In These Arms [mxm]

Chapter 21 - Chanyeol POV: Mark of disgrace

A/N: Thank you for your kind comments and encouragement! Here's another unedited chapter you gave me the strength to write!!! <33333 Please enjoy and don't forget to vote!

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When I saw Haneul stumbling through doors into the waiting area calling my name, something inside me snapped. Never in all our years together had I seen him look so terrified and alone. The reality of what he endured alone for seven years started to sink in. Alone in a hospital bed. Mind and body unconscious with nobody to sit beside him and hold his hand. Nobody to whisper to him that he would be alright, even if he might only hear it in his dreams.

As he searched the waiting room for me, face red and eyes filled with terror, I saw the frightened nineteen-year-old trapped inside his aged body. I saw the boy who was every bit as much my own family as my own father. This was not just lingering feelings of a first love who had abandoned me, this was the realization that I had abandoned him. I had given up on him.

His legs buckled within inches of reaching me, but I extended my arms and caught his slumped body before it could meet the floor. Haneul gripped the cloth of my shirt and he looked at me with tear-filled eyes that broke me. He was too scared in there, the radiologist explained, and had been calling for me as he desperately fought off the sedation drug only just injected into him.

Since they invited me to be in the room with him, I followed them and helped to settle his now limp and relaxed body onto the bed. I kissed his forehead and, when the technician offered to cover his eyes, I shook my head and told her to leave it be. Rather than that, I whispered to him a promise that I would be sit in his line of sight so he could take comfort in that, rather than feel the fear of not being able to see anything around him.

Then as the bed slowly moved into the machine, I could see just how small and vulnerable he really was. Confined and unable to move, just as it would have been in an eight year-long coma. The machine was loud and daunting, but I tried to erase any negative thoughts from my mind. He was forced to be strong on his own, but I needed to help be his strength for him.

Forty minutes passed, and a hospital member entered the room and stopped beside me.

"We're all done now," she said, eerily upbeat considering all that Haneul has been forced to endure. "He will need to rest in the post-anesthesia care unit for two hours before he can be discharged. Someone is on their way to safely escort Haneul to the PACU."

I nodded and watched her leave just as a male staff member pushed through the doors with a wheelchair in tow. The machine came to a quiet halt and after some minutes, the bed started sliding back out. Haneul's eyes were partially open, but they were blank. The male attendant released the helmet-like device from around Haneul's head and assisted his body upright. I did not feel comfortable with somebody handling him like this, so I brushed the attendant aside and asked that he hold the chair still, instead.

Scooping Haneul into my arms, I lifted and gently placed him into the chair where his head immediately drooped. He lifted it immediately and looked at me through glazed, hooded lids and smiled. "My handsome lover," he murmured sweetly before lowering his head again.

The attendant looked slightly embarrassed, but I felt a sharp pinch in my chest. The attendant's hand remained on the wheelchair ready to push, so I asked that he step aside and let me do so instead. He smiled meekly before stepping aside and walked ahead of us. "You can follow me, and I will lead you to the PACU," he said.

At his assigned room, the attendant lowered Haneul's bed to hip level and leaned a barely conscious Haneul forward in the chair so he could begin to maneuver him. I stepped between them and gently pushed Haneul safely back against the chair. "Do you mind?" I said, hoping he would take the hint. Considering I was twice, if not three times his size, I was more than capable of assisting Haneul on my own. The expression he wore was an evident mixture of embarrassment and annoyance.