The answer reached him through Son Hyung, a senior in the department who had the particular trait of saying everything without looking at the person he was speaking to, his eyes fixed on his computer, his fingers in constant motion across the keyboard.
—Brownson? Transferred to intensive care. At the same time as you, actually. Why?
—No reason, said Tae-Hee. Thanks.
He walked back into the corridor with the same neutral expression he had worn since morning, and waited until he had turned the corner before stopping.
At the same time as him.
He let the information settle. Dave had been transferred at the same moment, in the same administrative move, and had said nothing. Not a message. Not a sign. Just this absence that had stretched on for weeks, which Tae-Hee had attributed to overwork, to schedules, to the ordinary fatigue that pulls people out of sync even when they don't want it to.
He resumed walking. He had reports to finish.
But the thought didn't let him go for the rest of the morning.
He took advantage of a lull in the early afternoon to go up to the third floor.
The intensive care unit had that particular atmosphere he knew well — more hushed than the others, as if even sound had learned to hold its breath. Tae-Hee walked along the main corridor and pushed open the door to the break room.
Kiara was sitting at the central table, a paper cup of coffee between her hands, eyes on her phone. A young extern sitting across from her was taking notes with the diligent focus of someone in their first week.
—Is Dave here? Tae-Hee asked.
Kiara looked up. An imperceptible fraction of a second.
—No, she said. He's not here.
Tae-Hee scanned the room. The empty sofas, the closed lockers, the coffee machine. No one else.
—Alright, he said. Thanks.
He left.
Under the table, perfectly still, Dave held his breath.
Kiara set down her cup. She chewed her gum once, twice, with the unhurried pace of someone carefully choosing their next words.
—Seriously, she murmured, what you're doing to him isn't okay.
A silence.
— The worst part is, you're dragging me into it.
— I know, Dave breathed from the floor.
He got to his feet with the approximate dignity of a man who knows he has very little left. Kiara watched him without changing expression — no pity, no amusement, just that amber gaze that registered everything and commented only on the strictly necessary.
—You should tell him you feel guilty. You won't get far if you keep this up.
Dave scratched the back of his neck.
He knew. He knew exactly what he was doing and why it was cowardly, and that awareness helped him not at all. Who in this hospital didn't know that Tae-Hee had been Dr. Douglas's favorite target since his arrival? No one.
No one except Tae-Hee himself, who absorbed it, organized around it, adapted, and had apparently not yet understood that what was being done to him bore no resemblance to a normal integration process.
And Dave was the one who had set it in motion. Unintentionally, stupidly, with the best of intentions — but it was he who had slipped that name to the department head, he who had insisted, he who had opened that door.
His standing in the hospital amounted to that of a well-liked intern. Not enough to counterbalance Douglas. Not enough to protect anyone.
So he had pulled away. As if that helped anything.
Kiara sighed the brief, resigned sigh of someone who has spent too long around brilliant people who think like children.
—I don't want to stick my nose in your business, she said. But I'm telling you what I see.
The extern across from her had stopped taking notes some time ago and was watching the scene with wide eyes. Kiara glanced at her.
— We're continuing.
★★★
For his part, Tae-Hee spent the afternoon working. Mechanically, methodically, with the clockwork regularity he had built for himself as a shield. But the numbers kept slipping. The words too. His mind kept returning to the same place, circling the same question the way a tongue returns to a sore tooth.
Mme Chow had said it the week before, directly, without much softening, that was how she loved people, by telling them what they didn't want to hear.
—He's avoiding you, my boy. It's plain as day.
Tae-Hee had wanted to argue. He had almost done it. He had even mentally prepared two or three reasonable counterarguments — the schedules, the workload, the disorientation of an abrupt transfer. But Mme Chow had looked at him with the eyes of someone who had watched enough people come and go to be fooled by very little, and Tae-Hee had closed his mouth.
He had thought about it all week. He had resisted it all week.
And that morning, when he learned about the simultaneous transfer, he had stopped resisting.
Dave was avoiding him. Deliberately. And Tae-Hee was going to talk to him.
He gathered his things at the end of the afternoon and went back up to the third floor.
This time, Kiara was alone in the corridor, standing by a window, phone in hand. She looked up as he approached, and something in her expression shifted slightly, a decision made in a fraction of a second.
—If you're looking for Dave, he's already left.
Tae-Hee stopped. The disappointment was brief but real, he felt it in his shoulders before he had even put it into words. If he didn't talk to him now, he wouldn't have the nerve again. He knew it.
Kiara held his gaze for another second, then:
—He went out through the back, by the emergency wing. Better hurry before he slips away.
She was smiling slightly. Tae-Hee thanked her and left, nearly at a run.
He recognized him from behind immediately that unmistakable build, those shoulders that rose just slightly above the average human silhouette. Dave was walking toward the exit by the emergency wing, hands in his pockets, at that particular pace of his when he didn't want to look like he was in a hurry but was.
Tae-Hee picked up speed.
He hadn't prepared what he was going to say. So when he was close enough, he did what felt natural: he wrapped his arms around Dave's shoulders from behind and held on.
Dave startled violently.
—What the-
—I'm sorry, said Tae-Hee into his back. I don't know what I did. But I'm sorry.
The silence that followed lasted several seconds. Dave didn't move. Neither did Tae-Hee. Then Dave placed a hand over the arms wrapped around him, heavy, hesitant.
— I'm the one who should be saying that.
His voice was different. The usual baritone, without the smile underneath.
He turned slowly and they faced each other. Dave's eyes were evasive, he who always looked people straight in the eye, whose gaze was ordinarily as direct as a firm handshake.
—It's because of me, he said. What Douglas is putting you through.
Tae-Hee opened his mouth. Dave went on, because if he stopped now he wouldn't start again.
—I'm the one who recommended you for the procedure at Hôpital Lumière. I put your name forward, I pushed for it. And Douglas holds it against you, not for anything you did during the procedure, but because Ashton looked at you instead of him. I should have seen that coming. I should have been more careful.
He stopped. Rubbed the back of his neck with an awkwardness that didn't suit him.
—If I hadn't done that, you'd still be in intensive care with Dr. Shin and you'd be sleeping at home like a normal human being. So I... I didn't know how to look you in the eye. Because I knew what was happening and I couldn't do anything about it. My word doesn't carry enough weight in this hospital to stand up to Douglas. So I told myself that if I put some distance between us-
—It would help? Tae-Hee finished softly.
Dave closed his eyes for a moment.
—No. I know it made no sense. I already knew that at the time.
The silence returned, but different. More livable.
It was Tae-Hee who broke it not with words, but with what words could no longer contain. The tears came without warning, silent at first. He didn't hold them back. He was tired of holding things back.
—It's not Douglas, he said, his voice breaking halfway through. That's not what was hardest. It's not seeing you anymore. Not understanding what I'd done. Telling myself every morning that maybe you'd just grown tired of me and that-
He didn't finish.
Dave wrapped him in his arms without hesitating this time, completely, solidly, with the conviction of someone catching something he should have caught much sooner.
—I'm here. I'm so sorry.
Tae-Hee didn't answer. He didn't need to.
At the corner of the emergency corridor, Kiara watched from a distance. She chewed her gum slowly. Something in her expression — behind the usual irony, behind the multicolored barrettes — looked like pride. Quiet, unclaimed, but there.
She had been right to tell him which way Dave had gone.
She had no intention of admitting that out loud.
What she couldn't see, however, what no one in the emergency courtyard could see, was the figure on the fifth floor.
Behind the glass of a window overlooking the courtyard, Christopher Ashton was watching the scene below. Not with the studied nonchalance he kept for the rest of the world. With something else, something slower, quieter, that had no name yet in the vocabulary he had built for himself.
His grey eyes were fixed on the young man below, the one with the shaking shoulders being held by the other.
The little mouse.
He didn't move for a long moment. Then he looked away, deliberately, the way one closes a window against a draft one doesn't yet know how to name, and went back to his files.
★★★
Tae-Hee spent the rest of the afternoon working with the same mechanical regularity as always, but something had loosened slightly somewhere in his chest. Not much. Just enough for the numbers on the reports to seem one degree less hostile.
It was past seven in the evening when one of the seniors — the blonde with amber eyes, the one from the break room whose name he had only learned the week before — stopped in front of him.
Moreover, he had discovered that his nickname was Chief...
Atypical.
She looked at his stack of files. At his face. At the circles under his eyes.
—Do you live here now?
The tone wasn't unkind. It was worse, it was matter-of-fact.
—I still have a few-
—Put that down.
Tae-Hee put it down.
— When did you last set foot in your own home?
He calculated. The answer was embarrassing.
—Go home, she said, before he had even opened his mouth. Those files will still be here tomorrow. You, if you keep this up, won't be in any state to read them.
Chief picked up her own coat from the back of a chair and left without waiting for an answer.
Tae-Hee sat still for a moment.
Then he packed up his things and went home.