The Room Without Music
(A Keonho & Seonghyeon fic)
Synopsis: It only takes a few seconds for everything familiar to become something you have to learn again. Word Count: 11.5k Author's note: the poll results have convinced me that none of you can be trusted. I specifically said this was going to be a hurt fic, and somehow the two youngest members still ended up with the most votes. Congratulations to the Seonghyeon and Keonho fandoms, I guess. Your reward is emotional damage. No throwing rocks at me. Enjoy 😘
I. The Last Song
The apartment smelled like garlic and lemon by the time Keonho got the peppers going, warm and bright enough to almost cover the smell of the takeout containers still stacked by the sink from two nights ago, waiting for someone to finally take them down to the bins. Seonghyeon had claimed the corner of the couch closest to the kitchen without quite admitting that was on purpose — close enough to hear, far enough to pretend he wasn't listening, knees drawn up, phone held close to his face the way it always ended up when he'd been at it too long.
Outside, the sky had gone that particular deep blue it did in early evening, streetlights just starting to flicker on one by one down the block, and the rest of the dorm sat quiet around the two of them — James, Juhoon, and Martin had left maybe forty minutes earlier for the barbecue place two streets over, the one with the good side dishes, promising to be back within the hour with more food than the five of them had any real business eating. It was rare, these days, to have an evening with nothing scheduled into it — no vocal lesson, no choreography run, no interview prep — and rarer still to have the dorm split like this, half of them out, half of them in, the whole apartment feeling looser and quieter than it usually did with all five bodies moving through it at once.
"This is going to be the best salad of your life," Keonho announced, to nobody, to everybody, brandishing a bell pepper like a trophy before setting it down and reaching for the knife. "I'm talking life-changing. I'm talking you're going to cry a little."
Seonghyeon didn't look up from his phone. "You say that about the ramen too."
"The ramen also changed my life."
"You said that about the instant coffee last week."
"The coffee changed my life in a different way." He said it with total conviction, like the distinction mattered enormously, already turning back to the cutting board, sleeves shoved up past his elbows, a kitchen towel tucked into the waistband of his sweatpants the way their manager was always telling him not to do because it looked, in his exact words, unhygienic and a little unhinged.
He started cutting, and within about thirty seconds the cutting board had become a stage — a low hum turning into an actual song, something bright and half-invented on the spot, half a chorus from something they'd actually released blended seamlessly into nonsense lyrics about vegetables that he was clearly making up as he went, hips swaying just enough to be ridiculous, the knife pausing every few words for an unnecessary flourish, a spin, a little shimmy toward the fridge and back that had nothing to do with cooking at all. At one point, apropos of nothing, he did the owl thing — some low, warbling hoot he'd perfected years ago and never once been asked to retire, deployed purely, as far as Seonghyeon could tell, because it reliably made people look up from whatever they were doing, a party trick that had somehow survived years of the others begging him to stop.
It wasn't subtle. It wasn't supposed to be. Seonghyeon had been curled tighter and tighter into that corner of the couch for the better part of an hour, thumb moving on autopilot through the same three feeds, jaw tight in a way he probably didn't even notice himself doing anymore, and Keonho had clocked it from across the room the way he clocked most things about the people he cared about — quietly, sideways, without making it a whole conversation, without ever quite naming what he was doing, just turning the volume up on himself a little more each time Seonghyeon's shoulders crept another inch toward his ears.
It worked, for a while. Seonghyeon's mouth twitched at some particularly terrible rhyme about carrots — carrots, carrots, orange like the sunset, if you don't eat them I will not forget it — the kind of line that shouldn't have landed and somehow did, purely on the strength of how seriously Keonho delivered it. He looked up once, twice, huffed a small laugh at a spin that nearly took out the salt shaker, watched with something like real amusement as Keonho caught it a half-second before it went over the edge of the counter and held it up like he'd meant to do that all along.
"You're going to cut your finger off doing that."
"Worth it. For the art."
"There is no art. It's a salad."
"It's a life-changing salad. Respect the process."
But the phone pulled him back down each time, the scroll resuming, his shoulders creeping back toward that same folded-in shape, thumb moving faster now, more mechanical, less like he was actually reading anything and more like the motion itself had become the point. And after the fourth or fifth song Keonho tried to loop him into — this one something about tomatoes that didn't even really rhyme, delivered with the same unwavering commitment anyway — Seonghyeon finally said, not unkindly, just tired, worn thin in a way that had nothing to do with Keonho and everything to do with whatever he'd been reading, "Focus on the knife, idiot," and went back to the screen.
There was a beat where Keonho's face did something small and quick — not hurt exactly, more like recalibrating, filing the information away the way he did — before he covered it with a grin that came a half-second too fast to be entirely real.
"Fine, fine — no audience, see if I care." He said it light, easy, and kept going anyway, quieter now. Just humming. Just for himself, the performance scaling itself down without disappearing entirely, like he couldn't quite turn it off completely even once he'd been told to, like some part of him needed to keep the noise going regardless of whether anyone was watching.
Seonghyeon let the scroll take him. It always did, lately — one video into the next into the next, thumb barely conscious of the motion, some part of his brain aware, distantly, that he wasn't actually absorbing any of it, that the feed had become less about content and more about the motion of his own thumb, a groove worn smooth from overuse. Minutes went by. He couldn't have said how many.
At some point he realized the humming had stopped.
He didn't clock it right away — that was the strange part, later, the part that would sit wrong with him for a long time. It wasn't a sound that stopped and grabbed his attention. It was an absence that took a while to register as an absence at all, the kitchen just quietly, gradually, becoming a room with no voice in it, the knife's rhythmic tap against the cutting board fading out somewhere he hadn't consciously noticed, and it was only when he went to scroll past another video that some small, unrelated part of his brain snagged on the wrongness of it, some low hum of unease rising up underneath the scroll without a clear reason attached to it yet.
Keonho and quiet didn't belong in the same sentence. Not for this long. Not ever, really. Even asleep, James liked to say, the kid managed to look like he was mid-conversation with someone.
"Keonho?"
Nothing.
He said it again, already up, already moving, phone dropped somewhere on the cushion behind him without him deciding to drop it. "Keonho, seriously, if you're hiding to scare me I swear—" The threat trailed off into nothing as he crossed the living room, still half-annoyed, still entirely unaware, the particular tone of someone bracing for a prank rather than anything real, already half-composing the annoyed thing he'd say when Keonho inevitably popped up from behind the counter grinning.
The kitchen light was too bright, too normal, the peppers half-cut and scattered where they'd been left mid-motion, one piece still balanced on the edge of the board like it had been about to fall and never got the chance. And Keonho was already on the floor.
He was on his back, turned fully over somehow, one arm flung out toward the counter's leg like he'd been reaching for it and hadn't made it, and for one full, stupid second Seonghyeon's brain tried to fit the image into something harmless — tripped, sat down, was messing around, was going to pop up laughing any moment now the way Juhoon had once sworn he would, the way this exact kind of joke was so entirely, plausibly, infuriatingly him that some part of Seonghyeon actually waited, half a beat, for the punchline.
The knife wasn't in his hand.
It took Seonghyeon's mind another full second — too long, an unforgivable second he'd replay later — to understand where it actually was.
II. The Fall
The floor, it turned out later, had been slicker than either of them had any reason to think about — a stray splash of oil from the pan, maybe, or just water off the cutting board, something small and stupid and completely unremarkable under any other circumstances, the kind of thing that on any other night would have meant nothing worse than a startled yelp and a joke about it for the rest of the week. Keonho had been mid-spin, mid-note, the knife still loosely in his hand for one more flourish he never got to finish, when his foot went out from under him entirely, the world tilting sideways in a way his body had no time at all to correct for.
He didn't even really register the fall as a fall. One second he was upright, laughing at his own joke, weight shifting easily from one foot to the other the way it had a thousand times before in a thousand different kitchens and rehearsal rooms, and the next the floor and the counter's edge were rushing at him in the wrong order, gravity taking hold faster than thought could keep up with, and then there was a pressure in his chest that didn't make sense yet, that his brain hadn't caught up to, that felt for one long, strange, suspended moment like nothing at all. Not pain. Not yet. Just weight, and wrongness, and a strange, distant surprise, the kind of thought that had no business being as calm as it was: oh.
For a fraction of a second — less than a second, really, but long enough to exist as its own separate, isolated moment — he lay there on his side without moving, without fully understanding, staring at the underside of the counter from an angle he'd never seen it from before, some detached, faraway part of his mind noting, absurdly, that there was a smear of old sauce on the cabinet door he'd apparently never gotten around to wiping clean.
Then the understanding arrived, all at once, catastrophic and total.
It took every scrap of will he had — the kind that doesn't come from nowhere, the kind that had been built years ago in a pool, in the last unforgiving meters of a race where the body wants to quit long before the lungs actually will, where you learn, young, what it costs to keep moving anyway — to get himself turned over instead of staying face-down on the tile. He didn't know why that mattered so much in the moment. It just did. Some animal part of him needed to not be facing the floor, needed to see the ceiling, needed to know which way was up even if nothing else about his body made sense anymore. His hand found the counter's edge and he used it, dragging himself half onto his side and then, with a kind of effort that left spots swimming behind his eyes, sweat already breaking cold across his forehead, the rest of the way over, his shoulder blades finally settling flat against the tile with a small, wet, terrible sound he wouldn't let himself think about.
The pain arrived late, and all at once, the way it does — not a building thing but a switch flipped somewhere behind his sternum, spreading outward in a hot, tearing wave that stole the last of the air he'd managed to gather, and with it came the understanding, distant and strange and much too calm, that this was bad. That this was the kind of bad that didn't undo itself, the kind of bad that didn't come with a version of the next five minutes where he simply got back up and finished the salad and laughed about it later. He looked down once, just once, and immediately wished he hadn't, and then made himself stop looking, because looking wasn't going to help and some part of him, even now, even like this, was still trying to manage the situation the way he managed everything — by refusing to let it get worse than it already was, by treating panic itself like one more variable he could simply choose not to let in.
He tried to call out. His mouth opened, his chest pulled in a breath that felt like drawing air through a straw someone had pinched half shut, ribs screaming with the effort of it, and nothing came except a thin, wet, useless sound that didn't carry past his own ribs. He tried again. It came out smaller the second time, swallowed almost entirely by the low hum of the refrigerator, by the ordinary sounds of an ordinary kitchen that had no idea anything had gone wrong in it at all.
Seonghyeon. He thought the name more than he said it, over and over, a kind of prayer with no sound attached to it, willing it across the apartment through sheer force of wanting, his fingers scrabbling weakly against the tile beside him, searching for purchase on a floor that offered none.
III. Pressure
Seonghyeon was already moving.
He didn't remember crossing the room. One second he was standing in the kitchen doorway with his stomach falling out from under him, and the next he was on his knees on the tile, and Keonho's shirt was dark and spreading and the handle was still sitting there, upright, wrong, jutting out of him at an angle that didn't belong anywhere, and blood was — it was spurting, actually spurting, in small wet pulses that kept time with something Seonghyeon didn't want to name, and that was Keonho's face going pale and unfocused underneath him.
"Keonho — hey, look at me, you're okay, you're okay—" The words came out in pieces, his voice climbing thin and high, more like the voice he'd had at thirteen than the one he used on stage. He had no idea if any of it was true.
Keonho's eyes found his, glassy, sliding, his lips moving around something that might have been Seonghyeon's name, no sound behind it either way.
Pressure. He knew that much — a hundred half-watched dramas' worth of an actor pressing gauze to a fake wound, calm, competent, hands steady. The entire sum of everything he knew, distilled down to two words that suddenly felt catastrophically insufficient.
But pressure where. The knife itself sat there, handle upright, absurd against the white of his shirt, and some instinct screamed at him not to touch it, not to move it. Did it come out or stay in? He'd heard both, somewhere, some vague warning he couldn't verify and had no time to sort from nonsense while blood kept coming.
"Cloth — I need a cloth—" he said to nobody, and lunged for the dish towel off the oven handle, hands shaking so badly it took two tries to grab it. He pressed it down near the wound, not on the knife, folding it thick, bearing down with both hands, and Keonho made a sound underneath his palms that he was going to hear for the rest of his life. Small. Broken. Not a scream — he didn't have the air for one.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I know it hurts — just stay with me, please, please don't do this—"
The blood didn't stop. It spread under his palms, soaking warm through the towel almost instantly, seeping between his fingers no matter how hard he pressed, and the room began swimming at the edges, his vision narrowing to a tunnel with Keonho's gray, glassy face at the far end of it, trying, weakly, to say something that never became words. There was blood on his forearms now, tacky at his wrist, the copper smell filling the kitchen thick enough to taste.
Don't pass out. Not now. You have to be okay right now.
He pressed harder, counted his own breaths without meaning to — one, two, three — out-arguing the gray at the edges of his vision with sheer stubbornness, because if he went down too there'd be no one left even trying to help.
He forced his free hand toward his pocket, smearing red across the screen before he even got it unlocked, thumb missing the numbers twice before 1-1-9 finally connected.
"I need — my friend's hurt, he fell on a knife, there's so much blood, I don't—" His voice cracked apart and kept cracking, the address stammered out half backward before he caught himself, his free hand still pressed white-knuckled against Keonho's chest the entire time. The operator's voice came through calm, practiced — keep pressure on the wound, don't remove the object, stay on the line, is he conscious, how is he breathing — and Seonghyeon answered in fragments, glancing down at Keonho's chest, unable to tell anymore whether the small stuttering rise and fall was real or something his own panic had invented.
"He's — I don't know, I think he's breathing, his eyes are open but he's not — please, please hurry, I don't want him to die, please—"
Help is on the way. Stay with him.
He didn't remember hanging up so much as the call ending, his hand already moving to the next number, some part of him understanding that a decision this size wasn't his to carry alone. He wanted, more than anything, for someone older to be there. Anyone who'd know what to actually do instead of just guessing.
Their manager picked up on the second ring.
"Seonghyeon? What's—"
"Hyung, Keonho's hurt, I don't know what to do—" It came out too fast, cracking, small and wrecked, nothing like the voice he used in interviews. "He fell, there's a knife, so much blood, I called 119 but I don't know what to do, please, you have to tell me what to do—"
"Okay — slow down. Is the knife still in him?"
"Yes — I didn't touch it, I don't know if that's right—"
"That's right, don't take it out." There was a beat of silence, and underneath the calm he was clearly trying to project, Seonghyeon could hear it — the same blankness, the same scrambling. This wasn't a script the man had either. Thirty-four years old, a decade of managing schedules and scandals, and nothing in any of it had prepared him for this any more than it had prepared Seonghyeon. "Is the bleeding — how's it coming out? Just flowing, or—"
"I don't know what you're asking me, hyung, please just tell me what to do—"
"Is it pulsing? Coming out in bursts? That matters, that changes what it might be."
Seonghyeon looked down at the dark welling up around the edges of the towel, rhythmic, insistent, timed to something he didn't want to think too hard about.
"It's spurting." The word came out small and horrified, like naming it made it more true. "It keeps — every few seconds — it's not stopping, hyung, it's not stopping—"
The silence lasted a half a second too long.
"Okay." His manager's voice cracked, just for that one syllable, before he wrestled it back down — a grown man doing the exact same thing Seonghyeon was, pretending, badly, to know more than he did, because someone had to. "That's an artery, that might be an artery. Press harder, both hands, your whole weight if you have to—"
"I am, I promise, it's not helping, it's still coming through—"
"Keep going anyway. Don't stop, even if it hurts him, even if he tells you to. You do not stop." Something scraped in the background, a door, a chair, a grown man's composure fraying in real time. "I'm calling the others, I'm on my way. Ambulance is coming?"
"They said they're coming, I don't know how long is too long, is this too long already—"
"You're doing everything right, Seonghyeon. Keep the pressure on. Keep him talking, keep him awake."
His hands had locked into place against Keonho's chest, both palms stacked, his whole weight braced down exactly the way he'd been told. Every time Keonho's eyes drifted, Seonghyeon said his name again, sharp, too loud, until they found him.
"Hey. Please stay with me, okay? You have to stay with me."
Keonho's mouth moved. No sound came, or nearly none — just a thin thread of breath shaped almost like a word.
"I know you're trying, it's okay — just keep your eyes open. Keep looking at me."
His own voice broke apart, and he felt the first tears go, hot and sudden, dripping steadily now, and he didn't wipe them away because both his hands were full and there was nothing to spare for his own face, not when Keonho's eyes kept sliding shut a half-second longer each time before they opened again.
"Please," he said, to nobody, to Keonho, to whatever might be listening. "Please, just stay, just a little longer, they're coming, I promise they're coming—"
IV. The Locked Door
The second call came from a different number, clipped and official in a way the first hadn't been, and Seonghyeon fumbled the phone up onto speaker against his shoulder because his hands weren't leaving Keonho's chest for anything.
"This is emergency dispatch, we have units en route, estimated arrival four minutes. Can you confirm the address and unit number?"
He gave it, voice shaking, and thought, for one brief, stupid, hopeful second, that this was the part where everything got easier.
"Sir, is the front entrance accessible? Will someone be able to let paramedics into the building and the unit itself?"
The question sat there for a second before it fully landed.
The building itself was nothing special — an ordinary residential block, other families' names on other buzzers, the front lobby door propped open half the time by whoever'd last carried groceries through it. Nobody outside the company knew which unit was theirs, and that was the entire point: no gate, no guard, nothing that would ever make a fan or a stranger look twice. Blending in was the security.
Which meant the paramedics could get into the building easily enough. It was their own front door that was the problem — the one thing the company had actually reinforced, solid core, opened only by a face scanned at a panel or a six-digit backup code, no buzzer, no spare key hidden anywhere convenient. Enough strange faces had shown up at enough doors over the past year that nobody in the group had ever once complained about the extra ten seconds it cost them getting inside their own home.
Nobody had thought, not once, that the ten seconds might someday cost something else instead.
The dispatcher had already, gently, explained the part that mattered most: paramedics couldn't force open a locked residential door on their own authority. That required police, and police required either consent from someone inside, or a warrant — minutes that felt, right now, like an entire lifetime Keonho didn't have.
"I have to open it," Seonghyeon said, mostly to himself, the words arriving a half-second before the horror of them did.
The building super lived two floors down and had, in theory, a way to override the panel in exactly this kind of emergency — except the number rang four times and went to voicemail, and the second call did the same. Somewhere underneath his panic, Seonghyeon understood why: their unit was the one door he'd ever been told, firmly, not to open for anyone without a face match or a code, no exceptions. A rule built to keep the wrong people out, now standing squarely between Keonho and the only people who might save him.
Which left exactly two options, both unbearable. Stay, both hands locked against the only thing keeping Keonho's blood on the inside of his body, and hope the police broke the door down fast enough. Or let go — even for the handful of seconds it would take to sprint to the panel and buzz it open himself — and pray those seconds didn't cost more than they saved.
"Sir? Can someone open the door? Units are on scene, right outside your building, but they can't get to you if that door doesn't open."
They're here. Relief and horror arrived in the same breath — they were here and it didn't matter, thirty feet away through two walls and a locked door.
"I don't — there's no one else here, it's just—" His voice cracked entirely, Keonho's eyes drifting again beneath him, staying shut a full second longer before dragging back open, the fight visibly going out of it more each time. "I can't leave him, but if I don't open it they can't get in—"
"Sir, I need you to make a decision. Now."
Seonghyeon looked down at his hands, red to the wrist, and at Keonho's face, losing the fight to stay looking at him, and understood, with a clarity that felt like something breaking cleanly in half inside his chest, that there was no version of the next handful of seconds that didn't require him to choose which kind of terrible he could live with.
"I'm sorry," he said, to Keonho, the words tearing out of him wet and broken. "I have to, I'll be right back, I promise I'll be right back—"
He pressed one last time, hard, willing the towel to hold on its own, and then he was up, half-slipping in his own hands' worth of blood, scrambling upright on legs that didn't feel like his, crying too hard to see clearly, running anyway, some silent prayer running underneath every step — please, please, let this be fast enough — his bloodied palm slapping against the panel, the scanner catching his face on the second try, the lock releasing with a small mechanical click that felt louder than anything he'd ever heard.
He wrenched the door open.
The paramedics on the other side flinched, actually flinched, at the sight of him — a boy who couldn't have been older than seventeen, sobbing, soaked red to the elbows, yanking a locked door open from the inside a full beat before any of them had expected it to move.
It cost them less than a second to recover. One of them was already moving before the door had finished swinging, shouldering past him with a stretcher and a bag slung low, snapping something clipped over his shoulder to the others, and then they were pouring past him into the apartment, fast, sure, blessedly competent in a way nothing in the last several minutes had been.
"Kitchen," Seonghyeon managed, though he barely needed to say it — the trail of red already told them everything.
He followed on legs that barely held, and dropped to his knees beside Keonho again the second there was room, and found, with something between relief and fresh terror, that his eyes were still open. Barely. Fighting for it. But open.
"You did it," Seonghyeon said, half a laugh and half a sob at once, gripping his hand hard enough that it must have hurt. "They're here, you just have to hold on a little more."
A hand closed on his shoulder, gentle but firm. "We've got him. I need you to move back for me, okay?"
He went, because there was nothing else to do, because there were better hands than his working now — cutting the ruined shirt open, pressing gauze meant for this instead of a kitchen towel gone dark, a blood pressure cuff, a voice counting numbers to a partner unfolding the stretcher. Someone asked Keonho his name, told him to squeeze a hand if he could hear them, and got, after a long, agonizing pause, the faintest visible twitch of fingers — enough to make a paramedic nod once, sharply, to the others.
He knelt there at the edge of it all, palms open and empty for the first time in what felt like hours, red drying tight across his skin, and felt something in his chest cave inward at the relief of it, followed almost immediately by a disorienting kind of uselessness — his body not knowing what to do with itself now that it wasn't holding pressure against anything.
He didn't know how long he knelt there before the front door opened again.
He didn't hear it, not really — it was the sudden change in the air behind him that made him turn. A held breath. A silence dropping in on top of all the noise like something physical.
Juhoon was the one who'd pushed the door open, a grocery bag still looped over one wrist, forgotten. He made it three steps in before he stopped dead, and behind him James and Martin stopped too, one after the other, the doorway suddenly too small for all three of them.
Seonghyeon knew, without needing to see himself, exactly what they were looking at. Blood soaked through his shirt, dried dark at his wrists, smeared up one forearm. Blood on the tile in a wide, tracked arc. Keonho on a stretcher, half-strapped in, an oxygen mask fogging faintly, skin gone the color of old paper, paramedics moving fast and clipped around him with an urgency that didn't need translating — bad, this is very bad, we need to move.
The grocery bag hit the floor. Nobody heard it land, but Seonghyeon saw Juhoon's hand simply open and let it fall, saw his face do something Seonghyeon didn't have a name for.
"What—" James's voice came out wrong, thin, nothing like its usual register. "What happened?"
"He fell," Seonghyeon heard himself say, distant, like the words belonged to someone else. "He fell on the knife, I didn't see it happen, I just heard him stop singing and he was already—"
He couldn't finish it. His voice gave out, and Martin was the one who moved first, crossing the room in three strides and pulling him in without any care at all for the blood still wet on him, arms locking around him tight enough to hold him up, because his knees had started to go the second someone else's arms were there to catch him.
"You're okay," Martin said into his hair, voice rough. "I've got you. You did everything right, you hear me?"
Juhoon hadn't moved from where the bag had fallen, both hands pressed over his mouth, eyes fixed on Keonho's face.
"We need to move him now," a paramedic said, already wheeling the stretcher toward the door, and the room reorganized itself around that single sentence — Juhoon stumbling forward to grab for Keonho's hand as it passed, James already asking, voice cracking, which hospital, can we ride with him, and Seonghyeon standing in the middle of it all in Martin's arms, shaking, soaked in red that wasn't his, watching the stretcher's wheels fade down the hallway until they were gone, leaving behind nothing but the four of them, and the blood, and a kitchen that still, absurdly, smelled faintly of garlic and lemon underneath everything else.
V. Four Hours
Surgery ran long.
Longer, the surgeon would tell them afterward, choosing her words with the particular care of someone who'd delivered this exact kind of update more times than she probably wanted to count, than anyone in the operating room had expected going in. The blade had missed anything immediately fatal — no direct strike to the heart itself, a mercy none of them fully understood the size of until much later — but it had nicked close enough to a major vessel that the bleeding had been harder to control than the initial scans suggested, and what should have been a two-hour repair stretched into nearly four, the surgical team working through two separate moments where his blood pressure dropped fast enough to bring a second specialist rushing in from another floor.
None of the four of them, sitting in a waiting room that smelled like antiseptic and old coffee, knew any of this while it was happening. They only knew that the small number on the screen in the hallway — surgery in progress — refused to change for hour after hour, and that every time a doctor in scrubs walked past without stopping, something in Seonghyeon's chest folded a little further in on itself.
He hadn't showered yet. Nobody had made him, and he hadn't thought to ask, and so he sat through all four hours in the same clothes, Keonho's blood dried stiff and dark down one side of his shirt, flaking faintly off his knuckles whenever he moved his hands, a smell he was fairly sure he was never going to be able to fully separate from the taste of hospital coffee again as long as he lived. Martin sat beside him the entire time, one arm slung loosely around his shoulders, not saying much, just present, occasionally squeezing once when the silence got too loud. Juhoon paced. James made calls — to the company, to Keonho's family, his voice dropping low and careful each time, the same three sentences repeated with small variations depending on who was on the other end, he's in surgery, we don't know more yet, we'll call the second we do.
When the surgeon finally came out, mask pulled down around her neck, exhaustion written plainly across her face in a way she didn't try to hide, the four of them were on their feet before she'd said a single word.
"He's stable," she said first, because she'd clearly learned, somewhere along the way, that this was the sentence people needed before they could hear anything else. A collective breath went out of the room, four separate exhales landing almost on top of each other. "It was more complicated than we expected going in. There was more bleeding than the initial imaging suggested, and we lost some time managing that before we could fully close. He's in recovery now. He'll need to stay sedated through the night, and we'll be watching closely for the next twenty-four hours in particular — there's a slightly higher risk of complications given how much blood he lost and how long the repair took, but right now, he's stable, and that's the important part."
Nobody in the waiting room asked, that night, exactly how close more complicated than expected had actually come to meaning something else. It wouldn't be until the next day — a stray comment from a nurse, half-overheard, not meant for Keonho's ears at all — that anyone would learn the specific, narrow shape of what those four hours had actually held. That the window between the ambulance arriving when it did and arriving even ten seconds later might, by the surgeon's own quiet estimate, have been the difference between a hard recovery and no recovery to speak of.
VI. Another Ten Seconds
He woke for the first time properly on the second day, groggy, disoriented, a dull ache radiating out from his chest that made itself known before anything else did — before the room, before the faces, before even the fact of being alive at all fully registered.
The first day passed in fragments. Voices. Hands. The particular, floating unreality of heavy pain medication, where time stopped moving in any order he could follow and people seemed to simply appear and disappear at the edges of his vision without any clear sense of how much time had passed between one appearance and the next. He remembered Juhoon's face close to his, saying something he couldn't hold onto. He remembered Martin's hand around his, warm, steady. He didn't remember, that first day, much about the how of it at all — not the fall, not the floor, not any of the several minutes of the actual accident, his mind having apparently decided, mercifully or not, to keep that particular door shut for now.
It was that night, once the fog had thinned enough for actual thought to start forming again, that the nurse changing his IV bag mentioned it — not unkindly, not with any awareness at all of what she was setting off, just making conversation the way nurses sometimes did on quiet night shifts, commenting, almost admiringly, on how fast his friend had gotten him help. "You're lucky," she said, adjusting something on the monitor beside his bed. "Dr. Yoon said another ten seconds and it might have been a very different conversation we were having with your family. Your friend did well, calling it in so fast."
She left. The room went quiet again. And Keonho lay there in the dark, staring at the ceiling, turning that sentence over and over until it had worn a groove into him.
Another ten seconds.
He didn't remember much of the actual fall, but what he did remember — in pieces, fractured, unreliable — was time. Or the feeling of it, at least. Lying on that floor, mouth working uselessly around a name that wouldn't come out, some vast, elastic stretch of nothing happening at all before Seonghyeon's face finally swam into view above him. It had felt like minutes. It had probably been seconds. But lying in a hospital bed at two in the morning with a fresh scar and someone else's careless comment rattling around in his skull, probably wasn't the word that stuck. What stuck was the shape of the delay itself — real or imagined, he couldn't fully separate the two anymore — and a slow, ugly thought that took root somewhere he wasn't proud of and refused, stubbornly, to let go once it had.
He was right there. He should have gotten to me faster.
It wasn't fair, and some small, quieter part of him knew that even as the rest of him built the thought out bigger and bigger through the sleepless hours that followed — knew that Seonghyeon had been across an entire apartment, knew that seconds mattered less than the story his own fear was telling him they did, knew, somewhere underneath all of it, that the surgeon's ten seconds had almost certainly meant something closer to the time between the fall itself and the ambulance's arrival, not the handful of seconds it had taken Seonghyeon to cross a living room. None of that made it into the version of the night that took shape in his head by morning. Fear didn't care about fairness. It only cared about having somewhere to go, and by sunrise it had found exactly where.
By the time Seonghyeon came in that afternoon — hair still slightly damp from a shower he'd finally been convinced to take, a stack of Keonho's favorite snacks in a bag he wasn't sure Keonho could even eat yet, but had brought anyway because it felt like doing something — Keonho's face didn't do the thing it usually did.
"Hey," Seonghyeon said, careful, testing the water, setting the bag down gently on the little table beside the bed. "How are you feeling? They said you were more awake today—"
"Why'd it take you so long?"
The question landed flat and sudden, no build-up to it at all, and Seonghyeon actually laughed for half a second before he understood it wasn't a joke — a short, startled sound that died in his throat almost as soon as it started.
"What?"
"To get to me." Keonho's voice was still weak, still thin from the tube that had been in his throat until that morning, but there was an edge underneath it that hadn't been there in any of the hazier, medicated conversations from the day before. "I heard — the nurse said something last night. About timing. About how it mattered. And I've just been lying here trying to figure out why it took you so long to notice I wasn't singing anymore."
"I—" Seonghyeon's face had gone pale, something collapsing behind his eyes in real time. "I came the second I realized, I didn't — Keonho, I didn't even know, I thought you were joking around, I called your name and then I went straight in, I don't understand what you're—"
"It felt like forever." His voice cracked, not entirely from anger, something rawer underneath it too, something closer to fear dressed up as blame because fear alone had nowhere useful to put itself. "I was lying there and I couldn't even say your name and it felt like forever, and now they're telling me another ten seconds and I might not even be having this conversation with you right now, and I keep thinking — I keep thinking if you'd just come faster—"
"I didn't hear anything." Seonghyeon's voice had started shaking, tears already gathering, his hands twisting together in front of him. "I swear, I didn't hear anything, one second you were singing and then you weren't and I got up right away, I ran, I swear I ran the second I—"
"I'm not saying you didn't try." Keonho's jaw was tight, his hand curled loosely into the blanket, avoiding Seonghyeon's eyes now, staring instead at some fixed point on the far wall. "I'm just saying maybe if you hadn't been so deep in your phone you would've noticed sooner. Maybe if you'd been paying attention instead of scrolling through nothing for an hour, none of the rest of it would've—"
"That's not fair." It came out small, wounded, more like the seventeen-year-old he actually was than anything he'd sounded like in the four days since the accident. "You know that's not fair, I didn't do anything wrong, I called for help the second I found you, I held the towel the whole time, I opened the door myself even when I was scared to leave you, I did everything they told me to do—"
"I know." Keonho's voice dropped, quieter now, some of the fight already draining back out of him, replaced by something closer to exhaustion. "I know, okay? I know you did. I just — I can't stop thinking about it. I can't stop replaying it and wondering what would've happened if things had gone even a little differently, and I know that's not — I know it's not your fault, I know that, but I still can't — I can't look at you right now without thinking about it, and I don't know what to do with that."
A nurse, drawn by the raised voices, appeared in the doorway with a gently firm look on her face. "Everything alright in here? He needs to keep his heart rate down—"
"I'm fine," Keonho said, too fast, not looking at either of them. "I just need — can everyone give me some space for a bit."
Seonghyeon stood there another moment, waiting for something — an apology, a retraction, anything — that didn't come, and then, quietly, wiping at his face with the back of one hand, he left the room without another word.
He tried again the next morning, a small bag of the specific brand of yogurt Keonho liked held stiffly in front of him like an offering, and made it as far as the nurses' station before one of the nurses on shift, apologetic but firm, stopped him with a hand raised gently in his direction.
"I'm sorry," she said, not quite meeting his eyes, clearly uncomfortable with whatever she'd been asked to relay. "He asked that you not come in for now. He said he needs some time."
Seonghyeon stood there in the hallway for a long moment, the yogurt still held out in front of him like it might mean something if he just kept holding it there long enough, and then, very quietly, he nodded, and turned around, and didn't cry until he was outside, in the stairwell, where nobody could hear him.
VII. The Empty Bed
He went back to the dorm because there was nowhere else to go.
It was quiet in a way the apartment never really was — Juhoon and James had stayed behind at the hospital, taking turns in the waiting room in shifts none of them had officially agreed to but all of them were somehow keeping anyway, and the manager had dropped Seonghyeon off with a tired, apologetic look and instructions to eat something, get some sleep, we'll call you the second anything changes. Martin had come back with him, silent the whole ride, and had disappeared into the shower the second they were through the door, leaving Seonghyeon alone in a living room that still, faintly, if he let himself notice it, smelled like it had been cleaned in a hurry — someone from the company had come by and scrubbed the kitchen tile at some point in the last two days, and the effort of it, the sheer normalcy of a clean floor where there hadn't been one, made something in his chest twist in a way he didn't have words for.
He didn't decide to do it, not really. That was the thing he'd try, later, to explain to himself and fail — there wasn't a moment where he thought I am going to do this, weighed it, chose it. He was standing in the kitchen with the fridge door open, looking blankly at shelves of food nobody had touched in days, and the next thing he really understood was that he had a two-liter bottle of soda in one hand and he was walking toward their shared room with it, feet moving on some current that had nothing to do with thought at all.
Keonho's side of the room looked exactly the way he'd left it three nights ago. Bed unmade, the way it always was, blankets kicked half onto the floor, a phone charger still plugged into the wall with nothing attached to the end of it. A stuffed rabbit some fan had thrown at a fansign two years back, propped against the pillow, one ear permanently bent from being slept on wrong for months. It was so entirely, achingly him — messy and warm and alive in a way that had nothing to do with hospitals or wires or the flat, furious voice he'd used two days ago — that something in Seonghyeon simply broke.
He didn't think about it. He unscrewed the cap and poured the entire bottle over the mattress, watching it soak dark into the sheets, fizzing faintly where it pooled, and it didn't feel like enough, so he went back for more — a carton of juice from the fridge door, orange and violently sweet-smelling, dumped over the pillow, over the stupid bent-eared rabbit, and then whatever half-eaten snacks he could find in the cabinet, a bag of chips crushed and scattered across the blankets, crumbs and grease working their way into fabric that was going to need to be thrown out entirely by the time he was done, not washed, thrown out, and some small, distant part of him understood exactly how childish this was and did it anyway, because right now childish was the only thing that felt like it matched the size of what was sitting in his chest.
It's not fair. The thought kept looping, ugly and simple, nothing sophisticated about it at all. I did everything. I did everything right and he still — he still looked at me like that, like I was the one who — it's not fair, it's not fair, it's not—
He was crying again, he realized distantly, hands shaking as he tore open a second bag of something and shook it out over the ruined bed, tears dripping down onto the mess along with everything else, and he didn't stop, didn't want to stop, some ugly, satisfying release running underneath the destruction that he was too far gone to examine closely.
He didn't hear Martin come in until the doorway simply had someone standing in it.
Martin didn't say anything at first. He stood there in a t-shirt and damp hair, taking in the room — the soda-dark sheets, the wrecked pillow, the stuffed rabbit lying face-down in a puddle of orange juice, Seonghyeon standing in the middle of it all with an empty chip bag still in one fist, breathing hard, face wet and blotchy, looking, for one unguarded second, exactly as young as he actually was.
"Seonghyeon."
The sound of his own name did something to him — some dam giving out completely — and he sat down right there on the floor amid the mess, knees pulled up, and put his face in his hands, and Martin crossed the room without a word and sat down beside him on the wrecked, sticky carpet, not saying anything about the bed, not saying anything about any of it, just sitting there, shoulder against Seonghyeon's, letting him fall apart in a room that smelled like spilled soda and crushed chips and everything he hadn't been able to say to anyone yet.
"I did everything," Seonghyeon finally said, voice thick and small, muffled behind his own hands. "I did everything I could. I held the towel, I called for help, I opened the door even though I was so scared, I didn't stop, I never stopped, and he just — he looked at me like I was the reason, like I didn't try hard enough, and I don't — I don't understand what I was supposed to do differently, I don't understand what more he wanted from me—"
"I know," Martin said quietly. "I know you did everything."
"Then why does it feel like this."
Martin didn't have an answer for that. He just put an arm around him, careful, steady, and let the question sit there unanswered in the wreckage of a room neither of them was going to explain to anyone tonight.
They were still sitting there, on the floor, when the front door opened and Juhoon and James came in — quiet, worn thin from another day split between the waiting room and whatever scraps of normal life the company had insisted they attend to, voices trailing off mid-sentence the second they reached the bedroom doorway and took in the scene.
Juhoon's eyebrows went up. James just stood there for a second, visibly recalibrating, eyes moving from the soda-dark sheets to the ruined pillow to Seonghyeon, still blotchy-faced on the floor, before something in his expression softened all the way down.
"Okay," James said, not unkindly, crouching down to their level. "Okay. What happened here."
Seonghyeon didn't answer right away, humiliation creeping in now that the initial storm had passed, now that there were more people to witness the aftermath of it. "I don't know. I just — I got so mad, and I didn't even think, I just started—"
"You're the maknae," Juhoon said simply, like that explained everything, dropping down onto the wrecked carpet with the rest of them without a hint of hesitation, careless of the juice stain already spreading toward his sneaker. "You're allowed to lose it sometimes. God knows the rest of us have wanted to, this week."
"He shouldn't have said that to you," James added, quieter, more careful, like he was picking each word for weight rather than speed. "None of it was fair. You know that, right? Whatever's going on in his head right now — that's not on you."
Seonghyeon didn't fully believe it, not yet, not in the place underneath his ribs where the actual hurt lived, but hearing it out loud from someone other than Martin helped anyway, some of the tightness in his chest easing by a fraction.
"We should probably deal with this before it sets in," Juhoon said eventually, wrinkling his nose at the smell now that the crisis of Seonghyeon's tears had passed and the practical crisis of a ruined mattress had taken its place. "Chips and orange juice is not a combination anyone should have to live with long-term."
It became, almost without anyone deciding it should, something close to an actual project — Juhoon dragging the soaked sheets off the bed with theatrical disgust, holding a corner of it at arm's length like it was radioactive, James digging through the hall closet for spare bedding while keeping up a running, deadpan commentary on the whole situation that had, despite everything, actual jokes buried in it. Martin found the vacuum for the crumbs. Someone produced air freshener from somewhere and used entirely too much of it. At one point Juhoon held up the stuffed rabbit, orange juice dripping steadily off one ear, and delivered it in the driest voice he had — "casualty of war" — and it startled an actual laugh out of Seonghyeon, small and surprised, the first one in what felt like days.
For a while it almost felt normal. Four of them crowded into a bedroom too small for the job, bickering good-naturedly over how to fold a fitted sheet, Juhoon narrating the whole cleanup like a nature documentary, James tossing a pillow at his head when the commentary got too editorial, Seonghyeon caught somewhere in the middle of it, laughing despite himself, the tight, awful thing in his chest loosening just enough to let something lighter in for the first time since the kitchen.
It was Martin who noticed him go quiet first.
Seonghyeon had turned, mid-laugh, to say something — some half-formed joke about the smell, or the rabbit, or nothing at all — and his eyes had gone, automatically, without any conscious decision behind it, to the third bed in the room. The empty one. Still made, blankets undisturbed, exactly the way it had been left since the last time anyone had actually slept in it.
He didn't say anything. He didn't have to. The laugh died somewhere in his throat, and the room seemed to notice all at once, the easy noise of a few minutes ago draining out of it in the space of a single breath, and for a moment none of them moved, the fresh sheets still half-folded in Juhoon's hands, James's joke dying unfinished on his lips.
It hadn't been normal at all. It had just been very good, for a few minutes, at pretending.
"He'd have made fun of the rabbit thing," Juhoon said finally, quiet now, no performance left in it. "He'd have made us do a whole bit about it."
Nobody answered. Nobody needed to. They finished making the bed in silence after that, careful and slow, the way you'd handle something that belonged to someone who wasn't there to say it was fine to touch.
VIII. Home Again
The original plan had been his parents' house.
It made sense on paper — his mother had already taken leave from work, his father had converted the spare room into something resembling a recovery space within days of the surgery, and the company, when the subject came up in one of the increasingly frequent calls between the hospital and the label's offices, had seemed inclined to agree. Familiar space. Family close by around the clock. No cameras, no fans, none of the complications that came with housing a recognizable idol somewhere fans had, on more than one occasion in the past, managed to find.
It was James who pushed back first, gently, in a meeting none of the members had technically been invited to but had shown up to anyway, all four of them crowded into a small conference room at the company that smelled like stale coffee and felt entirely too formal for what they were actually there to argue about.
"The hospital's forty minutes from his parents' place," James said, laying it out carefully, the way he did when he wanted to be taken seriously rather than dismissed as sentimental. "It's twelve minutes from the dorm. If something happens — if he needs to go back in for anything, even a checkup — that's a real difference."
"And we have the space," Juhoon added. "We've got two guest rooms nobody's using. His parents could stay with us just as easily as we could all be crowding into their apartment. Easier, actually, because we're already set up for someone who needs — quiet, and time, and not having to explain himself to visitors."
Martin, who talked the least in rooms like this, was the one who said the thing that actually ended the discussion. "He needs to be around people who know exactly what happened. Not people who are going to ask him about it every five minutes because they weren't there and don't know what not to ask. We know. We were there. We know when to just — be quiet, and let him be quiet too."
Seonghyeon hadn't said anything in the meeting at all, hadn't trusted his voice enough to try, but he'd nodded, hard, at that last part, and something about the four of them sitting there united on this one specific thing, after days of everything else feeling fractured and uncertain, had apparently been persuasive enough. The company agreed, on the condition that his parents or his sister would be present around the clock for at least the first several weeks, staying in the guest rooms as long as needed — which nobody had any objection to at all.
He came home on a gray, unremarkable afternoon, nine days after the accident.
The transfer itself had been arranged quietly — a private vehicle instead of an ambulance, no announcement, staff briefed carefully on keeping the whole thing as contained and unremarkable as possible, though none of them could have guessed, going in, exactly how much effort it would take to move a recovering person through the world without the world noticing.
Seonghyeon had spent the whole morning pacing. He'd cleaned his side of the room he still hadn't fully explained to anyone, rearranged the pillows on Keonho's newly remade bed at least four times, and finally settled on standing by the window, watching the street below, until the familiar car finally pulled up and his heart did something complicated and painful in his chest.
Keonho came up in a wheelchair — not because there was anything specifically wrong with his legs, but because the knife had nicked close enough to a major artery that the surgeons had spent four hours fighting to keep him from bleeding out entirely, and nobody on his medical team was willing to leave any margin unaccounted for this early. It was precaution stacked on precaution: the repair itself still healing, the risk of the site reopening under strain higher than any of them wanted to test with something as ordinary as a long walk down a hospital corridor. If the next checkup showed the wound closing well and the repair holding steady the way they hoped it would, the wheelchair would go. For now, nobody was willing to take the chance. His mother pushed the chair. His sister carried two bags that were clearly more than clothes — snacks, a pillow from home, small comforts nobody had thought to bring to the hospital in the chaos of the first few days.
He looked smaller than any of them remembered him looking, even after nine days of visits, nine days of watching him slowly regain color and alertness in a hospital bed. Out here, in the ordinary hallway light of the building he'd lived in for over a year, thinner, paler, moving carefully and deliberately in a way that had nothing to do with the boy who used to spin around a kitchen with a knife in his hand for the fun of it, the difference landed harder than it ever had in the sterile, controlled environment of the hospital room.
Juhoon reached him first, crouching down to his level instead of hovering over him, a small, deliberate kindness that Keonho's eyes seemed to catch and hold onto. "Welcome home," he said, quieter than his usual register, careful in a way that suited the moment better than any joke would have. "We saved you the good spot by the window."
"You redecorated my bed," Keonho said, voice still thin but steadier than it had been days ago, the ghost of something wry in it. "James told me. Something about orange juice."
Somewhere behind the group, Seonghyeon went very still.
"That's a story for another day," James said smoothly, stepping in before the silence could stretch too long, throwing Seonghyeon a glance that was equal parts warning and reassurance. "Let's get you settled first."
Keonho's eyes found Seonghyeon's anyway, across the small crowd of people in the hallway, and held there for a moment — not quite an apology, not quite anything resolved, just a look, tentative and searching, the first real one either of them had managed since the hospital room two days after the surgery. Seonghyeon didn't know what to do with it, so he just held it back, steady, saying nothing, and let the moment pass without either of them reaching for more than that.
They wheeled him inside together.
IX. The Apple
A few days into being home, the dorm ran out of the easy things first — the pre-cut fruit cups, the packaged rice balls, the small, mindless snacks that had kept everyone fed without anyone needing to actually think about cooking. It was a Tuesday afternoon, quiet, most of the apartment empty. Juhoon and James were out at a scheduling meeting. Martin had gone to pick up groceries specifically to fix the very problem currently sitting untouched in the empty fridge, and hadn't been back yet.
Which left Keonho, alone in the kitchen for the first time since it had happened, hungry, restless in the particular way of someone whose patience for being fed and managed by other people was wearing thinner by the day, wheeled up close to the counter, staring at a bag of apples and deciding, with the kind of stubborn logic that had never once in his life talked him out of anything, that he could handle cutting up a single piece of fruit by himself.
He reached up for the knife from where it sat on the cutting board, close enough that the wheelchair put him at nearly the right height for the counter if he leaned in.
It wasn't the same knife. He knew that, rationally — that one had gone somewhere he'd never asked about and never wanted to, replaced weeks ago by a set nobody had commented on, sharp and unremarkable and completely, entirely ordinary. It didn't matter. The second his fingers closed around the handle, something in his chest seized shut, fast and total, air catching somewhere high in his throat.
It's fine. He said it out loud, quiet, to the empty kitchen, the way he used to fill silence without thinking twice about it. "It's fine. It's just an apple. You've cut like a thousand apples." His voice came out thinner than he meant it to, wavering on the second sentence in a way that embarrassed him even with no one there to hear it.
His hand wouldn't stay still. He set the blade against the apple's skin and his fingers were already trembling, faint at first and then worse, a fine, uncontrollable shake traveling up through his wrist that had nothing to do with any physical weakness the doctors had warned him about and everything to do with something else entirely, something that didn't have a scar or a scan to point to.
The knife slipped out of his grip and clattered onto the counter, loud in the quiet apartment, and he flinched so hard the wheelchair rocked slightly beneath him.
"Okay," he said, breath coming faster now, picking it back up with hands that shook worse the second time. "Okay, it's fine, it's just—"
It happened again almost immediately. The blade hit the counter with a second sharp, metallic clatter, and this time he didn't reach for it right away. This time something in him just stopped.
He curled forward in the wheelchair, as small as the frame of it would let him get, knees drawn up as far as they'd go, and pressed both hands hard over his ears like the sound was still happening, like it hadn't already stopped the second the knife went still on the counter. His breath was coming in short, uneven pulls, his whole body drawn tight and shaking, and for a moment he wasn't in the dorm kitchen at all — he was on his back on a different floor, staring up at a ceiling that wasn't this one, waiting for a voice that wasn't coming fast enough.
Seonghyeon heard the second clatter from down the hall and came to check without any particular urgency, the ordinary kind of curiosity that came from living with someone loud enough that any unusual silence was worth investigating.
He stopped in the kitchen doorway.
Keonho was folded forward over himself in the wheelchair, hands clamped over his ears, shoulders shaking, small in a way that had nothing to do with the space he actually took up in a room. The knife lay a few feet away on the counter, catching the afternoon light, an apple sitting forgotten and half-turned on the cutting board in front of him.
Seonghyeon didn't say anything.
He didn't ask what happened, didn't ask if he was okay, didn't do any of the things that might have made Keonho feel watched, or worse, seen in a moment he clearly hadn't meant for anyone to witness. He just crossed the kitchen quietly, picked the knife up off the floor without a word, and set it back on the counter with a soft, deliberate click, out of Keonho's immediate line of sight.
Then he picked up the apple, and cut it.
He worked in silence, steady, unhurried, the same competent quiet he'd carried through every hour of that night in the ambulance's absence, cutting the apple into neat, even slices the way Keonho always did it — thin, no core, arranged without thinking on a small plate because some habits didn't need conscious effort to survive. He didn't look over at Keonho on the floor while he did it, didn't make it a moment, didn't ask for anything in return.
He set the plate down on the counter within easy reach, close enough that Keonho wouldn't have to get up for it whenever he was ready, and then, without a single word, he turned and walked back out of the kitchen, leaving Keonho alone with the sound of his own breathing slowly evening out and a plate of apple slices he hadn't had to ask for.
It took a while — long enough that the apartment had gone fully quiet again, long enough that Seonghyeon had settled into the corner of the couch with the TV on low, some rerun neither of them would remember the plot of later, volume barely above a murmur.
He heard the wheels before he saw him — the soft, familiar sound of the chair moving over the floor, slower than usual, hesitant in a way Keonho's movements almost never were. He didn't say anything as he came around the couch, didn't announce himself, didn't make a joke out of it the way he would have on any other day. He just wheeled himself up alongside it, close, and with visible effort, guided himself out of the chair and onto the cushions, folding down until his head came to rest in Seonghyeon's lap, curling in the rest of the way like something in him had simply run out of the energy to hold itself upright any longer.
Seonghyeon didn't say anything either.
He didn't ask why, didn't ask if he was okay, didn't reach for any of the words that had failed both of them so badly two days ago in a hospital room neither of them wanted to think about right now. He just shifted slightly to make more room, one hand coming to rest, careful and light, in Keonho's hair, and let his eyes drift back to the television like nothing about this moment needed narrating at all.
On screen, some rerun character said something that should have been funny. Neither of them laughed. Neither of them needed to.
They stayed like that for a long time, the TV murmuring on in the background, Keonho's breathing slowly matching the quiet rhythm of the room, and nothing about it was fixed, not really — nothing had been said, nothing had been resolved out loud — but for the first time since the kitchen floor and the hospital room and the door that had stayed shut for two days, something between them had, without either of them needing to name it, quietly begun to mend.
