”

                He appeared startled, and then a short laugh escaped him. “Yeah, in full living color, with a beginning, a middle and end.”

                “The end,” Lu Han said quietly, “has not been written.”

                The words seemed to hang on the air, thickening it and chilling it until he felt something icy snake along his spine.

                Their eyes met, and for an instant, just an instant, electricity seemed to zap between them, like static on dry air. Then it was gone, giving way to darker things.

                Yixing pressed his lips together, appearing to try to gather himself in some way. Lu Han needed a moment, as well. The change in mood had been so sudden, up then down in an eye blink.

                “Do you think,” Yixing asked finally, “that your senior inspector would listen to me?”

                “I’m sure he’d listen. I don’t know whether he’d believe you. Or me. I mean, this is weird. I’m not sure I’d talk to my best friend this.”

                “I hear you.”

                “But Kai. . .well, Kai might not believe it, but he wouldn’t ignore it. He’d probably park someone right outside my house.”

                “Then we should call him.”

                Lu Han started to agree, but then something else struck him, maybe the most chilling thought of all. “No,” Lu said.

                “No? Look, Lu, I’m not sure I’ll be able to do enough to help you. If you think your inspector will listen to me, then we have to tell him. Even one sleepy deputy might be enough to tip the scales.”

                “No,” Lu Han said again.

“Are you out of your mind? You need all the protection you can get.” It was Yixing’s turn to grow impatient.

                “I’m not out of my mind,” Lu Han said quietly. “But think about this, Yixing. If somebody really wants to kill me, if I’m not just some kind of random target, putting a deputy out there will only change the place and time. Right now you’re pretty sure about where, when and how. What happens if we change things in a way that makes your vision invalid? Can you be sure I won’t just be attacked in the parking lot at work? Or when I go out in the morning to walk the dog?”

                “God, I don’t like this. Don’t be crazy, Lu. If you need a round-the-clock guard, then we’ll get you one.”

                “But how will I know? How will you know? Don’t you see? Unless we let this play out, we’ll never know when it’s over. We’ll never know that I’m safe. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder.”

                Yixing drew a long breath. “Okay. I understand. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to give up trying to find a way to better protect you.”

                “I have a dog and I have a shotgun,” Lu Han reminded him. “And be honest, Yixing, why are you so determined to be out there on that bench every night instead of in here or in your hotel room? I asked you to stay after dinner, but you wouldn’t even consider it. Because you know. You absolutely know that if you don’t follow the exact pattern, you’ll change what happens, and you’re worried that we wouldn’t be prepared then. Admit it.”

                Yixing clearly didn’t want to admit it, but Lu Han also saw that he couldn’t argue about it.

                “Nothing’s fixed,” Yixing said slowly.

                “No. it’s not. I can’t believe it is. But what you’ve seen. . .well, that’s what we need to prepare for. If we do something that makes it impossible for that guy to do what you’ve seen the way you’ve seen it, how can we even guess where he might come from, instead?”

                “I really, really don’t like this.”

                “Neither do I,” Lu Han admitted as a little shiver of apprehension ran through him. “But how else can I handle this? If I leave town for a week or a month or forever, how can I be sure this guy isn’t hunting for me? At this point I’m convinced enough that something is wrong that I’m willing to take the chance on you, rather than maybe becoming a target when I’m not ready for it.”

                Yixing stood up, paced Lu Han’s small kitchen with mug in hand. He took a couple of sips before setting it on the table. “I don’t know,” he said. “But honest to God, I don’t feel like I know anything anymore.”

                “How so?” Lu Han asked, following him with his eyes, hating the way he winced a little bit with nearly every step.

                “I used to be high on knowledge,” he admitted. “I chased like the gold at the end of the rainbow. I worked in a world of uncertainties that fascinated me as if I was playing with magic. Theories, equations, thought experiments. I was your ultimate geek, more plugged into a computer than the day-to-day world.”

                “But you ran a successful business,” Lu Han reminded him.

                “It was a means to an end. But yeah, I learned how to do that because I had to, in order to chase my pot of gold. But for heaven’s sake, Lu, my dog had to teach me how to be a decent person. My dog taught me how to be a passably good husband and father.”

                “I’m sure that you had some of the basics already.”

                At that he paused a moment, then resumed his pacing. “Yeah, maybe,” he said finally. “I had good friends. The kind of people who still give a damn, even though I walked out on them ten months ago and never did a thing to reassure them I was still alive. People who kept searching for me when they could have just bought me out of my business and gotten wealthier without me.”

                “So you had some contact with the real world?”

                “I always had contact with the real world. The problem was that I was focused on the reality we don’t see, the world too small for most of us to even notice. The world nobody really understands and probably never will.”

                He drew a long shaky breath.

                “Yixing ̶  “ Lu Han started, aching for him.

                Yixing cut him off. “I loved my husband and daughter. I loved them. But I didn’t love them enough. I should have given them more time, should have put my work aside more often. But I’d get hot on the track of some idea and I might not come home for days. I’d lock myself in my lab, catching catnaps when I had to, living on coffee and junk food. Baekhyun always said he understood, but in retrospect. . .maybe he was just being nice. I couldn’t have been easy to live with.”

                “Did he complain? Ever?”

                “No.”

                “Then,” Lu Han said gently, “maybe that’s the thing you should focus on.”

                Yixing looked at him from haunted eyes. “It’s too late now. Isn’t this the point where I should say, I hope I’ve learned something?”

                Lu Han nodded slowly. “Maybe. If it’s true. If it helps.”

                “God knows, I’ve had plenty of time to think about my shortcomings.”

                “Yeah,” he said quietly. “