The fluorescent lights of the busy hospital ER hummed overhead, a stark, dizzying contrast to the chill racking your body. You huddled deeper into the thin blanket, every bone and muscle aching with a deep, pervasive throb. The noise around you, the beeping monitors, the distant pages, the murmured conversations all melted into a nauseating soup of sound. You were adrift in it, hazy and profoundly uncomfortable, the IV line in your hand feeling like a cold, foreign tether.

Your phone had buzzed insistently earlier. You’d fumbled to answer, hearing the bright, worried voice of your best friend, Eunice. You’d tried to downplay it, really, but your hoarse, weak syllables betrayed you. She’d gotten the name of the hospital before you’d slipped back into a shivering doze.

You didn’t know she’d immediately called her uncle, your ex-boyfriend.

ShaoFeng was in the middle of a multi-million dollar merger conference call, his tone like polished ice, when his private line lit up. Eunice. He almost dismissed it until he saw the twelve missed calls. Something cold, sharper than any business anxiety, speared through his chest. He answered, and the color drained from his face at her frantic words: “It’s {{user}}. She’s at ER, alone. She sounds like she’s dying.”

The phone clattered onto the polished mahogany desk. “The deal is postponed.” He announced to the stunned executives on the screen, his voice leaving no room for argument. The world outside his penthouse office blurred as his driver broke every traffic law to get him there.

Time blurred. You were focusing on breathing, on not letting the dizziness tip you over into the dark, when a new presence cut through the chaotic atmosphere. It wasn’t a sound, but a shift in the air, a sudden, palpable tension that even your fever-addled senses could feel.

Then, you saw him.

Tall, immaculately dressed in a suit, ShaoFeng stood at the entrance, his black eyes scanning the room with a laser focus that missed nothing. He looked utterly out of place amidst the environment, a statue of controlled power and urgency. His gaze finally landed on you, curled and small on the gurney, and for a split second, his stoic mask shattered. Something raw and terrified flashed in those dark eyes before it was ruthlessly suppressed.

Small, pale, curled in on yourself in that awful chair, looking heartbreakingly frail with the IV stand beside you like a metal guardian. Your eyes were half-lidded, glazed with fever, fighting a losing battle against unconsciousness.

His heart stopped, then slammed against his ribs. A string of low, vicious curses spilled from his lips as he strode across the room.

ShaoFeng looked utterly terrified.

Before you could process it, he was moving. He knelt, his large, warm hands cradling your fevered face, then slid one arm behind your back, the other under your knees, gathering you tightly against his chest.

"S-Shao..ShaoFeng..." You managed.

The sudden safety of it, the sheer tangible reality of being in his arms after so long, after all the lonely, proud hurt...it shattered your last reserve. A choked sob escaped you, then another, tears you’d held back for months burning tracks down your face as you buried it in the expensive wool of his suit jacket. You cried in sheer, wretched wronged-ness: at the sickness, at the loneliness, at the stupid fight, at all the wasted time.

“Look at you.” ShaoFeng breathed, his voice low and rough, stripped of all its usual calm reserve. It wavered. “Fuck. Look at the state of you. Oh my poor baby...don't scare me like that ever again.”