Some of you may have missed chapter 40, which I uploaded on January 1st before the a/n on anxiety.  If you haven't yet read the chapter, click here to be directed to it.

Warning: unpleasant insinuations

The weather and fear of being caught if they remained in the same place too long had eventually driven Sehun and Weiyi to find more sheltered territory further up the nearest mountain.  Sehun had practically had to carry Weiyi most of the way there because her ankle was still very painful, but once they’d set up camp in a hollow just underneath a gigantic rocky overhang, he found some wood and made a splint for her.  No matter how much he tried to insist that it would be better for her to try walking on her ankle to keep it mobile and to ensure that her muscles remained strong, Weiyi refused.

When strong winds whipped up later that evening and their shelter was almost destroyed, Sehun figured it was time to deploy his favourite fashion statement in the interests of keeping them warm and protected, and started unravelling the paracord bracelet he’d worn around his wrist ever since he had hit double figures.  It was a double-bracelet of dark green nylon, giving him a couple of hundred inches of the stuff, and as Weiyi poked at the food cooking over the fire, he busied himself with tying their makeshift shelter back together.

“Will it work?” Weiyi asked him.  “It doesn’t look strong.”

“This could carry ten of you, don’t worry,” Sehun murmured distractedly as he lashed together a new set of sticks to put in as a door and close them off to the outside world.

“But it’s…”  Weiyi hesitated, clearly searching for the correct Korean word.  Sehun wasn’t sure if he’d taught her bracelet, but just as he opened his mouth to supply the word, she found an alternative.  “It’s jewellery,” she said.  “And jewellery isn’t that strong.”

“Accessory,” Sehun told her.  “It’s a bracelet, but I wouldn’t say it’s jewellery.  We’d call it an accessory instead.”

Weiyi wrinkled her nose.  “What’s the difference?”

If somebody had asked him at the beginning of the year what he saw himself doing during summer, Sehun would definitely not have replied teaching somebody about the nuances between jewellery and accessories.  Weiyi got it perfectly fine for a belt, scarf, headband – none of that was a problem – but she just didn’t seem to understand that some bracelets weren’t just designed for elegance.  Sehun ended up talking to her about leather cuffs, leather bracelets, and a whole host of other bracelet types that he’d never in his life pictured himself having a conversation about.

It felt weird enough talking about something he didn’t consider himself an expert at (because Semi could definitely outclass him when it came to any kind of accessories full stop), but when Weiyi piped up about silver metal bracelets with chains linking them and asked if there was a reason why they were only ever used indoors because she hadn't seen them worn outside in Korea, his brain shut down and he just gaped at her.

It took a few seconds for Weiyi to react, waving a hand in front of his face and, when he didn’t blink, going on to giving him tentative prods.

“A-are you talking about handcuffs?” he managed eventually.

“I dunno,” Weiyi said.  “You went weird.”

“I…”  Sehun met her gaze, distressed.  “Weiyi, the police use handcuffs to incapacitate criminals.”

He thought he caught a tinge of unease in the way she shifted her shoulders.

“Well, they go around your wrists, so they must be bracelets,” she concluded.

They’re not, Sehun nearly told her, but she looked unsettled, so he decided not to, instead attempting to figure out how to steer what should have been an innocuous topic back onto innocent territory.

His mouth didn’t follow his brain, and he ended up steering it into a pit.  “How many times did Sangchu let you out of that bedroom?  Or the building?”

Weiyi shrugged again.  “I don’t know.  Every so often we moved, but I was never allowed to see.”  One of her hands went absently to the side of her head, and her fingers tugged down on thin air by her temple for a second or two.  Sehun only recognised the motion because he’d done it himself before, back when… but he didn’t want to think about Baekhyun.  It was the automatic reflex of somebody trying to remove a blindfold.

“The room was always set up the same,” she added as an afterthought.

Her musing tone, completely devoid of any kind of negative emotion or judgement, stirred something in Sehun and he felt tears pricking at the backs of his eyes.  Thickly, he swallowed.  He didn’t even want to imagine what she’d gone through if she was at the stage she’d managed to normalise and numb herself to it, and he couldn’t help the surge of admiration he had for her at remaining such a pleasant, positive person in spite of it all.  Without thinking, he reached out for her hands, pulling her gently towards him.

Startled, Weiyi looked up at him, and Sehun hastily glanced away, unable to meet her gaze, because he knew he was going to cry if he di