Chapter Text
Dr. Zayne was an enigma of the most maddening, magnetic kind, and unfortunately for you, curiosity had always been your gravest sin. Nonetheless, it was a flaw you wore with something resembling pride. After all, not everyone could claim they'd managed to peel back even the faintest layers of the glacial fortress that was Zayne Li. But you had. Over the years, through careful observation and an embarrassing amount of persistence, you had glimpsed—just barely—the man who hid behind that frigid exterior. Not all of him, of course. He had never let you in entirely. But you liked to think you'd grown on him, just a little, like stubborn lichen.
Your fascination had begun back in medical school, the place where sleep went to die and energy drinks reigned supreme. Zayne was the kind of brilliant that made you question whether he was entirely human. The kind who could skim a textbook once and retain it with eerie precision, like his mind had never known the concept of forgetting. Meanwhile, you were a walking collage of colour-coded sticky notes, caffeine-induced tremors, and desperate all-nighters. A parody of a student, barely holding yourself together with mismatched socks and sheer willpower.
It wasn't fair, the way he always looked so composed. You'd catch sight of him walking into the exam hall, spine straight, slacks pressed to perfection, sweater vest unwrinkled and somehow smug in its neutrality. Meanwhile, you, in your hoodie that hadn't seen the inside of a washing machine in days, would feel something curdle inside you. Was it irritation? Admiration? You hadn't known back then.
At first, you'd approached him under the guise of academic interest. You told yourself you were merely studying the competition. A reconnaissance mission, nothing more. You wanted to see how he prepared, how he dissected practicals and diagrams with such mechanical ease. But somewhere along the line, observation turned into participation. You started joining him. Not officially, because Zayne didn't do invitations, but he didn't tell you to leave, and that was an invitation enough.
Were you friends?
You weren't sure. Not once in all those long years of shared library tables and late-night coffee runs had he properly smiled at you, but at least he let you stay. That had to count for something.
You suspected he only tolerated you because you came bearing offerings, carefully chosen pastries from the bakery three blocks away. Lemon tarts. Matcha cake. Anything delicate and within your meagre student budget. You'd Pavloved your way into his company.
Zayne's presence had a gravity to it, even in the silence, his attention never once straying from his notes. Watching him work made you want to do better as well. He didn't need to speak for you to learn from him. He just needed to exist beside you, head bowed over anatomy flashcards, long fingers ghosting over textbook pages like he was reading by touch alone.
It was enough for you. You'd learned long ago not to ask for too much. Life had a way of punishing the greedy.
It was a stroke of serendipity that after years of drifting through separate orbits, you and Zayne found yourselves working beneath the same roof again.
You hadn't expected it. The world was large. The medical world, larger still. Yet here he was, striding through the sterile white halls of Akso Hospital like a ghost from your past, just as distant and devastating.
You didn't expect your paths to cross often. As one of the hospital's new pediatricians, your hands were full with small patients and even smaller attention spans. Your pockets jingled with sticker sheets and crinkled candy wrappers, and your days were painted in primary colours. It was fulfilling, exhausting, and utterly chaotic work.
But somehow, you kept seeing him.
At first, you chalked it up to mere chance. But then a pattern began to emerge, and Zayne became a frequent fixture of the pediatric wing. Too frequent for someone whose field wasn't pediatrics. Too present to dismiss as a ghost.
Maybe you noticed because you were looking, or maybe the universe simply had a cruel sense of humour.
However, most surprising of all was his demeanour. Gone was the man who kept his emotions triple-locked beneath ice and iron. Or rather, he was still there, but softened in the presence of his smallest patients. You watched him kneel beside a whimpering five-year-old with a broken arm and distract her with the clinical grace of a magician. You saw him take time out of his rounds to bring puzzles and books to a chronically ill boy who refused to eat. And one morning, peeking around the curtain of Room 415, you caught him braiding a little girl's hair because she was weeping about not being able to do it herself post-surgery.
Your heart stuttered.
Admiration. That's what it was. That ache in your chest every time you watched him from across the room had to be admiration and nothing more. A professional curiosity and a desire to learn. You'd flourished under his shadow in med school, so it wasn't so strange that you wanted to do so again.
You told yourself that often, rehearsing it like a prayer.
Your own patients adored you, though your methods were far more chaotic than Zayne's methodical care. You bribed your way into affection with cartoon Band-Aids and fruit-scented stickers, offering jellybeans and lollipops like sacred talismans. The younger kids squealed when they saw you coming down the hall; the teenagers pretended not to smile while secretly pocketing the candy. You had always been this way—eager, perhaps too eager, feeding on approval like a deprived animal.
But there was one person whose approval you could never quite gauge.
After all these years, Zayne was still an unreadable cipher. You didn't know what he thought of you. Whether he remembered your shared study sessions or noticed your offerings. You carried forth the rituals from med school into the real world like a superstition you couldn't let die.
During late-night shifts, you'd sometimes find yourself hovering outside his office. You didn't knock to chat. You'd long lost the reckless bravado of your student days. No, you simply rapped twice on the door, cracked it open just enough to slip inside when he told you to enter, and placed a steaming cup of tea on his desk. Sometimes it came accompanied by a carefully wrapped dessert.
He never looked up right away, and his gratitude was an awkward mumble, but he never asked you to stop, either.
And foolishly, it was enough.
You never lingered long enough to chat, retreating with a bright, rehearsed smile and your usual farewell. "Make sure to take breaks, Dr. Li!"
You never got a response, but every now and then, you'd see expression soften the tiniest amount, which was akin to receiving a full-blown grin from a man like him. It made your heart hiccup.
You couldn't say how long this odd back and forth of yours continued like, but you began to catalogue your moments with Dr. Zayne like treasure.
There was, of course, that one time it was raining at the end of your shift, the vindictive kind that came down in sheets.
You stood under the hospital's awning, trying to muster the courage to open your umbrella and brave the trudge to the train station. But then you saw him, and all hesitation vanished.
Across the small stretch of concrete outside the side exit, beneath a narrow overhang, stood Dr. Zayne. His posture was immaculate as always, one hand clutching his phone, the other tucked neatly into his coat pocket. Water dripped in thin lines down the sleeves of his blazer, and you noticed—almost indignantly—that even in the middle of a storm, his expression was as unreadable as ever. His collar was damp, and his hair, though still neatly combed, was slowly giving up the fight.
You didn't think. You just acted.
You jogged across the short distance, the icy rain lashing against your legs. You flipped open your umbrella mid-step and thrust it up over both your heads, standing a little too close beneath its narrow span.
He looked up and blinked at you in surprise.
"Dr. Li," you greeted breathlessly. "You planning on standing there until the rain evolves into hail?"
"No."
You squinted at him, then angled the umbrella slightly more in his direction. "Lucky I found you before you melted."
His eyes flicked toward you, then back out at the storm. "I'm not made of sugar," he stated simply.
"Well," you replied, grinning, "you're certainly not as sweet."
Something in his expression shifted, like he wasn't entirely immune to the jab, and he stepped further into the umbrella's shade. Closer to you.
You adjusted your grip as the two of you fell into step. His legs were longer, and his pace brisk, so you had to hold the umbrella awkwardly high, your left shoulder slowly soaking through with rain.
Zayne noticed, but didn't say anything until you were halfway to the station.
"You're holding it too far left."
You glanced up. "I'm trying to keep you dry."
"You're getting wet."
You gave a half-shrug. "So? I'm replaceable. You're Akso's golden prodigy. Can't let you get drenched and catch a cold."
"That's a ridiculous hierarchy."
"Says the guy with the patent leather shoes."
"...They're waterproof."
You snorted. "Of course they are."
The silence that followed was companionable in a strange, off-kilter sort of way. Rain hissed around you, cars splashed by in the distance, but for a brief moment, the storm felt far away.
At the station entrance, you pressed the umbrella into his hands. "You need it more than I do," you insisted. "Your hair might actually un-gel out there."
In response, Zayne's brow creased like the suggestion had short-circuited a pattern in his brain.
"I'll return it," he said finally.
"I know."
He didn't reply, disappearing back into the crowd without a word, but the next morning, when you opened your locker at work, the umbrella was waiting for you. There was a thin elastic band wrapped around the handle, anchoring a packet of candy to its handle, and you felt a tentative smile tug at your lips.
You'd mentioned it once in passing during a night shift to one of the nurses—something about craving a very specific, obscure brand of citrus-flavoured hard candy your grandmother used to send you during your med school days. You had lamented about not being able to find in stores anymore.
Yet here it was, that familiar crinkled package winking at you.
You didn't stop grinning for the rest of the week.
Then there had been the incident with the wrist brace.
It had been a long week, an endless carousel of back-to-back surgeries, sleep-deprived consults, and aching hands from scribbling charts long past the point your fingers had gone numb. Everyone was tired, and even the invulnerable Dr. Zayne looked frayed around the edges.
You noticed his injury, almost instantly, a falter in movement as he flexed his right wrist after signing off on a file. It was expertly hidden, but you had spent years watching him, cataloguing every subtle shift in his expression like rare meteor showers. So, of course, you caught that wince.
"Overworked?" you asked mildly, leaning against the nurses' station as he passed by.
"Repetitive strain," he responded without inflection.
You hummed. "Do you want—?"
"No."
Of course not.
Still, when he left, you disappeared into the on-call lounge, rummaging through the staff med-kit you were fairly sure only you ever used properly. Thankfully, you found what you were looking for before he returned to his office. A soft, fabric wrist support brace in neutral grey. Nothing flashy, just something to ease the tension. You placed it on his desk without expectation.
He didn't bring it up the next day, or the one after that. There was no thank-you or acknowledgement, and you assumed that he'd thrown it out.
Until three days later.
You returned from rounds to find your usual patient folders neatly stacked on your desk, and beside them—perched so innocently it took you a moment to realize it hadn't been there before—was a box of your favourite pens. The ones you hoarded like treasure and had recently, much to your dismay, run out of.
There was a Post-it stuck to the lid.
"I assumed you'd prefer the 0.38mm ones. You always complain about ink bleed."
You stared at the note, and then at the hallway beyond the glass window of your office door, where Zayne was coincidentally passing by.
You stepped out into the hall and caught up with him. "Dr. Li!"
He turned and looked at you with an arched brow.
You held up the box. "You're not subtle, you know."
His gaze shifted to the pens. "I wasn't trying to be."
"Returning the favour, were you?"
"I don't believe in unbalanced exchanges."
You laughed. "I gave you a wrist brace, not a kidney."
He didn't smile, but his voice softened just slightly. "It helped."
Your breath hitched, but you tried not to show it. "I see...well, thanks for the pens."
There was a beat of silence.
Then Zayne calmly continued. "You should pace your charting. Your handwriting deteriorates after the fourth file."
You gaped at him. "Are you analyzing my handwriting now?"
"It's just always been that way."
"Wait. Always?"
Zayne's gaze remained fixed somewhere beyond your head. "Finals, third year. You wrote so fast during the pharmacology mock that your 'f's started looking like sevens. I wasn't sure if you were prescribing medication or unlocking a bank vault."
"You..." You squinted. "You remember that?"
"It was difficult to read your notes when we shared a study table."
"You remember us sharing a table?"
Zayne tilted his head minutely. "It was the only one near the east windows. You always took the seat closest to the outlet and claimed the light helped you concentrate."
"I didn't think you paid attention to any of that."
"You assumed I was unaware of the person sitting across from me for three years?"
"I assumed you were... indifferent."
Zayne's lips twitched in an imperceptible frown. "You used to rewrite your notes three times. All in pencil, because you said pencil was less threatening when you had to re-memorize everything from scratch. You also always sat cross-legged in library chairs and collected pens from every club's fair booth."
You let out an incredulous laugh.
"And," he added, still with that maddening calmness of his, "you muttered anatomy terms in your sleep during overnight study sessions."
"You—you heard that?" you exclaimed, horrified.
"You once said 'ischiocavernosus' so many times, I thought you were casting a spell."
You buried your face in your hands, groaning. "I want to dissolve into the floor."
"You seemed very dedicated."
You peeked at him through your fingers. "That's a nice way of saying I was completely unhinged."
"Also accurate."
You shook your head, but under the mortification was something else. He had remembered, and not just a few throwaway details, but every odd little habit you thought no one ever noticed.
"Why didn't you say anything back then?"
Zayne shrugged, as if he had no response.
You had been making progress. You were almost certain of it. Not in any obvious, sweeping way—Zayne wasn't a man of dramatic gestures or sudden declarations—but in the quiet consistencies, and the way he'd started waiting a beat longer in the hallway when he saw you approaching.
You were still careful not to be greedy. You never dared ask for more. What you had was already more than you expected: acknowledgement. A place in the periphery of his otherwise closed-off world. You orbited him the way the Earth orbits the sun—at a safe, unchanging distance. Warm enough not to freeze, far enough not to burn.
That was until she appeared.
No, not appeared. That implied novelty. You doubted she was new in his life. No, she seemed important, someone who had long ago carved out a space that had never been yours to want.
The Hunter. Dazzling and alive in the way people like you rarely allowed themselves to be. She was a presence that demanded space and then owned it unapologetically. You understood immediately why he who lived so carefully might have made room for her.
You hadn't meant to see them together. You were only there to return his charger—the one he'd left at your station after overhearing you grumbling to the nurses about your broken one. You hadn't even realized he'd been listening.
When you knocked on his door and he called for you to come in, you had smiled hopefully.
Only to find her perched on the edge of his desk like she belonged there. She was laughing casually, legs crossed, one hand braced behind her as she leaned toward him. She was telling a story, something fast-paced and colourful, her hands moving animatedly. And he was...
Smiling.
Not the faint, fleeting lift of his mouth he sometimes gave you on your most persistent days. Not the polite nod of acknowledgment.
No, this was a whole half-smile. Unmistakably soft and real.
You'd never seen him look like that. Not in all the years of having known him. Not even when you had once tried to make him laugh with horrible anatomy puns.
You'd barely stepped into the room when Miss Hunter spotted you.
"Oh!" she cried delightedly. "Look at this, what a coincidence!"
You blinked, caught off guard.
She beamed. "You work here? I had no idea you were at Akso too!"
You nodded numbly. "Pediatrics."
"Right, of course, silly me. All our conversations, and I didn't think to ask you where you worked," she apologized.
"It's alright."
"She's my neighbour, you know," Miss Hunter added, turning back to Zayne like sharing a favourite secret. "I haven't seen her come home in days! I hope you're not overworking her, dearest Zayne."
You felt something inside you crack at her term of endearment. And then you felt guilty. You hadn't done anything wrong technically, but the feeling took root anyway.
Had you been pining after a taken man?
Oh god.
The thought alone made your skin prickle with shame.
You'd never so much as look at him again if that were the case. You'd pull away completely and pretend you hadn't spent the past however-many months—years, even—watching his every glance like a starving thing. You would bury your humiliation deep, fold it into some quiet compartment inside yourself, and walk away with your dignity intact.
But was Miss Hunter really with him?
You remembered her laughter echoing in your kitchen last weekend when you had finally managed to crawl home after a particularly long shift. She'd come over with refreshments, and after one too many drinks, she had begun to ramble. Her cheeks had been flushed with wine, feet up on your coffee table as she slurred names and nonsense.
"He's so frustrating," she'd said, in that melodramatic tone she took when tipsy. "Like, emotionally constipated. But god, when he lets his guard down, it's like... ugh. It ruins you. He lives on the floor right above ours—you've probably seen him around. Tall. Blue eyes. Smells amazing."
"I don't go around sniffing my neighbours," you'd deadpanned.
"Well, you're going to have to trust me on this one, then," she'd insisted. "He's from the Association. I've worked a few cases with him."
You dragged yourself out of your reverie.
Surely if she were dating Zayne, she would have said something. You were friends. Not best friends, maybe, but close enough. She told you when she hated her lipstick. When she found a new favourite song. When someone from the Hunters' Association made a pass at her.
She told you everything.
Whatever had begun to splinter inside of you deteriorated even further when Zayne finally reacted to her words.
"I hope you're not overworking her," she repeated, "or yourself, for that matter."
"I'm not her boss," he replied curtly. "She makes her own hours. Maintaining a work-life balance is one's own responsibility."
"I—well, yeah," you tried to laugh. "That's rich coming from you, Dr. Li. Pretty sure you haven't slept in three weeks."
You looked to him, searching for the usual twitch of amusement and the barely-there softness he sometimes allowed when you teased him. But he didn't look up, and his jaw tightened like he was holding back a scowl.
"I have paperwork," he declared flatly.
Your hand, still holding the charger, hovered in the space between you. You hesitated before setting it on the edge of his desk. "Right... of course, I just wanted to return this."
You didn't let yourself feel the sting until the door clicked shut behind you, and you were alone again in the hallway, blinking at the linoleum floor as if it might give you answers.
You thought you were making progress, but maybe all you had ever been was a convenience. A background hum in the routine of his life. And now, suddenly, you weren't even that.
Over the next few weeks, a new pattern emerged, one that kept chipping away at pieces of your fragile heart. Perhaps it was your fault, too. You kept returning to the scene of the damage, stupidly hoping this time it would be different, but it never was.
You kept stopping by Zayne's office, in the hopes of regaining his favour. You'd even started doing the routine errands that should have been passed off to interns or residents. You told yourself it was more efficient to do it all yourself, but really, you just wanted to catch a glimpse of those elusive hazel green eyes, even if they now looked at you with disdain.
And every time you passed by, Miss Hunter was there too. She seemed to be always in his office, no matter the time of day, even at odd hours of the night. Sometimes you'd catch sight of her perched on the window ledge with her legs tucked beneath her, and other times she was just by his desk, leaning into his space. And most miraculous of all, Zayne allowed it.
He only allowed it for her, though. While in med school, he might have allowed you to share a library table with him, these days, he seemed adamant to distance himself from you as much as possible.
You wondered if Miss Hunter was working on a project with him. You couldn't really tell the true nature of their relationship, but that had to be the only explanation as to why she was always around. On your rare days off, she still came over to your apartment to keep you company and gush about her charming coworker, so you were still under the delusion that she wasn't dating Zayne.
It was the sort of delusion that was going to hurt you one day. And that day was today.
Tonight, when you stopped by the man's office, you fully intended to pass by without lingering. That is, until you heard your name.
Miss Hunter’s amused voice floated clearly through the door. “…I swear, she’s the only person I've ever met who doesn’t hate double shifts,” she was saying, chuckling fondly. “That girl is sweet. Like dangerously sweet. Even to you, and I know you don’t exactly roll out the red carpet.”
Zayne’s response was as dry as ever. “I didn’t ask for her kindness. She’s not helping anyone by wasting time with personal errands. If she spent as much energy on her department as she does playing nursemaid, maybe the pediatrics wing would run on schedule.”
"Don't you think that's a little—"
You didn’t stay to hear the rest of Miss Hunter’s reply. You didn't care to see if she would try to defend you or join him in his condemnation. The damage was already done.
Humiliation was the only word for how you felt. Humiliation and utter defeat.
You had done nothing but your best.
Day in and day out, you poured everything you had into your work—your time, your focus, your very soul. You had held the hands of anxious parents, wiped away the tears of frightened children before anesthesia dragged them under, and taken on shifts no one else wanted. You stayed late, came early, and went without sleep. You had practically bled for this job.
And now here he was, the man you admired so diligently, cutting through you with a few harsh words spoken in private. Words that struck you like open-handed slaps across the face.
You felt sick. Like something had lodged in your throat and was refusing to budge.
So that was what he thought of you.
When he wasn’t pretending to be nice. When he wasn’t lending you his charger or leaving pens in your drawer, this is what he believed. That you were incompetent and unprofessional. That your kindness was a distraction.
Zayne hadn’t just criticized your habits. He had questioned your calibre and your right to be here.
Suddenly, you were ten years old again, sitting in the back of a classroom while a teacher shook her head at your test score. You were fifteen, being told by your guidance counsellor that maybe medicine wasn’t for someone “with your academic record.” You were seventeen, crying in the school library after your chemistry teacher told you some people just weren’t “wired for science.” You were eighteen, slumped at your mother’s kitchen table, listening to your parents whisper that maybe it was time to pick something “more realistic.”
You were every failure, every disappointment, every bruise to your spirit, and now Zayne had joined their chorus.
His anger might have been easier to swallow than his indifferent dismissal of your abilities.
And the worst part?
You didn’t think your patients were suffering. In fact, you knew they weren’t. You were a good doctor. You had earned every stitch of your white coat. The day you took your Hippocratic Oath, you had vowed to devote your entire life to it.
So why did you feel like a fraud now? Why did one man’s brutal judgment make you want to pack up and disappear?
You weren't sure how you made it back to your office without breaking down into tears, but when you finally closed the door, you sank into your chair with a sharp inhale and buried your face in your hands. You could not find it in yourself to cry, so all you could do was exist in that suffocating space where shame and grief and rage all sat too closely together.