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Taeyong doesn’t know much about instant death, but he does know a lot about the kind that is slow.
The death that looks like this: plastic tubing going into a body, into a patient’s mouth that is gaping like a wound. Plastic tubing into an engorged hand that is bruised because all week needles have pierced the tender skin over a pulse point, over the radial artery. There are no veins to palpate at this point. Everything is edema, all extravasated fluid. So you take an arterial sample. Hope you draw enough blood to run the tests. Hope that you’ll find something to correct when the results come in. Hope that it makes a difference somehow.
It’s hard being at the mercy of someone—something— else’s control, when even with his five years of medical schooling and his two years of residency, there are still so many limitations to what his doctor’s hands can do.
He takes off his white coat in the call room, blood splattered on the hem of it from an extraction gone wrong, a sample not caught in time. He’s exhausted, and all he wants to do is sleep for a whole week. The hospital is silent now that they’ve wheeled the body down to the morgue. He figures there’s maybe one or two hours where he can squeeze in a short nap before having to do his patient rounds again, but his weariness is bone-deep.
He can’t stop thinking about the patient he’s just lost, and it shakes him that it’s taking so long for him to shake it off. Normally he can brush this off, but it’s much harder to do lately, and he can’t place why.
A knock on the call room door snaps him out of it just as he takes his glasses off, and in comes Johnny Suh— best friend, co-Internal Medicine resident, and love of Taeyong’s life (but of course this part is a secret Taeyong has worked the last three years to keep hidden).
The room’s air conditioning is on full blast. Taeyong is shivering. Johnny sweeps into the room and says nothing, walking instead towards his locker and pulling out a purple fleece blanket, and draping it over Taeyong’s shoulders. This is the shit that really did Taeyong in three years ago, back when they were interns and didn’t know anything about death or Do Not Resuscitate forms yet, back when all they knew was the kind of tired that meant monitoring patient’s vital signs and running to and from the lab and studying for exams and passing out from it all.
“I heard about—“
Taeyong stops him there. He doesn’t want to talk about it. A sob leaves his lips, and Johnny is there in a second.
“We can’t save everyone, you know that.” It’s said so softly that it’s clear Johnny is trying his very best to cushion the blow. The first time Johnny lost a patient, he had stepped into the call room for two minutes, cried his eyes out, and then stepped out and got back to work. Taeyong doesn’t know how he does it, how Johnny manages to keep his tenderness despite having to harden himself whenever these things happen. Johnny has his hands in Taeyong’s hair, stroking down his back, while Taeyong dry heaves into the starched collar of Johnny’s coat, no tears, nothing.
“I really thought I could save this one this time,” Taeyong replies, and pulls away. They don’t talk much about the losses, because most of the days they’re chasing after wins anyway. And most days, they get the wins. A fever breaks. Uraemia resolves. A code is run and epinephrine is given and suddenly you get a tick on the electrocardiogram. A patient goes home, even if you don’t.
Johnny sighs, and stretches out. It’s 2:37 am on the clock above the door. They’ve got 89 patients to do rounds on between the two of them. Taeyong counts himself lucky that they’re pulling the same shift tonight. It’s always easier with Johnny around— everything is.
Taeyong pulls out his raggedy notebook, worn at the corners from all the times he’s stuffed it haphazardly into his coat pockets, and opens it up to the latest entry, some notes on a new admission before he had to call the time of death earlier.
“You wouldn’t happen to know Mr. Park’s trop-I levels, would you?” Taeyong sighs. So much for that nap. He’s scanning his notes for the complete blood count levels he had noted down prior to... Well, prior to.
“A solid 2.3, Yongie. Don’t worry, I already wrote the orders out. Vitals are stable now, started him on ASA, and he’s comfortable, I just checked on him,” Johnny says, leaning his head back on the couch they’re sat on, closing his eyes for a few seconds.
“I could kiss you,” Taeyong groans, and then catches himself, freezing as Johnny pulls his head up and opens one eye to look at him. He smiles at Taeyong, this soft, warm thing, and says “Don’t say things you won’t follow through on,” before closing his eyes again and gently throwing his head back.
Taeyong tells Johnny to shut up. See, this has always baffled Taeyong, how easy it is for Johnny to throw remarks out like that whenever he has a moment of weakness. He never bats an eyelash, never misses a beat.
More than once it’s made Taeyong wonder if— well, wonder. If. If maybe there was something more to all of this. More to their friendship than the long nights spent together on duty, more than the fact that they’re neighbours who spend less time in their own homes and more in each others’. Taeyong figures that if Johnny somehow knew that Taeyong carried a torch for him, and he felt the same way, then Johnny would have said something by now. But as it stands, all there’s ever been is flirtation and no follow-through.
“Dr. Suh, ER now. Dr. Suh, ER now,” comes a grating, urgent, tinny voice over the intercom, and Johnny shoots up from where he’s seated.
“Fuck,” he mutters, running his hands through his hair and fixing the drawstrings of his scrub pants as he strides to the door.
“I’m coming with you,” Taeyong says, running after him and pulling his coat on.
“Yongie, if this is a gonna turn into a code, I don’t want you there. You’re exhausted,” Johnny says firmly while he pulls his phone out. They’re brisk-walking toward the elevator just as Johnny’s phone rings. Taeyong ignores him and punches the down button instead.
“Johnny, there’s a patient here that’s GCS 8, a 37-year-old male, last seen fully conscious at around 10 in the evening. I’ve got a thready pulse but there’s no respiration—“ Doyoung speaks a mile a minute, trying to squeeze in everything Johnny needs to know before he gets to the ER. “It’s—“ There’s shouting in the background. “Yuta, ready the intubation set, Johnny’s on his way! You’re on your way, right?”
The elevator dings to the ground level and Johnny and Taeyong rush out. They round the corner towards the emergency room doors and Taeyong sees the bed right away, curtains being drawn around a patient while Jaehyun, their medical intern, has an Ambu bag to the patient’s mouth. Doyoung steps aside to make way for Johnny, and nods in Taeyong’s direction.
“Ready suction machine,” Johnny commands clearly. He’s pushed his sleeves up to his elbows, and Taeyong steps closer to him to assist. He’s always hated intubations, but when Johnny does it, it’s one shot, easy as pie. He’s got sterile gloves on, and he holds his hand out for Taeyong to apply lubricant on the back of his hand before smearing it all over the laryngoscope. It goes into the patient’s mouth, one smooth motion, and then Taeyong is handing him the endotracheal tube, and Johnny is pulling the stylus out. It’s less than three minutes from start to finish by the time Johnny is taking the 5cc syringe and inflating the balloon to keep the tube in place.
Now see, this is something that Taeyong has seen over and over and over, Johnny thriving in an emergency setting. It still confuses him that Johnny had decided to apply for a residency in internal medicine when he so clearly was built for the lightning-quick environment of emergency medicine.
Johnny had rationalized that his exam scores hadn’t made the cut for it, but Taeyong knows that it’s a lie, because he had seen Johnny’s ranking and scores on the licensure exams and he knows that Johnny, for some inexplicable reason, decided to follow Taeyong’s track.
Luckily for Johnny, in their hospital, when an emergency case happens, it’s the internal medicine residents who rush down first. Johnny gets enough action and excitement on a daily basis, and Taeyong gets to marvel at it, day in, day out.
So, Taeyong has seen Johnny at it enough times, and seen patients in the ER enough times to know when a case is 50-50 life-and-death (though he knows that intensive care is really more his speed). This case is one of those better odds. This patient has a patent airway, he’s hooked to a respirator, his blood pressure is up from the 80/50 mmHg it was at prior to. He’s going to be okay, and Taeyong knows that it’s because Johnny had moved so quickly.
Taeyong knows it’s fucked up to even think of Johnny as remotely hot when an emergency situation is taking place, but as he watches Johnny insert a suction tip into the ET tube, as he watches him take command of the entire situation, instructing Yuta to prepare the red, blue, and purple topped tubes for the battery of blood work they need, Taeyong realizes that he really cannot help it.
He knows how juvenile it would seem if someone was privy to the reel in his head, but it’s not exactly his fault that Johnny— best friend, co-Internal Medicine resident, love of his fucking life— is ripped straight out of a Korean medical drama. He once saw Johnny walking across the bridge heading towards the Medical Arts building, the sun setting through the glass windows behind him, and Taeyong had completely ignored the referral poor Jaehyun was trying to make because he was so busy staring at Johnny in awe. He had also dropped his sandwich, which was beside the point. Didn’t matter. Anyway.
“We’re admitting this patient,” Johnny says to Doyoung, their second year surgery resident stationed at the emergency department for the night. “We’ve still got rooms upstairs. I’ll inform admitting on the way back up.” Doyoung nods, clasping his hand on Johnny’s shoulder and squeezing Taeyong’s elbow before heading back to the nurse’s station.
The adrenaline from the last couple of minutes fades, and Taeyong realizes that he’s still got at least 40 patients’ charts to update and check on. It’s also at this point when he remembers that his last meal was almost 16 hours ago, but Johnny, like clockwork, takes him by the wrist after air-drying his newly-Steriliumed hands and drags him to the cafeteria.
“We’re going to eat before we get back to work,” Johnny says. “You’re running yourself thin, you’ve been doing it more and more lately and I want to know why.” Johnny raises an eyebrow at him again while he pulls a sandwich and a Red Bull from the shelf.
Taeyong can’t exactly give a straight answer to that, because lately it’s been more difficult to compartmentalize the important parts of himself from work. But he knows Johnny isn’t going to let up, not this time, so he takes his own sandwich, pays for it quickly, and sets himself across the table from Johnny and takes a mournful bite.
“It doesn’t get any easier, is all,” Taeyong tries, and Johnny frowns. “Everything. Like, you’d think that things would get easier after we got through the hell that was first year, but Dr. Chen grilled my ass in the hemodialysis center earlier and I choked. Basic stuff, and I couldn’t even give her the ultrafiltrate figure for Patient Lim.”
“Yongie, I know that the workload just gets harder, but what else is there?”
Taeyong avoids Johnny’s gaze, choosing instead to stare at the grain of the fake wood on their table, holding his tongue, thinking about how fucking lonely he feels whenever he comes home to an apartment without Johnny around, despite the fact that their units are separated by maybe a good 20 meters at most. He also doesn’t want to admit that there is a small part of him that hardens more and more as time goes on, and he doesn’t know if he can keep swallowing the cost, but he also doesn’t think he can keep not talking about the things that have been weighing him down.
“I feel like maybe I’m turning into the kind of physician that I promised myself I would never become,” Taeyong responds. “Sometimes, I have to remind myself to ask a patient how they’re feeling, how they’re really feeling, and it’s embarrassing that I have to force myself to listen to them instead of it coming naturally to me. Johnny, it took me three days to start really talking to my patient and now he’s fucking dead and I felt like, maybe if I had listened to him more then things would have gone differently. Did you even see me crying earlier? I didn’t cry. I felt awful, but I didn’t cry.” His face is on fire. His hands are shaking. He feels like he should turn in his license right now and walk out the hospital.
Johnny has his lower lip between his teeth, and the next thing Taeyong knows is that Johnny is taking his hand and looping his fingers in with Johnny’s own. Taeyong usually flinches when he does this, and as a result, Johnny doesn’t do it too often. He doesn’t flinch this time, as starved for any kind of affection as he is right now. Johnny looks like he’s about to say something, but he hesitates, and aborts several attempts before finally settling on, “Yongie, it’s okay.”
“It’s not—“
“Taeyong, it’s okay. No one gets through this profession soft, and you of all people know that. I know you think that nothing about me is hard,” and Johnny has the audacity to wink at him before plowing on. “I know you think that it’s easy for me to talk to people and patients and be patient with everyone, but the truth of the matter is that I am constantly, actively telling myself to give a shit, because if I don’t, then who else will show them tenderness?”
Taeyong can’t help the hurt that slices through him when he hears this, because it—well it sounds like Johnny doesn’t actually care about people, and about, well, him. Taeyong makes to pull his hand free,
“I can hear what you’re thinking, and you’re wrong,” Johnny says quietly, squeezing around Taeyong’s fingers a little tighter. “I’ve never done that with you though. It’s easy with you. I don’t have to try. I don’t have to force myself to.”
It doesn’t do much to calm Taeyong, but he’s looking at Johnny now, really looking, and Taeyong realizes that this is who they both are: that in this profession and in this life, there are things that they hate saying out loud, things that make them think they’re terrible people, and somehow they’ll find someone whose ugliness is still something that they want to love.
“We get by on grit, Yongie, that’s all that’s left when the romantic notions we entered med school with have run out,” Johnny continues, and gently lets go of Taeyong’s hand to finish off the rest of his food. “We get by on grit and discipline, and hope that a part of us remains unscathed after all of that has run out, too.”
Taeyong doesn’t know what to say to that, and so he remains silent, chewing on the saddest sandwich he’s ever had. Johnny glances at his watch and says, “It’s 3:12. Chop chop, baby.” He squeezes his hand on the back of Taeyong’s neck and heads off to the garbage disposal with his crushed can of Red Bull. Taeyong hopes to whatever god is watching that Johnny can’t see the pink on his cheeks. He hates what Johnny’s little pet name does to him, hates that he enjoys hearing it so much. He shoves to the back of his mind again. There’s work to get done.
They head back up to the fourth floor and split up to handle the east and north wing respectively, and Taeyong has to roll his shoulders and neck back before knocking on the door marked 431. Inhale. Exhale. Relax your jaw. Smile.
He enters with a cheerful, soft, “Good morning, Mrs. Kim, how are you feeling now?”
Here it goes.
_
“I want a beer, a pizza, a shower, and a nap,” Johnny groans after they’ve finished with the morning endorsements and they’re finally free to go home.
“Is there a specific order to that?” Taeyong responds, pulling his backpack from his locker and stuffing his stained coat into it.
“All at the same time,” Johnny replies. It’s well past 11 am. They’ve both been awake a solid 34 hours, and they managed to accomplish their rounds in about three hours, admittedly a new personal record for them together. “A massage. Holy shit, a massage would be great. Can I stay over at yours?”
Taeyong fights the blush down again, mentally scolding himself because he and Johnny spend so much time together as it is, and it’s really not that big a deal. There was a week where Taeyong had all but moved in, back when they were first year residents taking on the pay floors, pulling solo duty hours and a patient census of 55 to 60 at a time. His grip on his emotions has really gone to the shitter.
“If you think you’re getting a massage out of me, Suh, you’re wrong,” Taeyong says. “But yeah, come on, let’s go home.”
Johnny stands up at that, slinging his messenger bag’s strap over his shoulder and taking Taeyong by the hand again.
Something about how Johnny carries himself around him has changed in the last couple of hours since they ate in the cafeteria, and Taeyong keeps trying to figure out what it is while they walk out of the hospital together, but all he can come up with is that Johnny probably thinks he’s a little fragile right now and is handling him with kid gloves. It’s equal parts endearing and grating.
__
When they arrive at Taeyong’s apartment, Johnny leans on the door frame, half asleep while Taeyong opens the door and turns the lights on. It’s a large enough place, definitely larger than the apartment that Johnny was able to snag at the last minute when he moved into the area two weeks after Taeyong had, and it’s a space that accommodates the two of them as if that had been the intention in the first place.
Johnny settles on the plush couch by the window, stretching all six feet two inches of himself out, his socked feet resting on the arm of it. Sunlight comes in striped across his face as it peeks in through Taeyong’s blinds. Taeyong wants so much to settle there with him, to lay himself across Johnny’s body and rest in the crook of his neck. He settles instead for busying himself in the kitchen to get some hot water going. It doesn’t matter what time it is, he needs some tea.
He takes his laundry from his bag, and decides to just throw in Johnny’s laundry with his own before he feels it again in his gut, that crushing loneliness that has been pervasive for the last couple of weeks. The weight of his longing is going to crush him, he thinks to himself as he separates his (their) whites from their dress shirts and pants and scrubs, but that’s bearable when faced with the alternative of Johnny avoiding him, or fucking up their friendship irrevocably.
Taeyong settles at the counter on his bar stool, nursing his cup of genmaicha while the washing machine rumbles a low soft rhythm behind him. When the machine dings softly, he gets up to load the laundry into the dryer, and takes his post back at the counter to wait it out. He’s at the point of dozing off when he feels hands encircle his waist and a chin rest on his shoulder. He barely even jumps. There it is again, that change that’s taken a hold of Johnny. Skinship is not new to them, but there’s an emotion Taeyong can’t seem to place. Or maybe it’s just his pathetic brain being so starved for affection, for anything really, that it’s willing to take any breadcrumbs Johnny sends his way and build a meal out of it.
Johnny’s fingers are in his hair, and Taeyong is so, so tired already of having to hold himself together, of always having to keep his emotions in check around him, of always having to fight wanting to let his fingers hold on to Johnny’s skin longer than platonically allowable, of feeling so lonely and exhausted in the hospital and in his own home, that really, it’s not his fault that he turns in his seat to face Johnny whose face is inches from his own.
“What I’m about to do is reckless and stupid, but Johnny, I—“
Johnny’s lips are on Taeyong’s in the space of an exhale. There is pressure on the back of Taeyong’s neck, and it feels like his entire life has been spent on artificial respiration up until this very moment. The kiss is insistent, and it feels like it’s always been an inevitability, the logical step after Johnny and Taeyong have traversed points A and B. Taeyong pulls back to take a breath, and Johnny’s lips chase him, unwilling to let up now that they know how the other tastes.
There is a concept that they learned in first year biochemistry, where specific cycles undergo a rate-limiting step. They call it irreversible. It happens in catalysis.
This kiss feels like the next step in the Krebs cycle that Johnny had spent two days running over and over out loud in the cafe they had studied at. This kiss is essential. It is final.
Johnny slides himself between Taeyong’s thighs, running his hands along the clothed skin there, pressing his hardness into Taeyong’s own, and a moan escapes his lips as Taeyong bucks up against him.
“You have,” Johnny whispers into the skin of Taeyong’s jaw. “No idea how long I have wanted to kiss you.” Johnny’s voice is wrecked. His eyes look feral when Taeyong pulls away momentarily to look at him. He also looks afraid. Taeyong knows he’s not alone in this fear then.
“I have the same sentiments, Suh,” Taeyong replies, taking Johnny’s hand and placing it over his racing heart, his adrenaline spiking and making him bolder. “But I’m in this if you are.”
“I’ve been in this since the day you walked into Anatomy class and sat next to me, Taeyong,” Johnny says.
They don’t talk much after that. Taeyong’s shirt is tossed to the floor as Johnny slides his tongue over his jugular, his pulse going completely off the charts that he thinks his heart will give out. Taeyong pulls at Johnny’s belt and undoes his zipper, and Johnny groans into Taeyong’s ear as he takes Johnny’s cock in his hand, the hot breath ghosting over Taeyong’s neck while Johnny scrapes his teeth on Taeyong’s helix. Johnny is so hard it makes his eyes water, and Taeyong can think of nothing other than how badly he wants Johnny to wreck his throat, his hand shaking as he slides it along the length, his fingers barely able to encircle the girth of it.
Johnny pulls Taeyong in closer, hands cupping his ass to get as much contact a humanly possible with all the layers of clothing still between them. There’s a ringing in Taeyong’s ears punctuated by his own sighs and Johnny running his mouth, whispering things like “You feel so fucking good,” and “God, yeah, just like that.”
Taeyong is starving.
Taeyong’s skin is on fire.
He pushes Johnny away gently, trading places with him before sinking to his knees and keeping a loose grip on Johnny’s cock. He takes a tentative lick at the head, tonguing over the slit where precum is leaking, before sliding as much of Johnny’s length as he can take, and Johnny has to lock his hips in place to stop himself from making Taeyong choke around him.
It’s slow and it’s agony, having to hold himself back when all he wants is to feel Taeyong swallow around him. Johnny is almost tipped over the edge when he risks a glance at Taeyong, who is looking up at him with hooded eyes. Johnny grips Taeyong’s hair, holds him in place, tugging a bit before Taeyong outright moans around his girth. Johnny’s muttering “fuck, fuck, Yongie, so good,” under his breath, and he’s so close, has to take himself in his hand and squeeze around the base to keep from coming. He tugs at Taeyong’s shoulder, desperate to feel Taeyong’s lips on his again.
Taeyong feels like his atoms are coming apart. There was a video they had watched, some time-lapsed video of a seed growing into a small plant until the tree’s arms had extended well past the stratosphere or something. Taeyong thinks of that as he tiptoes, his ass pressing against the counter and as Johnny’s massive hand undoes his fly and takes the both of them in one stroke. He imagines a rocket launcher, he imagines burning fuel, he imagines the exhilaration of a bird taking its first flight, he imagines a panther’s first kill. He’s losing himself as Johnny rocks the both of them in tandem, the soft skin of his cock sliding against the velvet of Johnny’s.
He thinks that this is where the violins should come in, the fireworks that everyone talks about, but all he sees behind his eyes as he spills hot and wet all over Johnny’s hand is the stars against darkness that you get when the brain loses blood, the kind of heady feeling you get when you’ve got orthostatic hypotension, when you’re having a syncopal attack. His lips feel like there’s electricity dancing in them as Johnny cries out against his mouth, his hips stuttering against Taeyong’s.
The reaction slows to a stop, Johnny gently tucking Taeyong back into his boxer briefs and bracketing Taeyong against the counter with his arms. Their breathing goes from Cheyne-Stokes to an acceptable 20 cycles per minute and Johnny rests his forehead on Taeyong’s with his eyes closed.
“Please tell me that you don’t regret what just happened,” Johnny whispers, his expression pained. He had never, not once, ever begged Taeyong for anything in the years that they have known each other, but he is begging now. “Please.”
Taeyong slides his arms around Johnny’s neck, thinking about the nights he had come home to his empty apartment wishing he was man enough to ask Johnny if he wanted to move in together, thinking about his wins and his losses, thinking about how even if he has had to let go of birthdays and anniversaries and weddings and funerals and people because his entire life consists of reviewing symptoms and interpreting laboratory values, he has never had to let go of Johnny, who was brilliant and steadfast and present from the moment Taeyong had laid eyes on Johnny’s beautiful nose, on his beautiful hands drawing a human leg with muscles labelled neatly on the page.
“My only regret is that I feel like we’ve wasted so much time being stupid,” Taeyong says, a small laugh escaping him when Johnny exhales a breath that he had been holding. Johnny presses his face into the crook of Taeyong’s neck, breathes him in (“What the fuck, I haven’t showered—“ “You didn’t care about that just now when you had your—“ “Finish that sentence, I fucking dare you—“).
Taeyong doesn’t know much about love at first sight, but he does know a lot about the kind that is slow.
The kind of love that looks like this: a census that’s freshly printed and ready for morning endorsements when you’ve got a morbidity and mortality presentation that you had had to cram after having had to deal with not one but three heart attacks at 5 in the morning. The kind that has you being held safely with arms around you while you cry over the first patient who dies because of your ineptitude, your lack of experience.
The kind that is soft looks, and purple fleece blankets, and an insistence on eating before getting back to work. The kind of love that goes from thinking your Anatomy seat mate looks handsome but intimidating, to realizing that he is the biggest, softest nerd with the biggest softest plushie collection your allergies have ever had the misfortune of being subjected to. The kind of love that is strong and quiet.
The kind of love that happens not as a series of catabolic reactions one after another, but a step-wise process that follows the logic of the universe, the kind that lends you the grit you so desperately lack when you feel like you have nothing else left inside of you to give; the kind shaped like Dr. Suh Johnny, second year internal medicine resident, the smartest, kindest man that Lee Taeyong has ever met.