Chapter Text
Bong Kwanghyeon looks at the latest patient in his ER, recently freed from a certain predicament, and shakes his head.
“Why is it that every time something absurd or ridiculous happens, it always involves you somehow?”
“Excuse me?” Lee Ikjun retorts, indignant. “This isn’t even my fault. It’s U-ju’s!”
“He’s your son, he’s literally half you,” Kwanghyeon points out dryly. “Which brings me to my next point. If half of you already invites this kind of disaster, then what are the odds that one-and-a-half of you, living in the same place, won’t cause such a catastrophe that will result in the end of the world? Is your house even still standing?”
“Ha. Ha. Ha. Very funny.” Ikjun levels a thoroughly unimpressed look at him. “Your sense of humour totally reflects your domain, Emergency Medicine Professor Bong. You must have practised a lot to get that bad at jokes. Seriously, it’s an achievement.”
“Shut up, you’re lucky we don’t have many emergencies today so we can deal with your absurd Star Wars–”
“Hey! It was your hospital who asked for my help! I could’ve said no, you know?”
“As if. You’re a busybody and a softie with a bleeding heart–”
“Be quiet, both of you,” Chae Songhwa’s crisp voice cuts through their argument. “Or I will glue this thing back to your head and this time I’ll let you deal with it.
Lee Ikjun promptly subsides into meek silence. Bong Kwanghyeon cannot help but marvel, for probably the millionth time, at the ease with which Chae Songhwa brings her boys to heel. It’s truly a life skill and Songhwa only gets better with time. He listens in mild amusement as she walks Ikjun through a series of routine post-procedural questions—unnecessary, in Kwanghyeon’s opinion. Anyone, even a layman, can see what an excellent job she did.
“Alright,” she sighs at the end of her cross-questioning. “You can go home now. And get some sleep, you’ve been awake the entire night for the surgery.”
“Sounds awesome, except I should probably show my face at the funeral first,” Ikjun tells her, right after making a big show of yawning and stretching his limbs. “Since I’m already here and all.”
“Ah... right.” Something odd lurks in the undertone of Songhwa’s voice, but then she nods. “Okay, I’ll see you there. The others are still there too, keeping an eye on U-ju.” She pauses. “Get ready for a surprise.”
Ikjun stares. “What? What surprise?”
She only waves her hand and turns to leave the ER, ignoring his increasingly loud questions and complaints (“you know how much I hate surprises!”) etc.
Kwanghyeon, who knows exactly what Songhwa is talking about, remains wisely mum, and communicates as much when Ikjun turns his interrogation on him.
“I have no idea what she’s talking about. Why don’t you go and get changed now?”
“Lend me your black suit.”
“I don’t have a black suit.”
“Yes, you do. You already paid your respects, didn’t you? What did you wear if not a black suit?”
Kwanghyeon rolls his eyes. He’s almost forgotten how annoyingly smart Ikjun can be.
“How can I show up like this?” Ikjun continues—except it’s clear that he’s no longer grumbling about wardrobe. Instead, he’s busy examining himself in the hand mirror one of the nurses have brought over. “Look, she practically cut half of my hair.”
Kwanghyeon resists an urge to kick him. “Ungrateful ass. Chae Songhwa literally had to take a chunk of her nonexistent free time to do this. I mean, me and my less than expert hands would have loved to take a crack at you just to make you pay for all the grief you put me through in college—but no, she insisted.”
“I know, I know,” Ikjun winces. “No need to shout, seriously.”
“You’ve always been her soft spot, god knows why,” Kwanghyeon mutters.
“What?”
“You.” Kwanghyeon pauses, and then decides against it. “Actually, never mind.”
Ikjun slants a suspicious look at him. “Are you still trying to ask her out?”
For what feels like the hundredth time, Bong Kwanghyeon has to remind himself not to strangle any of his patients, even one as irritating as Lee Ikjun. “What kind of stupid question are you spouting now?” he growls.
“You did try to ask her out once,” Ikjun says pointedly. “You, fourth year. Us, second year.”
“Why are you always remembering all those useless stuffs from the past? Are you an old man?”
“See, the thing is, they’re not useless,” Ikjun tells him sagely, grinning like the little devil he is. Kwanghyeon remembers him wearing the same grin once upon a time, when he caught an upperclassman asking Songhwa out. (The upperclassman was not, in fact, Kwanghyeon. Ikjun is wrong about that. Bong Kwanghyeon never did get around to asking Chae Songhwa out, even to this day.)
But then the guy had turned pushy, leaning closer, looming over the much smaller Songhwa. Kwanghyeon, sitting on a bench not far away, was considering staging an intervention—he actually knew the guy, they had the same classes a few times—when someone else beat him to it.
The thing about Lee Ikjun is he has not even one unkind bone in his body. That said, he also seems to have inherited all the deviousness of the devil itself, and so pretending that he had just run all the way, arriving out of breath, and then concocting a barrage of lies that the dean was looking for Songhwa on some urgent matter or other, was child’s play to him.
Ikjun had been dating someone else back then, a girl from another major (Biology? Architecture? he had so many of them), but Kwanghyeon has never forgotten the look on Songhwa’s face when Ikjun put his arm around her shoulders to drag her away. That was when he knew she already had somebody buried so deep in her heart. (Hence why Kwanghyeon could never quite bring himself to ask Songhwa out, even during their years of residency together in the same hospital.)
Not that any of these matter right now. Ikjun is married, and he and Songhwa have remained good friends. So have they, for that matter.
Kwanghyeon sighs. “I’ll lend you the suit. Just go. Get out. Shoo.”
End