Deer Luhan, With Love

21

Chapter 21 – In Which (a) Pretty Hand(s) Give(s) a Formal Injunction

Deer Luhan

Good luck weaning Baekhyun off Game of Thrones.  I think he’s addicted.  Prepare for the withdrawal symptoms when he has to go cold turkey between finishing the current three seasons and waiting for the fourth season to start airing next April.

Leigh

I left the coffee shop at around lunchtime, absolutely star-struck, with Changmin’s and Yunho’s laughter ringing in my ears and two signed albums tucked under my arm.  Back at the dorm, I put in a couple of hours on the Chinese flashcards – my vocabulary was now up to nearly four thousand words, which I was quite proud of and also quite surprised had survived the amount of sustained cramming I’d been doing (I probably owed a lot to having left my enormous French vocab list for A-level to the last minute, or I would not have been capable of squeezing that many words into my head, though having a photographic memory helped: crude as it was, I treated the Chinese characters as a bunch of pictures and everything was instantly easier).

Everything was dandy until I received a phone call from Baekhyun summoning me to the hospital.  I had absolutely no intention of going, and I told him so, because the last thing I wanted was yet another discussion about the not-date.

“I’ll castrate Sehun if you don’t come,” he’d warned me.  “I’ve found a curved implement to do it with.”

“Have you been watching Game of Thrones?” I asked him with suspicion.

“In the game of Baekhyun’s Pleasure, you come or you die,” he’d replied superciliously, and hung up.

Exasperated, I tried calling back (he didn’t answer), and then gathered my stuff together to make the familiar trip to the hospital.

Chanyeol, Kai and D.O. were sitting around Baekhyun’s bed when I arrived.

“Ah!  Le Englishborn has deigned us with her presence!” Baekhyun exclaimed jovially as I entered.  I winced at yet another pun with my name – this time with his horrific French accent – and dumped my bag on the floor with a heavy sigh.

“No, there are no dragons, not even Kris, and I don’t have an army of the Unsullied, and I only came because you threatened to do unspeakable things to my friend.”

“We need to take the Game of Thrones box set away,” I heard Kai muttering to D.O.  “It’s only going to get worse.”

“And also,” I said, “what curved implement?”

Baekhyun grinned wickedly and held up a pair of nail scissors.

I shook my head in disbelief.  “I’m so done with you.”

“Be seated,” he told me, and Chanyeol shoved a seat into the back of my knees so that I had no choice in the matter.  “You’ve been a cruel, cruel girl, and as Hand of prettiness to the Boy King Sehun, I have convened this Small Council to institute a new policy in Exoplanet.  You are hereby to refer to all of us as oppa.”

I just gazed at him, nonplussed and trying to make sense of the archaic Korean he was spouting.  I’d watched the odd drama in Korean, but never a historical one.  They’d never really been my thing because it felt a little like trying to sit through Shakespeare marathons with only cameo appearances from the comedies.

Chanyeol produced a gat from under the bed and popped it on Baekhyun’s head, as if it would enable me to understand him better.  Baekhyun sighed and reached for a piece of paper on the bedside table, tucking it into his breast pocket.