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“Have some sugar with that.” Minho says when Hyunjin piles his plate with pancakes from the lunch buffet. Sometimes, Hyunjin feels like he has a sticky note on his back that says, ‘tell me to eat sugar’, he hears it so often.
“There’s enough sugar in pancakes already.” Hyunjin says, looking pointedly at Felix while he passes the sugar without touching it. He doesn’t want sugar on his pancakes. Instead, he picks out some berries to have on the side.
“And your Dexcom is beeping.” Mino points out as if Hyunjin can’t hear it. It’s stuffed in one of the too many pockets on the pants he’s wearing, screaming that his blood sugar is dropping again. His Dexcom is a small device that looks like old cellphone that is wirelessly connected to a needle in his skin. It constantly checks his blood sugar levels and alerts him if he’s dropping. Technology really is amazing.
“I know. That’s why I’m having fruit.” Hyunjin says innocently and Minho looks so done with him that Hyunjin almost feels a little guilty. He knows he needs to take care of his health, but sometimes he just wants to eat something healthy that won’t make him feel bloated and jittery.
“I’ll get something else if it doesn’t help.” He shrugs, popping a strawberry into his mouth. He knows that Minho just cares, but having hypoglycemia isn’t something new to him, he knows how to manage it.
“Why is it still beeping?” It usually only beeps a few times every five minutes when he’s low, but now it’s going off like crazy. The insistent beeping would drive anyone crazy; he will never understand how Hyunjin can ignore it so easily.
“Oh, right.” Hyunjin balances his plate on one hand, reaching into his pocket to pull out the device. He frowns when he sees the number on the screen, it’s not receiving signal. He’s so used to always having a reading, the failure is completely throwing him off. With one click, the beeping stops, and a relieved silence fills the room. The only way to stop the beeping is to turn it off, so that’s what he does.
“Alright?” Minho asks, seeing the look on his face. He is already grabbing a sugary juice for Hyunjin, it’s pretty much an instinct for them at this point. He sees Hyunjin’s hand shaking when he takes it with a sheepish smile. He’ll just check his levels manually after he’s eaten. He’s having food now anyway, so the current readings won’t be accurate for long.
They sit down with the others in the canteen area, all the members gathered at one table. They’re at the venue they’re preforming at tonight. The eight of them are pretty much the only ones not running around in every direction. All their preparations are finished, now they’ve just got to kill a few hours before soundcheck and getting ready. It feels pointless to even be here this early, but they had to arrive before people start lining up outside.
Hyunjin easily shuts out the conversations going on around the table while he sips his juice and rips off pieces of pancake to wrap around his berries and chew on.
Everyone spread out after lunch. Most of them go to the activity room down the hall to play a table tennis battle. They’re so loud that Felix and Hyunjin can hear them three doors down at the dance studio, this arena has everything they could need backstage.
After so long of not being able to dance, and even longer of not having any shows, Felix grew anxious about forgetting any choreography or lyrics, so Hyunjin offered to go over everything with him one last time while they wait.
Anyone with eyes can see that Felix hasn’t forgotten anything, even though he hasn’t danced for a couple of months. Even the choreographies they haven’t done in a year or two sit in their muscle memory, pretty much impossible to forget with how many times they’ve practiced them. He remembers all his words, hits all the notes and is never off by one single beat.
He has nothing to worry about. Hyunjin on the other hand, is stumbling over his own feet and spacing out, making him miss cues, and forget lyrics. He’s a mess, and the fact that he messes up is messing him up more. Every time Felix tries to say something about it, Hyunjin stops him. It’s not his sugar levels, his Dexcom would’ve alerted him if he was still low or dropping.
“Hyun-”
“No.” Hyunjin breaks him off, making a hand-motion for him to close his mouth with a sharp look.
“But-” Felix tries, but Hyunjin stops him again. Felix keeps a strained smile on his face, trying to keep the good mood.
“I know how this looks, okay? But that’s not it.” Hyunjin is growing frustrated. It doesn’t always have to be his hypoglycemia, sometimes he’s just nervous or tired or distracted or having an off day, just like anyone else.
“Your-” Felix tries to say. He’s pointing at Hyunjin’s shaky hands so Hyunjin stuffs them in his pockets to hide, as if Felix hasn’t already seen.
“Stop it.” Hyunjin orders, now glaring at the younger. “I’m just nervous.”
“Will you please just let me speak, god!” Felix bursts out, shouting over Hyunjin when he tries to tell him to stop again. The mood in the room is instantly flipped, tension hanging heavy in the air.
“What can you say that I don’t already know?” Hyunjin tests him. They both know that Hyunjin will have a less-than-kind comeback to anything Felix says next.
“Can we check manually, just to be sure?” Felix asks, putting aside his frustrations and forcing his voice to be soft. If he shouts at Hyunjin, the other will just build his walls higher, completely unaware that he usually only gets in these moods when he’s been low for a while.
“No.” Hyunjin says, looking offended. “What do you think you’re gonna find that the Dexcom can’t? It’s literally touching my blood as we speak.” While he’s saying it, a realization dawns on him; he turned it off. It’s not going to alert him of anything as long as it’s switched off.
“I know, but just, for my peace of mind?” Felix uses his last weapon, making it about himself. Hyunjin can be reckless about his own health, but as soon as Felix brings his own emotions into it, Hyunjin is easy to convince.
“Prick your own finger.” Hyunjin sulks and drops to the floor, sitting cross legged with his arms crossed over his chest. With that, Felix has his permission. He walks over to Hyunjin’s backpack in the corner, pulling out a pouch with the supplies.
Sitting down in front of Hyunjin, Felix offers him the pouch, but Hyunjin doesn’t take it, just holds out his finger with another sulking breath. Hyunjin never got used to pricking his own finger or seeing his own blood. He hates doing it himself, but Felix always offers so he feels more in control.
Hyunjin watches Felix wipe his fingertip with an alcohol wipe before putting the pen to his skin and pushing down. The needle piercing his skin hurts, and he can’t quite hide his flinch. Felix pays it no mind, knowing it embarrasses Hyunjin how squeamish he still is. He just puts down the pen and squeezes at his finger to get a big enough drop of blood before touching it to the strip attached to the glucose meter. Lastly, he presses a cotton ball to Hyunjin’s finger to stop the bleeding.
“Sixty-one.” He says when the reading is ready. “Give me your Dexcom?” Hyunjin grabs it out of his pocket, slapping it into Felix’ hand a little too hard. Before Felix takes a look at it, he goes back to their bags, getting a sweet for Hyunjin to suck on. Hyunjin pops it into his mouth with little resistance.
“You turned it off?” Felix asks disapprovingly. Hyunjin mumbles something about it beeping too much just as Felix turns it on and the beeping starts back up. He watches Felix squint at the device, pressing buttons and hitting it with his hand before looking back at Hyunjin.
“It won’t receive the signal.” He says, meaning the signal that is sent out from the little machine attached to the needle in his arm. They sometimes stop working for seemingly no reason. The needle is fragile and needs switching out on a regular basis anyway. As amazing as technology is, it isn’t always reliable. “Who knows how long you’ve been low. Did you check after lunch?”
Hyunjin stares back at him with wide eyes. “I forgot.” He mumbles, already regretting snapping at him a moment ago. He’s just got so much going on with the show tonight, he forgets that his health needs to be the number one priority. The look Felix gives him is exactly what he deserves.
“Let’s just take out the needle and check manually, you can’t wear it on stage anyway. We’ll put in a new one after, okay?” Felix suggests and Hyunjin nods in agreement, knowing that Felix will make a more rational decision than him at the moment.
Hyunjin offers Felix his arm, also hating putting in and removing the needles, even though they’re so small, he never has to see it if he doesn’t want to. Felix gladly helps him, peeling of the tape around the edges first and then grabbing the whole thing and pulling it off in one swift motion. It doesn’t even leave a mark on his skin; the needle is that small.
“There you go. Can I prick you finger again?” Fifteen minutes have passed by now, and his sugar should be fine after the candy, but he wants to check to be sure. Hyunjin nods and Felix repeats the process, nodding to himself when he sees the number is within the normal range again, not too high, not too low.
Soundcheck rolls around and the group make their way to the stage. Their excitement can be felt by everyone. In just a couple of hours they will be standing right here and preforming their first show in two and a half years.
They run through a couple of songs, once again feeling like they aren’t doing much while watching crew run around to adjust everything from the lighting to their mics. All they have to do is point at what they want to adjust, and someone is on it right away.
Something always goes wrong during sound check. This time Hyunjin’s microphone won’t work properly. The sound falls in and out like there’s a faulty wire somewhere in the system that only works when it wants to. After a couple of songs of trying to fix it in the system with no luck, a technician comes on stage to see if the problem lies in the actual mic.
Hyunjin hands him the mic and mic pack, and he starts fiddling with it. While they’re standing there, Hyunjin feels how tired he is. He didn’t get much sleep last night, too excited and nervous to relax enough. He closes his eyes, feeling like he’s swaying slightly on his feet.
“Hyunjin-ah.” Someone calls, snapping their fingers in front of his face. Hyunjin opens his eyes to meet Jeongin’s worried ones. A quick glance tells him all the others are also staring at him. “Are you low?”
“No, sorry. I just spaced out, sorry.” He’s apologizing too much, but he has no control over the words leaving his mouth. Despite the reassurance, Felix goes over to his bag that he left at the back of the stage and pulls out another juice box. Hyunjin is getting so sick of that juice, he needs to switch it out with something else.
With how many sugary juices and sweets he goes through in a day just to keep his blood sugar up, he has a few he rotates between every few weeks when he gets sick of them. You’d think he enjoys the excuse to eat sweets all the time but having to eat it all the time makes it a chore rather than a treat.
“Here you go.” Felix hands him the juice, the straw already poked into the box. Hyunjin takes a couple sips and gives him a look that says, ‘see? I’m a good boy’. Felix laughs at him and moves back to where he was joking around with Jisung and Minho.
“It should be good now.” The technician says. Hyunjin had almost forgotten that he was still there. Hyunjin sets down his juice on the floor and takes the mic and mic pack back, bowing in thanks before the technician leaves. He stumbles a little, feeling like his body is too heavy to lift when he slowly straightens back up.
He puts everything back in place and tests the mic a few times, hearing that everything seems to be working right. Just like that, the juice is forgotten, and they go back to running through songs, this time without any issues.
Being back on stage feels amazing. Hyunjin feels like he’s floating as he runs around on stage, dancing as if it takes no effort, and singing as if he’s never been out of breath. He puts everything into his performance, beaming from ear to ear with joy at seeing their audience again. It’s reminding all of them why they do what they do. It had been so long since the last time, and so many audience-less performances in between that they’d almost forgotten about the thrill.
They’re halfway through the show when he feels himself falter and stumble over a step. He suddenly feels out of focus, blurry around the edges and his hands shake when he holds the pose at the end of the song. He’s put too much energy in, he knows it, but he thought he’d last longer than this. He was so caught up in preforming that he didn’t feel the decline until it refused to be ignored any longer.
A few more songs go by before the headache sets in, a sharp pounding in his temples. It takes him by surprise, making him miss a step when he freezes in pain. It’s the kind of headache he gets when he’s gone too long without a proper meal, the kind of headache he wakes up with in the morning, and only food can fix it.
The shakiness spreads from his hands until his whole body is trembling, exceeding what is normal from just being tired. This is the kind of trembling that is usually accompanied by an insistent beeping and worried members. The pieces fall into place in his mind while he keeps dancing to the best of his abilities.
When the song finishes and they spread out to interact with the crown, he walks over to Felix as casually as possible. Felix smiles widely at him, throwing an arm over his shoulders and getting Hyunjin to jump with him while waving at the crowd. He’s enjoying being back just as much as Hyunjin is.
“Felix.” Hyunjin tries to shout over all the noise filling the venue. Felix doesn’t seem to hear him as they keep jumping along with the music. It’s quickly wearing out Hyunjin’s legs and he can feel them buckling under him, struggling to keep him up. That’s when Felix stops jumping and pays attention to him, a badly disguised frown on his face.
“I’m dropping.” Hyunjin leans in to shout in Felix’s ear. It’s easier to feel himself dropping when he’s active, if he’s paying attention that is. The tired dizziness isn’t always as clear when he’s just sitting around or relaxing even if he knows he’s low.
Felix is always ready for a drop. When he can’t bring his backpack full of juice, he hides hard candies in his outfits. He doesn’t need pockets to have a few candies at hand. They’re easily tucked into his socks, sleeves, in the waist of his jeans or any other tight and restricting part of his outfit. This time, he pulls one out of his sock. That’s usually where they stay in place. He’s sent hard candies flying while dancing more than once and being hit by those things hurts more than you’d think.
It's the kind of candy that is perfect for putting under his tongue to dissolve. Hyunjin usually likes to move them around his mouth, pressing them against the insides of his cheeks and the roof of his mouth, but that won’t work on stage.
As it turns out, it doesn’t matter much where he puts it. He’s lisping slightly when he sings, even more when he raps. As soon as he feels a little steadier on his feet, he sneakily spits it out, noting where it lands so he can pick it up and discard properly of it later.
Another song with choreography is next and Hyunjin struggles his way through it. He can’t make his limbs move the way he wants, like the contact between them and his brain glitches like his mic did earlier. He puts everything he has and then some into making it through without messing up. If the lack of reactions from the others is anything to go by, he’s good at pretending to be okay.
He makes it through song after song, adrenaline making it possible to keep going despite his dropping blood sugar. It’s risky to keep going, but he’s done it before, and he’s always fine. As long as he doesn’t drop too low, it isn’t an emergency. Despite feeling weak and dizzy, he’s having so much fun, he just wants to stay in this moment and not have to think about annoying health stuff.
By the time they’re lining up for ending mentions, he’s barely on his feet. He stumbles over to Felix, hoping he doesn’t look too out of it and grabs onto his shoulder to keep himself steady. Felix knows just by looking at him and fishes another candy out of his sock, helping Hyunjin unwrap it when his hands shake too much.
Hyunjin figures no one will yell at him if he sits down while the others talk. While he sits there, his heartbeat doesn’t slow down, the headache doesn’t calm down, the shakiness doesn’t subside, the dizziness doesn’t improve. He’s still sweating as if he’s in the middle of intense choreography. He feels so out of it that he doesn’t even register what he says when it’s his turn. Words just tumble out of him, hopefully making a little sense.
There’s no way he’s getting back off the floor and doing another couple of songs, but he does it anyway. How he feels isn’t important. People have paid a lot to be here, to see them and he can’t disappoint. If anyone asks, he won’t be able to explain how he keeps going, he just does because it’s non-negotiable, there is no other choice.
By the end of the show, he can barely make his limbs move the way he wants, and he feels disoriented, like he can’t quite remember which way is up. If Chan hadn’t come up to him and pulled him along when it was time to get off stage, Hyunjin wouldn’t have known it was time. The ringing in his ears is much louder than the music, his attention spread out thin over every miscommunicating cell of his body.
He leans heavily on Chan while they walk off stage and down a hall to the backstage area. The moment they’re out of view, Hyunjin moans in pain, clutching his head with a trembling hand. Chan stops walking, then Hyunjin’s falling and suddenly he’s sitting on a soft surface. He’s barely hanging onto consciousness, eyes open but not registering anything.
The look on his face scares Chan more than anything he’s seen before. He knows Hyunjin drops dangerously low sometimes, but he’s only seen him completely out of it a couple of times. Felix comes running with juice and sweets. The rest of the members are spread out in the room, but they’re all looking at Hyunjin with worry and fear.
“We can’t give him anything if he’s at risk of choking.” Chan reminds Felix. If they give Hyunjin juice or hard candies when he can’t swallow properly, it can be very dangerous. Felix nods shortly at him while sitting down next to Hyunjin, cupping his cheek in one hand, and slapping the other cheek lightly with his other hand to try to wake him a little.
“Hyunjin? Can you hear me?” There’s no response, just a blank stare landing somewhere above Felix’s shoulder. “We need a medic.” Felix decides. He isn’t ready to have this responsibility on his own shoulders and he doesn’t know what to do. Chan moves faster than he’s ever done before, disappearing behind a corner, and returning with a medic in tow a moment later.
“Can we get him to the med room?” The medic asks. She is calm but focused, giving off the energy that she knows exactly what needs to be done. Chan and the medic carry Hyunjin to the small medic room down the hall where they lay Hyunjin on his back on a bed. The rest of the group follow closely behind, crowding the room.
“Do you know how to prick him?” She asks and Felix nods furiously, taking the supplies she’s handing him. His hands shake and he has to remind himself to breathe while he wipes Hyunjin’s finger, warning him of the poke in case he’s aware enough to hear.
“Some of you will have to leave, I’m sorry.” The medic says while pulling out a small container with a syringe of liquid and a vial of powder. She inserts the syringe into the vial, pushing the liquid into the powder and holding onto both with one hand while swirling it around to let the powder dissolve. Everyone but Felix leaves the room, understanding that they need space to help Hyunjin. They can’t do that if the room is so crowded that they can’t move around to get what they need.
“Thirty-five.” Felix says, gulping at the low number. He didn’t even know that was possible, how much lower can it get? He can’t remember Hyunjin ever going below the mid-fifties. He takes a long look at the syringe, knowing how much Hyunjin would hate the needle if he could see it. “What is that?”
“Glucagon. It raises blood sugar and helps keep it up. Sort of the opposite of insulin. We can’t safely give him anything to eat or drink and his blood sugar is too low for that to have a fast enough effect even if he could eat or drink.” She explains, taking time to make sure Felix feels comfortable even though her main concern in Hyunjin. She looks closely at the vial, the liquid turning into a water-like substance.
“I need access to his thigh.” She says while going over to a cabinet and getting another alcohol wipe, tearing open the pack with her teeth. Felix feels awkward unbuttoning Hyunjin’s jeans and pulling them down his thighs when the other is unconscious. She hands him the alcohol wipe with an instruction of where to clean, and he wipes the area while she inspects the liquid in the vial to see if it’s ready.
“Usually, the only side effect of the shot is nausea and vomiting, so don’t be alarmed if he gets sick. Can you hold this for him?” She hands him a vomit bag, one of those with a hard plastic rim to keep it open and a far from opaque enough plastic bag to disguise whatever fills it. Felix takes it, moving to stand by Hyunjin’s head. Everything is moving so fast; it can’t have been more than a minute since they entered the room. Felix is barely hanging onto what’s going on, simply following the instructions he’s given. His only concern is Hyunjin.
“You’ll feel a pinch in your thigh now, okay?” Felix says softly, running his free hand through Hyunjin’s bright red locks. He watches the needle go into Hyunjin’s thigh and then the medication is administered. They roll him onto his side, so he won’t choke on his vomit, and Felix holds the bag up to his mouth, ready to catch anything.
“I’m gonna call the emergency number.” The medic says and excuses herself from the room. Felix bows at her, silently thanking her for all the help. It doesn’t take long for Hyunjin’s eyes to focus on Felix’s face. He has no clue how long it’s been or how he got off stage. He feels the fog lift from his brain, the weight lift from his bones, but with that comes blinding nausea. He’s throwing up before he’s even fully aware. He heaves weakly, breaking off in a cough when the bile burns his throat.
Felix adjusts his grip on the bag, helping Hyunjin lean more over it and then he’s heaving again, stronger this time as he’s slowly gaining his strength back. He barely has time to breathe before the next intense heave. Thankfully, he hasn’t eaten anything since right after soundcheck, so his stomach empties quickly, leaving him dry heaving for a while before the nausea settles. Felix strokes his hair, murmuring reassurances through the whole thing.
“We need to check his blood again.” The medic says, looking apologetically at Felix. Felix nods at her, offering to do it so Hyunjin will feel more relaxed. She has no problem with that, handing him the pen, test strip and glucose meter and taking the vomit bag from him.
“Hyunjin, can you hear me?” Felix starts off, receiving a nod from Hyunjin.
“I’m not deaf, you know.” Hyunjin says. He still sounds half dead but having the energy to be witty is a good sign. The shot quickly gets his blood sugar back on track, but he still needs some time to fully recover.
“Right, sorry.” Felix chuckles. “Can I prick your finger?” Hyunjin obligingly holds out his hand. Felix looks for a finger that hasn’t been pricked yet to lessen the pain and sets to work. Hyunjin watches his every move carefully. He tries to think back to what happened to orient himself but comes up empty.
“What happened?” He asks, unable to piece it together on his own. Felix holds up a finger as if to tell him to wait while he tells the medic what his blood sugar level is. She confirms that it’s within normal range, but tells them to keep checking for the next few hours, giving Hyunjin sugar if it drops at all.
“You passed out and your blood sugar was at thirty-five, so we had to give you a glucagon shot.” Felix explains, clearing up a few things for Hyunjin. Like why he suddenly felt so sick and why his pants are pulled down. “Do you know what could’ve caused you to go so low?”
Hyunjin thinks about it for a moment. He thinks back to being stubborn at lunch and then forgetting to check after, then the unfinished juice at soundcheck, the candy he spat out during the show. He didn’t check his blood sugar once after Felix pricked him when they were dancing even when he felt that he was low.
It’s clear that he hasn’t been keeping up with his sugars today. They’ve all been under a lot of stress leading up to the show and that’s when Hyunjin tends to neglect his health the most. That is also when he needs to keep an extra eye on it because he tends to forget.
“A good mix of forgetting and neglecting, and don’t even start with me, I’ve learned my freaking lesson, okay?” Hyunjin points at Felix, his finger still shaking a little and Felix bursts out laughing. He’s trying to be intimidating, but he’s just so adorable.
“I wasn’t going to yell at you.” Felix says. His plan is to sit Hyunjin down tomorrow and have a serious conversation about how they can help him when he gets like this, but he doesn’t mention that now. “Do you feel up to finding somewhere more comfortable to lie down?”
In response, Hyunjin pushes himself up to sitting, only a little dizzy at the change of position. Felix holds onto him while they walk back to the dressing room, not taking Hyunjin’s word for it when he says he’s fine.