Stardust || Dokyeom ✔

thirty five

FOR TEN YEARS, PARK Eun Ha and Lee Seok Min never saw each other again.

Almost immediately after the Spring Festival, he was whisked away to Pledis Entertainment; and she to a local college, where she took up medicine. He debuted a year later as a member of the rising boy group, SEVENTEEN, and she, on the other hand, got herself a scholarship to one of the leader universities of medicine in Singapore.

And then, dear reader,

Park Eun Ha became a doctor.

Arguably on of the best in Korea, at that. His name ghosted in her mind that night, when she was handed the placard for Best Oncologist of the Year. As she stood proudly onstage, shaking the hands of chairpersons and senior doctors alike, she thought of a boy.

Not just any boy, but the boy called Lee Seok Min.

The boy who found her in her darkest moments and lifted her up on his shoulders, pushing past the blinds she'd drawn so stubbornly over her heart and entering with a bag of cookies, a guitar, and a smile like starlight. The boy who was patient enough to take the handles of her squeaky wheelchair and push her up the highest mountains along with him.

She still had the wheelchair with her, actually, carefully stored at the back of her apartment with her old song book and box of dance medals. Ever since she regained enough control of her legs – though tedious years of therapy and two surgical operations – she didn't need it, anymore. But she still kept it there as a reminder of where she came from, and the person she used to be, the person who would always have her place in Dr. Park Eun Ha's heart.

"Dr. Park," Mr. Song, the chairman of the medical board, said. "What inspired you to take up oncology, out of all the medical tracks?"

"Well, sir," she said, to him and to the crowd and to the flashing cameras before her, "when I was five years old, I lost my mother to cancer. That was really – that was really the start of when my life began spiralling down. And I want to ensure that young boys and girls, they never, ever, have to lose they parents like that."