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A hand closed on Sieun's forearm, going tight as he flinched away. He fought it, confused and resisting panic.
“No, you’re good, it’s me, it’s me! Sieun!”
Sieun shook off a spin and realized he was propped on a set of steps, Suho’s voice raised as he kept Sieun from struggling to his feet. There was a weird tone of white noise, and it receded as he started to feel more alert.
“You’re okay, but you hit your head. I need you to sit still,” he said clearly. “Can you hear me?”
Nodding hurt. He reached up and Suho caught him before Sieun touched the top of his head where the pain felt like something gnawing on him. Something thickly liquid was wetting his hair.
“I think I’m bleeding.”
Sieun knew his tone was off. He was swaying, and his joints felt too weak to stabilize himself.
“You are a little bit,” Suho said. “It’s not that bad. The scalp bleeds a lot from nothing. I’m more worried about the inside. How’s your stomach?”
Sieun tried to feel the rest of his body, but only felt weird and shaken. He frowned, and managed to meet Suho’s gaze as the latter waited for him to answer.
“Sick at all, need to throw up?”
He was crouched in front of him, his hands on his legs and giving him a pleading look to be okay. Sieun understood Suho’s reaction but he was a little removed from his own feelings.
“No, not that. Doesn’t feel like anything.”
There would be a giant headache later, once the shock left him. He heard Suho sigh. “Good. I need you to stay awake for me. If you start to drift off, say something,” he told him. “Okay, I’m about to shine a light in your eyes and blind you. Before I do that, look at something far away and tell me if you can focus on it.”
Sieun found a sign over Suho’s shoulder, tipping his head carefully. The sickening wet feeling through his hair changed direction and flowed faster.
“There’s a no parking across the street. The street name is… Nongol-ro,” he said.
Suho looked back to read the sign, and turned to Sieun, sparing an encouraging squeeze to his knee. “Good, and you can see me clearly? It’s not difficult to focus your eyes?”
There was a stress tic in his jaw, sometimes making a vein pulse down his neck. Sieun realized he had a big red and black coat draped around his slumped shoulders, and Suho was down to a t-shirt. It was late fall in South Korea. He was going to be cold.
“I can see you. You should take your jacket back,” he said. “I’ll get it dirty. I’m not cold. It’s kind of warm.”
Suho reached behind Sieun and took his coat away, but he didn’t put it on. His face flushed and he said something under his breath. “I’m too angry to be cold,” he said roughly. “That ass threw you into a bike rack. He could have killed you over not getting some stupid fucking assignment that you weren’t even supposed to do.”
Sieun’s butt was going numb and he shifted to ease the feeling. "I'm fine, Suho," Sieun replied, a hint of his usual reserved logic in his tone. He'd shifted slightly again, trying to regain feeling. "And you're right, he's an ass. But you don't need to get angry for my sake and don’t freeze. Put your coat on, stupid."
Jeon Youngbin has been harassing Sieun in class for weeks now, especially knowing that Sieun can stand up for himself and “can take punches really well”, let’s not forget how Youngbin would never be able to place first in class if Sieun is around.
“I choose to be angry, Sieun-ah, he almost tried to kill you with those useless lackeys of his,” Suho said tightly. “It doesn’t matter what he thought he was doing. By that logic it’s perfectly fine to shove you on the subway tracks if he’s running late for a movie. I’m going to shine a light in your eyes. It’s going to be unpleasant.”
Sieun cringed as the quick flash of illumination set off the pain in his head he’d been expecting.
“Ow, yeah that’s true. I’m not saying it’s okay he did it,” he mumbled. “But I was fighting him. You and Yeongi were chasing him. Where did she go?”
Suho had put his phone away, and he was digging in his backpack. If Sieun knew him, he probably still carried the first aid pouch from his martial arts trainee days. It had expanded a lot to include the ability to give stitches.
“Yeongi is getting my scooter, but there’s an ambulance coming, too. Whichever vehicle gets here first you’re getting in and we’ll go to the hospital.”
Sieun wasn’t as foggy as before. The gap between the chase, the injury and coming back to awareness was mostly sorted out.
“I don’t think I need to go. I wasn’t really knocked out, you know? Nothing feels broken. My brain isn’t squishing out,” he said.
Suho studied him, his face stern. “That’s the concussion making you tired. Even if we went back to the hotel you can’t sleep. You can’t imagine you married someone trained as an EMT and are going to refuse first aid for a head injury,” he told Sieun. “I’ll wrestle you into the damn ambulance.”
Sieun knew Suho wasn’t angry at him, but the insistence was a lot when he was feeling weak.
“I’m sorry I got hurt. You know I didn’t mean to. I don’t want strangers touching me and they don’t even do stitches under the hair half the time. Hospitals are the worst place when you have a really bad headache,” he said, aware his tone had veered toward whining.
The numbness was gone and he was sad; longing for a comfortable, dark bedroom. Suho was too responsible to give in about medical care. Sieun was in for a long, invasive day of checks that wouldn't actually cure his concussion. The doctors would tell him what he knew he had, and then he would have to heal slowly.
Suho had paper wrapped packages of gauze out, and he stopped opening them to look at Sieun directly. “You don’t have to be sorry. I’m sorry I have to make you go somewhere bright and noisy. I know you recognize the difference between feeling beat up and being really hurt. But if you go to sleep forever because we assume that, I’m a widower in my teens and I’m going to have to drink myself to death, okay?”
His attempt at a joke was horrifying, and Sieun felt tears overflow down his cheeks. “No! Not ever okay Suho-ya!”
Sieun shoved Suho back and he fell on his ass. They did dangerous things with the measure of calculated risks guesstimated from previous experiences. Sieun knew he wasn’t immune and that meant neither was Suho. And they weren’t even really married, but they also were just a little bit. If anything, the lack of a legal marriage meant they couldn’t get divorced and give it a true end.
Hardass Ahn Suho was gone. He came back on his knees and hugged Sieun as he pulled himself into a mortified slump. It was just being injured that made him such a crybaby, and that made it much harder to calm down.
“I’m sorry. Nobody’s dying, it was a really bad joke. I’ll be serious from now on. I’ll be humourless. We’ll discuss very heavy topics. I’ll recite statistics, and you can eat the expensive box of chocolates I’m going to buy you,” Suho whispered. “I’m a jerk.”
Suho wasn’t, and it was terrible he wasn’t. If he could just show some crappy trait that was impossible to love, Sieun could work out if he was the unrequited party of their dynamic. They could only float in the maybe of it for so long.
“You’re not a jerk,” Sieun mumbled. “My head hurts a lot.”
“You’ll feel better soon.” He took Sieun’s disgusting, bloody hair in one hand and cleared it from his forehead, kissing him there delicately. His mouth went down under his jaw, brushed his earlobe and laid a peck on his throat.
Sieun stretched his back, leaning forward to Suho. He came up and kissed him on the mouth, a warm, unhurried caress that brought a sudden stop to his tears. The waves of fatigue were no match for the heat that lit up his cheeks like two stove burners.
Suho pulled back and Sieun let him go, staring at him as he paused for something. Sadly, Suho went back to his gauze packs and Sieun pouted.
“That didn’t make me less dazed,” he complained mildly. “And I hate that we only ever kiss when somebody’s upset and I look like garbage.”
Suho smiled at him, bunching a white lump to dab at his head. “You’re always pretty, and you cried off a lot of the crusty playground sand. I’m not seeing any visible brains. You’re probably twitterpated, but it’s a very common chronic condition.”
It was familiar, and his tone made it clear it wasn’t a real medical condition. Sieun made a little inquiring noise.
“Like Beomseok explained to Yeongi,” he said. “Every spring, all the animals reunite and a few of them take a fancy to someone. I’ve been living with it for a few months now. It’s sometimes hard to manage, but it’s not all bad.”
Sieun was huddled right up to Suho’s chest, his scent drowning him in a weird urge to nuzzle and rub on him. He’d bled on his shoulder at some point, and the knees of his jeans were damp from kneeling on the ground.
“What’s so good about it, in your opinion?”
“I know where I caught it, and I know the person who gave it to me is worth at the very least nervous excitement,” he said. “It sometimes flares up and those are the days Yeongi complains we’re being ‘too married.’”
Sieun was fascinated now, aware Suho was humouring him because he thought it distracted from the soreness as he picked at his wound.
“Do you think we’re too married?”
His soft, easy note of uncertainty was gentle on Sieun’s ears. “Maybe not married enough. I think eventually the condition becomes terminal twitterpation. Leads to some dangerous behaviour - sudden marriage proposals and surprise honeymoons and such. Sometimes two people meet and their twitterpation crosses strains and the next thing you know they’re just up to crazy stuff,” he said. “Living together and spending all their time together, and talking about having a pet together. Maybe a plant would do?”
He was clearly not suggesting that was for them in any near future, but it wasn’t an impossibility. Sieun liked the way Suho smoothed his hair flat, even though it was filthy with blood.
“A terrifying condition when you put it like that,” he said lightly. “It’s making my concussion seem like a kindness. I hope you have someone you can talk to about it, for support.”
Suho bundled the bloody gauze in the wrapper, zipped his backpack and stood up. “I have somebody nice who always listens.”
They were growing past the need to drop clues about what they might say if it was time to say it. Sieun watched him bemused as Suho reached down to help him up.
“You’re going to be a bit dizzy, and all pins and needles,” he said. “Take your time.”
He stood up slowly, irritated to remember he was hurt and in pain. He had a lot to think about while he was near Suho, and he didn’t want to waste time on naps and healing. There might be a flare up of married symptoms to worry Yeongi soon. Sieun wasn’t sure he wanted Suho to be cured.
“Are you still packing me off to the hospital?” he asked.
“I’m not locking you up in a Victorian institution for mad men,” Suho told him, keeping one of his hands. “I’m going to stay with you. I want to see that sexy brain on your MRI you’re getting. So we can make sure you don’t slip into a coma and die. What about this plan is unreasonable?”
Sieun gave him a tragic look. “The gross hospital smell, the bad food, and how long it will be before I can shower the blood out of my hair,” Sieun told him.
Suho smiled. “You need to toughen up. I could send you to a spooky asylum for difficult men who are too smart for their own good?”
Aware he was baiting him, Sieun scowled at him. “What is this idea of sending me places like you can put me in a box with enough postage and that’s normal?”
Suho grinned, clearly enjoying his outrage. “Obviously you’ll have some packing peanuts and a water bottle and some food. We’re going to use a lot of fragile stickers and some air holes for the box,” Suho told him. “And you’ll be wearing my new invention I just thought of called the husband helmet. It’s a football helmet I’m padlocking onto your head. It can be any colour you want!”
Sieun glared at him, marveling at the notion Suho was famous for being a sleepyhead in class who did nothing but play around and make everyone feel foolish when they try to provoke him. He was quick with a juvenile bit of humour, but more selective when he said it aloud. He gestured with their joined hands to the ambulance pulling up the curb, closely followed by Yeongi on his scooter.
“Oh, look, it’s our ride,” he said brightly.
Sieun widened his eyes and gave Suho a fake smile. “Just in time, you were about to need the emergency room and not me.”