A/N: So I just finished watching the Korean drama "Boys Before Flowers". Now I have watched the Tiwanese, Japanese, and Korean version of the show and have loved all of them. I just never liked how they left the character of Rui/Lei/Ji Hoo alone at the end. He was always my favorite character, and I feel like he deserves an interesting and successful love story of his own. So this is my take.

This story takes place five years after the final events of "Boys Over Flowers", putting the characters at around 27/28 years old. Enjoy!

Chapter 1

A Fateful Encounter

"Am I the only doctor in this damned hospital?" Ji Hoo whispered to himself, exiting his office after being paged for what seemed like the hundredth time that day. It wasn't usual for the reserved man to vocalize his frustrations, but he felt as though he was justified.

After all, he was having the worst day in his life.

He had woken up in the morning to find the papers all sporting the news that famous Korean model Min Seo Hyun was divorcing her equally famous Parisian husband because of his adulterous ways. Though it had been years since he had left her in Paris after her engagement, Ji Hoo couldn't help but feel bitter. Seo Hyun had dumped him for a cheating playboy? What in the world did that say about him?

And if that wasn't enough news to put him in a dark mood, he found himself ambushed during his lunch by a glowing Jan Di, who came in with a large bowl of seaweed soup.

"Is it someone's birthday today?" Ji Hoo questioned, looking at the steaming broth. Normally, seaweed soup was reserved only for special occasions.

"No, today is an important day, though," Jan Di said as Ji Hoo hesitantly tried the soup. Deciding it was better than the instant ramyeon he had been eating for the past week, he helped himself to more.

"Really, what is so special about today?' he asked, half expecting Jan Di to say that they were celebrating Seo Hyun's divorce. He knew that she would have some ridiculous plan for him to win back his first love. Jan Di was always naïve like that.

"I recieved some great news today," Jan Di said. Ji Hoo looked up at her, motioning for her to go on.

"Ji-Hoo sunbae," Jan Di cried, her eyes overly bright, "Jun Pyo and I are expecting our first child!"

Had Ji Hoo been a less restrained man he would have spewed the seaweed soup all over the table.

"That is wonderful news," he finally forced himself to say. It had been five years since Jan Di and Jun Pyo had gotten married, and Ji Hoo still wasn't fine with that fact. Now they were expecting their first child. Jan Di, his Jan Di, was expecting her first child.

"We want you to be the godfather, of course" Jan Di gushed.

The irony was enough to make him gag.

So it was no surprise that Ji Hoo was not in the best of moods when he entered his latest patient's room. It was days like this that made him yearn for the high school days again. At least he didn't have a conscious back then.

"Who do we have this time?" Ji Hoo asked the nurse, who seemed to be momentarily stunned by his entrance. It had been two years since he had started working in the hospital, and people still called him 'The Prince Doctor'. As if it even mattered.

"We…I…the patient…" the nurse stammered. Ji Hoo concealed the sigh of impatience that threatened to spill out of him. After all, he was the pragmatic and conservative Ji Hoo. Sighing was unacceptable.

"May I have a look at the patient's records?" he asked, patiently. The nurse nodded her head blankly and handed him a manila folder.

Ji Hoo opened the folder, exasperated. Another case of the flu. People these days were becoming over paranoid, going to the hospital after only a few sneezes. Plastering on a fake smile, Ji Hoo walked over to the patient.

It seems as though I am becoming rather skilled at faking happiness, Ji Hoo thought to himself bitterly. It was a useful skill to possess when one's life wasn't happy in the least bit.

The rest of the day progressed at a snail's pace and was so exhausting that Ji Hoo considered just collapsing in the middle of the hospital so that they would force him to take a break. Instead, he just visited the canteen every half hour, getting himself one coffee after another, as though caffeine could solve all of his problems. Though, in reality, the canteen just severed as another problem for him, seeing as it was filled with nurses that were rife with the latest gossip and were all too willing to share.

"Dr. Yoon," a nurse gushed, pushing a magazine in his face, "have you seen the latest news about the actress and singer Park Mei Ji? Everybody is speculating whether she and her costar are dating in real life".

Ji Hoo looked distastefully at the beautiful, doe-eyed girl on the front of the magazine. He had always been more of a newspaper and classical music type of person. He didn't keep up with popular culture and didn't see why everybody else seemed to be obsessed with it.

"That is wonderful," Ji Hoo said, pushing the magazine away. Always diplomatic Ji Hoo. Always fake Ji Hoo.

"What do you think?" the nurse asked her fellow chattering friends, "they would make a cute couple, wouldn't they?"

Ji Hoo stood up and walked away, leaving his half full cup of coffee behind. The constant gossip and talking were even worse than being in his office with the empty bowl of seaweed soup mocking him. It was going to be a long day…

Finally, Ji Hoo's shift was over and he left the hospital as quickly as he could. The cold night air hit him in full force as he started to walk the distance between the hospital and the garage where he kept his car.

It was an exhausting life he lived. A horrible life, he thought to himself. He remembered five years before, graduating from medical school and starting a career as an idealistic doctor, filled with the will to help everybody he saw. He had been so full of morals then. But those had started to disappear. They left as he stood by Jun Pyo as the best man at his wedding, they left as they lowered his grandfather into his grave. They left just as everybody that had ever been close to him left.

Way to throw yourself a one man pity party, Ji Hoo thought with acrid amusement as he started to cross the bridge that led him to the garage. He walked slowly, the wind making his copper hair fly in all sorts of crazy angles around his angelic face.

He looked up to see a small girl bent over the railing of the bridge. He slowed his pace as he looked over at her. Her feet were on the railing and her long, wavy hair was blowing, hiding her face. He watched, eyes widening a bit as she started to hoist herself over the ledge.

Wonderful, Ji Hoo thought as he hurried over towards her, the last thing I need is for some teenager to kill herself right in front of my eyes. Grabbing the girl around the waist, he hoisted her away from the ledge.

Shocked, the girl slumped in his arms for a second. Then she started fighting back. She bucked around like a wildcat, kicking and clawing at him.

"What do you think you were trying to do?" he asked, though the answer was painfully obvious.

"Let go of me," the girl whispered to him harshly.

"Not if you are just going to go back and try to jump off the bridge once more," Ji Hoo whispered back. Already a crowd of people were starting to form around them. The girl suddenly buried her head in Ji Hoo's chest.

"What are you doing?" Ji Hoo asked. He had just saved the girl's life, but he didn't expect her to be so affectionate, especially when just a few seconds earlier it seemed as though she had been trying to dismember him with her nails.

"I can't let them see my face," she said, throwing her arms around his neck and pulling herself closer to him. The crowd started to smile and chatter amongst themselves.

"What a cute couple," Ji Hoo heard a woman near him say. He looked down at the girl, who was so tightly wrapped against him. This was not what he needed at the moment.

"It doesn't matter if they see your face," he said pulling her off of him. The girl started to bury her head in her arms, but Ji Hoo caught both of her hands before she could. He looked down at the girl's horror stricken face and felt his eyes widen.

It was the exact same face that had graced the magazine that had been so unceremoniously thrust at him earlier in the day.

"Park Mei Ji!" he heard a woman in the crown shriek. The girl groaned loudly and glared at Ji Hoo, who was still grabbing onto her wrists.

"Who is that man with her?"

"Are they dating?"

"Of course they are! Didn't you see the way they were hugging earlier?"

"And look at how he is clutching onto her wrists now"

Ji Hoo immediately let go of the girl's wrists, but not before nearly everybody in the crowd had taken pictures of the incident with their phones. He looked down at the girl once again. The suicidal teenager that he had saved had actually turned out to be the most famous star in all of Korea.

"Why were you trying to kill yourself?" Ji Hoo whispered to Mei Ji. The girl looked up at him and snorted bitterly.

"Do you ever feel like your life is just cursed?" she whispered before turning on her heels and promptly walking away from him. The crowd followed her, leaving Ji Hoo alone, confused, and in slight disbelief of the events that had just occurred.

That seemed to be a trend with him.

For the next two days, Ji Hoo had off from the hospital and he decided to isolate himself. He pretended it was because he had caught a cold from one of his patients and needed to recover. Truthfully, though, he just wanted two days to sleep and stay away from everybody else. Jan Di and Jun Pyo were going to have a child, Yi Jung and Ga Eul were getting married, even Woo Bin seemed to have slowed down his stream of women a bit. Everybody was going somewhere, and Ji Hoo didn't feel like trying to catch up with them. He was just too exhausted to.

Ji Hoo slowly, lethargically, walked around the house, picking up his mail, ignoring the paper—he didn't need Seo Hyun divorce drama part 2. He started to flip lazily through his letters as he made his way to the kitchen.

Ads, Ads, Garage bills, Ads, SM Contract, Ads, Ads.

"Wait, SM Contract," Ji Hoo said to himself, pulling out a rather thick envelope from the stack. It was a very ominous looking envelope, with "SM Entertainment" stamped on the front of it in bold letters.

What is this, Ji Hoo thought, am I being recruited to go into entertainment now? He stopped for a moment to imagine himself being packaged with a group of prepubescent boys and marketed as the next big boy band. It was the most amusing thing that had crossed his mind in a while.

He opened the envelope and took out the contract inside.

"Relationship contract," he read aloud, becoming steadily more confused.

Suddenly there was sharp knocking on the door. He put down the contract and walked over to the door. The person on the other side kept knocking, a steady rhythm that started to grate on Ji Hoo's nerves after only a couple of seconds. There was only one person out there would knock impatiently like that.

He opened the door and saw the familiar figure of Jun Pyo glaring at him. Ji Hoo opened his mouth to speak, but was stopped by Jun Pyo, who punched him in his stomach… hard.

Ji Hoo doubled over and stared at his friend, clutching onto his stomach. What was going on now?

"You…" Jun Pyo said, pointing a shaking finger at Ji Hoo, "you bastard! I thought we were friends, how could you betray me like this?"

Isn't that supposed to be my line, Ji Hoo thought to himself.

He looked up and blinked slowly, his trademark. Confusion, anger, happiness, it was all expressed in his slow, almost lazy, blinking. All of the sudden Jun Pyo's face broke out into a smile and he clutched his friend by the shoulders, hoisting him up.

"Though I can't say that I'm not happy for you," Jun Pyo said, smiling widely, "it's about time that you got yourself a girl".

"Jun Pyo, what are you talking about?" Ji Hoo asked, separating himself from his friend's grip.

"The newspaper today," Jun Pyo said, throwing a copy of it to Ji Hoo, "I did really expect you to share this information with us before, though. What kind of friendship do we have if we all have to learn about this by reading a paper? Yi Jung and Woo Bin are upset too".

Ji Hoo looked at the paper, his heart stopping momentarily as he read the headline.

"SM idol star Park Mei Ji dating grandson of Late President Yoon Seok Young" he read aloud. Underneath the headline was a blurry picture of Ji Hoo grabbing on to Mei Ji's hands, both of them glaring at each other. Ji Hoo hadn't realized he had glared at her so passionately. He didn't think she had noticed it either.

Now the SM contract seemed to make more sense.

"You know she's my favorite actress," Jun Pyo whined. Ji Hoo looked up at his friend quickly. Had his fake relationship with Mei Ji made Jun Pyo jealous? Had he, Yoon Ji Hoo, made Jun Pyo jealous?

Why did that fact make him so happy?

"I still don't know why you couldn't tell us," Jun Pyo continued, "haven't I always been your unwavering and constantly supportive friend?" Ji Hoo's mind wandered to the time where Jun Pyo had kicked him out of the F4 and made him compete for the chance to stay in school.

"Yes," he answered.

"And have I ever done anything that made you sad or upset?" Jun Pyo continued. Four years back, white suit, fake smile, watching as the girl he loved expressed her love and loyalty to Jun Pyo.

"No," Ji Hoo answered.

"Then why couldn't you tell me? We're best friends!" Jun Pyo said, frowning. Ji Hoo didn't quite know what to say. He could just tell the truth and say that relationship was fake. But then again, telling the truth was not one of Ji Hoo's strong points. Plus, Mei Ji's words were still in his head.

"Do you ever feel like your life is just cursed?"

If only she knew.

"How long have you been dating? When is the wedding ceremony going to happen? I am going to be your best man, right?" Jun Pyo asked in rapid-fire speed. Ji Hoo grabbed his bag along and stuffed the contract in it.

"I have to go now," Ji Hoo said to Jun Pyo, "we can talk about this later".

"Later?" Jun Pyo said, as though it was the most offensive thing that Ji Hoo had ever said to him.

I can think of a lot more offensive things to say to you, Jun Pyo.

"You should go back to Jan Di," Ji Hoo forced himself to say. How long had it been? Why was he still having trouble just saying her name out loud? "Pregnant women need lots of attention and care." Why did he always say things that made him feel like dying on the inside? Maybe he was a closet sadist.

"F4 meeting tomorrow," Jun Pyo said, "no excuses".

"I do have work, you know," Ji Hoo said shortly.

"No excuses," Jun Pyo said once again.

Ji Hoo just nodded and led his best friend out of his house. Jun Pyo often seemed to forget that the boys were grown up now and actually had responsibilities. Though, the thought of the F4 actually being responsible for other people was still a frightening though. But they all had to grow up sometime.

Jun Pyo was still working on that.

Ji Hoo locked the front door and started to make his way to his car.

"You know, Jan Di was shocked when she heard the news," Jun Pyo said, "It was as though she thought that you would always just stay the same. The same Yoon Ji Hoo that she has known".

Ji Hoo faltered a little. That is what his problem was. He was always the same. The same Yoon Ji Hoo who was outwardly conservative and unemotional. The same Yoon Ji Hoo that was still in love with Jan Di. The same Yoon Ji Hoo that hated himself.

"Things change," he said softly before getting into his car. It was off to SM Entertainment. He needed to have a long talk with a certain idol star.

A/N: Okay, how was that? I know it was a lot of internal dialouge, but I think that is what Ji Hoo is all about and that's what makes him so interesting-- this things that he keeps inside. And I know that Park Mei Ji was just unceremoniously thrown in there, but trust me, there will be a lot more character developemnt for her in the comign chapters. Any thoughts/comments/ideas you have about this story are always welcome. Gracias y besos!!