(Heart)beats for woohyunized [1/2]
For: woohyunized
Title: (Heart)beats
Pairing(s): Chanyeol/Kai (also Chanyeol-centric)
Rating: PG
Warning(s): Language, Kris as a central character, Loosely based on canon, not meant to offend SM as a company in any way.
Length: 10,316w
Summary: SM can stand for Star Makers, Seoul's Magicians or Soul-Maimers, and Chanyeol is stuck in the middle of all that (with Jongin. So maybe it's not so bad.)
Author’s Note: Dear Recipient, I hope you enjoy this since I was really trying to stick to the wonderful prompt you gave me. (Funny thing, I actually started two for you, but since this one turned into a monster, I just went with it, I hope it’s still to your liking-might finish the other one later!) But many thank yous go out to my lovely anonymous beta, who slapped some sense into my convoluted writing, and the YPD mod, who kindly gave me an extension. Again, please enjoy!
Bubble Tea Tuesdays were Sehun’s idea, of course.
“It’s a well-earned break and bonding time between two future band members,” he had willingly pitched. “Plus, they have matcha flavoured tea now too.”
Matcha bubble tea had sold Chanyeol, admittedly. The little tea stall Sehun dragged him to easily earned half its profits from somnolent amateurs up the road trickling out of the anaemic SM building. The white castle where kings and queens of entertainment were sewn together with threads of plastic and gold, humanity undone stich by stitch. That’s what people heard, anyway. SM, the Star Makers, Soul Manufacturers, Seoul’s Magicians, SoMething like that.
Sehun always had an excuse to get out of practice, and the other trainees, Chanyeol included, never really needed a decent one to join him.
“What did you want to talk about, then?”
“Well, there’s this trainee.”
Chanyeol sucked pearls from his matcha milk tea. “There are a lot of trainees. What else is new?”
“This trainee is different, I mean. He’s not like the others.” Sehun mumbled. “You’ve heard of Kim Jongin, right? The dancer.”
The name was familiar. Kim Jongin was that seventeen year old apathetic ballerino, and as far as Chanyeol knew, spoke only when spoken to, danced on air and did revoltades along the clouds splayed across the back wall. His reputation had been constructed with whispers through the curtains pre-production where no show business had begun yet; Jongin was known by everybody before he was somebody, and that was important in the industry.
“Yeah, I’ve heard of him. Why?”
“I went to a showcase he performed at today.” Sehun patted his cheeks in unease. “And he’s just…fucking fantastic. A cross between a hip-hop experimentalist and the Korean Billy Elliot. His routine was insane, and the way he moves his body is like water.”
Chanyeol smirked. “This is a revelation. Flattery of others is pretty rare with you.”
Sehun’s face was straight. “No bullshit. He dances like he’s weightless. He’s a ballerina and you’d think that’d make him delicate, but he’s slick too, strikes every move like an arrow. I’m not kidding, hyung.”
“And why are you so concerned?”
Poor Sehun had looked so troubled, his young brow furrowed with the anxiety lines of someone years his senior. Chanyeol had almost laughed.
“I’m kind of scared he’s going to upstage me, hyung. Everyone knows that Lee Soo Man is preparing the line-up for the new group, and the way things are going, he’s going to be its main dancer instead of me.” Sehun dropped his head onto the table, exhaling loudly. “I really want to debut this year. And as a member people will remember.”
And at that point, Chanyeol, who hadn’t had any knowledge of this Kim Jongin, wasn’t aware that this danseur could throw himself headfirst into the bass line of a dubstep track, rollicking in its sea of synthesized neon beats, was very much the thief of hopes and dreams that Sehun had anticipated he’d be. Not yet, at this point he was just faceless, nameless.
“You’ve trained hard, so don’t underestimate yourself. You’ve got nothing to worry about, Sehun-ah.”
Though after that conversation, Chanyeol made sure to keep his dreams close to his heart. If they were too open he’d be setting them up to be stolen by somebody else.
There were two kinds of dancers floating around the trainee building. The first kind who could actually do pirouettes and arabesques and fancy French shit Chanyeol had a hard time pronouncing. The second could do jazz-hands-and jump around like flashdance on steroids. Chanyeol liked to pretend he was the first kind but he knew otherwise. It was soothing to frequently remind himself that rappers don’t dance.
The first time he saw Kim Jongin dance though, he knew Sehun hadn’t exaggerated. He wasn’t just the first kind of dancer; he was the one person who would come out first among the firsts. About the fluidity of his elastic limbs and the way energy shot through his veins in jolts of clean movements, he hadn’t exaggerated at all.
They were in a group session together, working on a contemporary routine to some mellow remix of a Beenzino song, and from the back of the room Chanyeol only saw Jongin’s reflection in the mirror moving slicker than everyone else, ducking and swooping with every new pulse of the syncopated beat.
Kim Jongin, he had established, was indeed fucking fantastic.
Chanyeol tried not to eyeball but it was very difficult, admittedly. There was something effortless about the way he moved. He absorbed melodies through his movement, washes of sound entered through his ears and exited out of the flourishes of his fingertips, the pointed toes, the flick of wrists and measured gaps between snapping from the first twirl to the second turn to the third breakdown. Chanyeol looked at Jongin like he was made of magic, because that kind of vitality wasn’t taught in any company, anywhere. It stemmed somewhere much deeper, and Jongin was bursting at the seams with it, from inside out.
After practice Chanyeol mostly hung back to talk to Sehun. The kid worked more and played less with the looming project, his energy hit a plateau while Bubble Tea Tuesdays receded in frequency, but they snuck out after curfew every now and again. Sehun ordered taro, Chanyeol stuck to matcha.
“You’ve seen him at practice, right?” Sehun mumbled, rubbing his shiny forehead with the collar of his shirt. “Jongin’s a great, bloody great dancer. But he’s kind of quiet.”
Chanyeol just nodded and had another gulp of tea. “Maybe that’s kind of good for you. Shyness could be his downfall, especially after debut, you never know. Idols have to be good at variety too.”
“He has a lot of friends and everything; he just prefers to be alone. Do you think that gives me a better chance? I’ve been practicing nonstop, between sessions and way into the night time. If Soo Man sees how much I’ve improved…”
Poor foetus-age Sehun looked so weary and lethargic for his seventeen years that the anxiety was crinkled in his brow. Chanyeol almost found it funny. But he restrained himself from spitting his tapioca pearls all over the shop.
He just patted his dongsaeng on the back. “You never know.”
The Beenzino contemporary routine had Chanyeol’s heart beating (at 110bpm) and oscillated in the lifelines, and they were told the steps just get harder from there. For Huckleberry P (at 126bpm), Dok2 (at 138bpm) and Skrillex (at 140bpm), the turns were quick and clean and required military precision to hit effectively, according to the strong-faced instructor. Before they had the urge to collapse, they weren’t working hard enough.
“He’s such a hardhead.” Sehun wheezed to Chanyeol between segments. “If he’d just give us a ten minute break or something-“
The instructors didn’t cut them any slack because in the limelight nobody holds the curtain open for them while they go to the bathroom. The ebbing energy finally fell to the floor when the music cuts. Eventually the trainees all ended up yawning and nestled to the cool comfort of the wooden floorboards.
After practice ended, one by one they started to get up off their backs and the last two left were Chanyeol and a trainee up front. Jongin lay on his back, breathing hard into the timber floor, gazing into the blue backdrop of clouds that taunted them with faraway tranquillity every moment of practice.
“Why are clouds the background for all the practice rooms, do you know?” Jongin murmured, in a voice so muffled that Chanyeol had to ask again.
“I have no idea.” Chanyeol answered, sitting next to them and staring at the cloudscape.
Jongin mused. “I’ve always wanted to know why SM chose that particular wallpaper. Ever since before I came into the company.”
Chanyeol stared back at the clusters of diaphanous white, willowing and blowing in their synthetic foreground. They did make him feel obligated to stay awake, even when it was dark out and it would be nice seeing constellations splattered across the back wall, especially with the real starlight streaming through the glass windows.
Jongin sat up and stretched out his hamstring with a grimace. “Imagine. If they put up a sky full of stars instead of clouds, we would really shine then, you know?”
“Shining stars?”
He chuckled in response. “Yeah. Because that’s what stars do, they shine. And it happens best at night, the time people can see them glowing from the inside out.” Jongin laid his head back on the ground. “I know it sounds kind of stupid, but it makes sense in my head somehow.”
He scratched his head and grinned bashfully, as if to swallow his thoughts, looking at Chanyeol for approval. “Doesn’t it?”
Chanyeol head raised an eyebrow thoughtfully. “You know, we could probably just paint over them.”
“We’d get in so much shit for that.”
They had both laughed about it and imagined how many ways Lee Soo Man would be able to put them in body bags and wheel them into the depths of the oceans if they even touched the famous SM cloud wallpapers.
Jongin was probably right, but that didn’t stop Chanyeol from digging some plastic glow-in-the-dark stars out of the back of a minimart shelf and plastering his bedroom ceiling with them, just because. Then he turned the lights off and gazed up at his synthetic galaxy. Of course they shone brighter in the darkness. He shouldn’t have expected anything else, and it made him wonder why he’d tried in the first place.
Twelve trainees were gathered in the business office that following Tuesday and from then on, those starry-eyed hopefuls became the prototypes for a new project. It was a blueprint that mapped a masterwork of musicality to convert dreams into reality, not to mention being expected to pay them in millions.
Chanyeol hadn’t been familiar with his future bandmates, less Sehun, who was adamant about celebrating with an XL size milk tea afterwards, and wide-eyed, golden throat Do Kyungsoo, his fellow ’92 liner who sometimes caught the bus home with him. Serious-faced and diligent, Kyungsoo would have made it far with or without riding on the coattails of a company.
The rest of the trainees, he wasn’t sure what to think about them. Byun Baekhyun and Kim Jong-something were both freshly recruited and friendly, but Chanyeol wasn’t sure if the rigid work ethic the industry demanded could develop with such a short amount of training. He had only ever seen the Chinese native trainees wandering the halls, floating within their own little group, though individually Yixing, Luhan and Yifan were all quite congenial and competent in conversational Korean. Junmyeon was a veteran of labour, Minseok was too quiet. The wushu boy, Tao, intimidated Chanyeol on sight, only because he could probably beat the shit out of somebody with any given household object lying around, though he never voiced this thought out loud.
Then there was Jongin, and that was expected by almost everybody, that the dancer would dance his dance on a big dancing stage someday, somewhere. But he didn’t relish in the news of debut like some of the others, didn’t holler out loud like Baekhyun or reel from disbelief, speechless like Minseok. He just smiled to himself, and so genuinely that his smile might’ve broken his face in two if it could be any wider.
Chanyeol had glanced over at Sehun. He looked pleased with himself, hiding a brighter smile beneath a satisfied smirk. He’d probably forget about Jongin for a while.
They did go out for Bubble Tea Tuesday right after the meeting. They were expected to move into a dorm together in a few months to get more comfortable with each other. Half would be growing into prodigies of the Shinwha-persona riding the Korean hallyu wave while the other half would be shipped off to China to make magic in mandarin. Chanyeol was hesitant but determined to do his best, if they had to call on him.
Sehun was less open to the idea.
“If we’re training in Korea, shouldn’t we debut in Korea too? I mean, that’s what we signed up for.” He waves his straw irritably in the air before stabbing it into the top of his choco bubble tea.
Chanyeol justified. “They probably want us to have international exposure too, I reckon that wouldn’t be so bad.”
Sehun shook his head. “We’d be half a group though, like, split down the middle.”
“Twelve is already a lot of members, Sehun-ah.”
“I know.” Sehun twirled the plastic straw around in the cup. After a pause, he adds, “I hope they put me with you, hyung.”
He was wearing that embarrassed grin which made his eyes crinkle and cave like little crescent moons glowing on his face. Chanyeol knew he wasn’t just fucking around because that smile was becoming rarer and when it appeared he knew it was real.
“If it means anything to you, I hope we’re together too, forever.”
“You’re friends with Kim Jongin, the dancer, right?”
It was a starless evening, and Chanyeol and Kyungsoo were the only two people left on the 11:05pm bus. Kyungsoo lifted an eyebrow in response. “Sure. I mean, we got off on the wrong foot, but now, I guess we are. Why so curious?”
“What makes you think I’m curious? I could just be asking out of…general interest.”
(He really did try but Kyungsoo was boring holes into his face.)
“You’re a shitty liar. It’s practically inked on your forehead.”
Chanyeol scoffed. “I’m not a-forget it. Anyway, this Jongin; he’s pretty shy, right? I mean, that’s not the best thing to be as an idol. He doesn’t open up very much, you know. I don’t know what to think about him.”
Kyungsoo glanced out the window before answering. “Jongin’s not shy. He’s just quiet, and that’s not the same thing. If he seems closed up, it means there’s a time and place when he’ll open up too. You probably just haven’t found it yet.”
“Have you?”
Kyungsoo didn’t say anything else.
Their group name was announced a few weeks later.
“EXO. What does that name even mean?” Baekhyun had mused.
Sehun shrugged in response. “Maybe it’s like kisses and hugs, like literally spelling out our love and or some shit like that. XOXO, E-XO, E-XO. L-O-V-E. D-R-U-G-S. S-E-X.”
“You’re such a hormonal fuck, Sehun.”
Jongdae grinned. “It could just be cryptic and the board just wants us to self-interpret our own meaning of being EXO.”
Chanyeol had pondered over that notion until he was sleepless in his bed. EXO could mean a whole world of rock and roll, sex and stars, a legion of fans and a long-awaited dream coming true. Though it could also be a daydream turned nightmare, he had considered that possibility too.
It could also just mean nothing at all, and he kind of liked how the meaning was meaningless. It was a nice paradox.
They would be EXO-K and EXO-M, which sounded way more official than their prototype names of M1 and M2. Now they had been established as real somebodies, the dream was descending from the clouds and into the chasms of reality, and it was very scary.
The groups were divided. Chanyeol was put into the K group, as were Sehun and Kyungsoo, he was particularly glad to hear. Junmyeon would be a good leader, he could already tell, and even if Baekhyun sang the telephone book Chanyeol would think it sounded beautiful.
Jongin was put in K too. As he noticed Sehun’s eyes flittering towards him every now and then, Chanyeol was forced to wonder about how the dynamic of this group would be.
Chanyeol quickly ascertained that dance practice was the black hole which ate idols with two left feet and no sense of balance; people like him who teetered on the rim of an abyss and only needed one ankle to snap and send them spinning into dark matter.
It didn’t help that EXO’s debut track was MAMA. After brainstorming the message behind the title (and failing), the twelve battered trainees became subject to a majestic orchestral fusion of dubstep and metal and the bizarre opening mantra of a pseudo-English cult. Along with the shitload of rapping parts Chanyeol was assigned for the song, the dance was physically demanding, fast-paced insanity. He would collapse on the floor after rehearsal and drag out the ten minute break intervals they were rarely granted for as long as possible.
At least he wasn’t the only one struggling. The other rapper and leader of M was Yifan, and Chanyeol felt comforted by the fact they could both be slow, imbalanced giants together.
“Dancing is a burden we will have to bear for as long as we’re a part of EXO.” Yifan had once joked. “Rapping is more our style, see. Once we become idol veterans, we can forget all this dancing stuff. Take the hip-hop underground by storm instead. You and me, Yeol.”
Chanyeol had slung his arm over Yifan’s shoulder and chuckled. “Let’s try and drag Sehun and Zitao into it too. They’d probably appreciate the thought.”
It was a done deal. Dancing just took its toll on Chanyeol’s energy levels. He was starting the day with triple shot Americanos and ending it with sleeping pills because all hours were day hours at SM, the Star Manufacturing Establishment.
Bedtime was never fixed. They would be too busy revising the dances over and over and over again in the cloud-spangled practice rooms, reverberating squeaks of sneakers bouncing off the mirrors into the hollow hallways. Late into the night until the stars fell from grace and turned to drops of morning dew, Chanyeol caught his fair share of sunrises, an iridescent glow streaming into the studio somehow made him sleepier than the dark did.
But twenty-four hour days weren’t just expectation, they were obligation. Time felt as if the clock had been stuck in one second for hours. Chanyeol woke up in the morning looking forward to sleeping again that night.
Rappers don’t dance, he told himself. They should stand and look cool and talk fast.
But Jongin was a rapper too. He stood tall, at nearly 6 feet; he was exceedingly handsome, with sculpted features that were strong but still soft. And he could really fucking dance. He might’ve been the glowing exception to the rapper stereotype but that didn’t cease Chanyeol’s admiration for him.
Chanyeol practiced his dance steps way past midnight, usually half-awake and always alone so nobody would see if he flopped.
“Aren’t you tired?”
Jongin interrupted quietly, leaning against the doorframe of the practice room. It was 2:19AM. Chanyeol looked up and saw his reflection walking towards him. “Exhausted.”
“Then sleep.”
Chanyeol grunted in frustration. “Haven’t gotten the second verse right yet. If I can’t nail them by tomorrow, the instructor will tear me to pieces.”
Jongin walked towards him. “You nearly had it. If you just move your foot inwards with the half-turn, then you can pivot quicker into the next slide.”
Chanyeol paused. “Show me.”
Jongin was hesitant to oblige but when he did, Chanyeol understood. He laid it out slow and smooth for him, pivoted, darted between moves cleanly and coherently. His low voice echoed bass in the practice room, and they both retraced their steps thousands of times, over and over again until sunlight began streaming in through the window.
“Weren’t you going home?” Chanyeol asked.
Jongin just shrugged and said, “I don’t deserve to be asleep when you’re still awake and practicing so diligently, hyung.”
They both slept on the floor that night, curled up in the corner of the practice room and it was the best night of sleep Chanyeol had experienced in a long time.
It wasn’t fair that idols had to be good at everything, not just singing and dancing and rapping. Chanyeol learned this when he was put into lessons for guitar, drums and piano, all of which he was already quite good at, but SM wanted to hone his skills and make him a one-man band, apparently. He learned very quickly that Soo Man expected them to practice for their impending variety shows, so they had to be funny and charismatic and well-mannered at the same time. Then he overheard from Minseok that one of the boys from M had been offered an unspecified procedure on their face, so they had to be physically, impeccably beautiful.
Wherever there were holes in their abilities or personalities, the industry pillowed and overfilled them with sweet, cloying paragons. They were moulded in flawless silhouettes and their blemishes were drowned in the foundations of Midas, gold to the touch. But all that glittered at SM had become so decadent to the point that they dulled, as far as Chanyeol knew. Sometimes things were too perfect, and the compensation for perfection was decay.
If the Soul Maiming Enterprise wanted perfect human beings, they should have started from scratch. No one cares about me indeed, Chanyeol thought. They shouldn’t take beautiful people, inside and out, and make them into animatronic robots.
Sometimes Chanyeol found himself wondering it if was the company that was heartless.
Over the next few months they prepared for the rise of Exoplanet. Photo shoots for the album required Chanyeol to become stiffened with the smells of aerosols from hairspray and the amount of dewy makeup caked onto his face. The clothes were top-end, the expressions had to match.
(Undoubtedly Jongin had the you-me-bed-now photo shoot face downpat, Chanyeol quickly decided. He’d reel in females by the armfuls.)
Bubble Tea Tuesdays went on indefinite hiatus and they decided to swap drinks with dreams in well-earned naps on the practice room floors. Despite the late nights and the negative hours of sleep between destinations in the back of their manager’s van though, it wasn’t all bad.
For the most part, his members were all diligent and considerate people. His new roommate in the dorm was Baekhyun, a loud and husky-voiced chatterbox, an utter idiotic shitbag and possibly his spirit animal sent from an angel in heaven. They made the most noise together and got into the most trouble for it. Kyungsoo cooked kimchi spaghetti for them around noon when they finished practice, and sometimes they didn’t even have to ask for it. Junmyeon tolerated his irritating younger dongsaengs, even spoiled them from time to time with chocolates and street foods that veered away from their calorie controlled diets.
“Fucking spinach salad without salt or seasoning is like eating the garden.” Sehun would always complain sourly. He was skinny enough without eating like a rabbit, all of them were, but funnily enough (or not) the company took little notice.
There were a lot of things they had to deal with themselves, honestly. When they were stressed, when tears were shed, chairs thrown around the room in frustration, SM was there to offer a handkerchief and a shoulder to cry on and nothing more. But if anything, it pushed them closer within their own groups, so maybe that was done on purpose.
EXO-K was called into the main office, and their performance personas were established. Chanyeol, deep-voiced, baby-faced rap monster. Baekhyun, eye-liner king, Kyungsoo, personality of a devil with the voice and face of an angel. Everybody else was pretty standard-Junmyeon was the maternalistic leader, Sehun, the cute maknae, though he hated aegyo. Jongin was given dance and sexiness. Chanyeol found it funny they had to actually assign ‘sexiness’ to someone specifically, but it was fitting.
“You’re in charge of sexy skin tone too.” Baekhyun jokingly dubbed. Jongin punched his arm (because he knew it was true).
When it came down to it, Sehun wasn’t furious when Jongin was assigned the role of main dancer in EXO-K. He remained admirably passive, nodding humbly as he was given the position of lead dancer instead.
“You’re not upset about it at all?” Chanyeol approached Sehun quietly after the meeting. “You seemed pretty good in there.”
“No, I’m not mad.” Sehun’s mouth was a taut line across his narrow face. “But I am disappointed in myself.”
“Lead dancer is just as important as main dancer.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it. Don’t sugar-coat this for me, hyung, I know where I stand in EXO-K.” In a slightly smaller voice, he added. “I’m already his inferior in practice, it won’t make a difference on the main stage.
Chanyeol shook his head, “People will see you for how good you are, no matter what your position is. Plus, people love the good old SM stereotype.”
Sehun smiled a bit, and then scoffed. “What is that supposed to mean, hyung?”
“SM. Satanic Maknaes.”
He made Sehun laugh out loud, at least.
The first teaser was released, and their views would spike at 100,000 and just keep accelerating with every new video. They were already dubbed “promising” and “anticipated” and the video clips were picked to pixelated pieces by eager netizens. Their names were splattered all over search stations, Chanyeol succumbed to curiosity searched up their names. Thousands of results, 0.00593 seconds, fan sites established for non-existent superstars.
He had been sitting with Kyungsoo in the dorm, just endlessly scrolling through picture after picture after picture of themselves. He had no idea where they could’ve gotten half of them.
“We’re famous.” Chanyeol murmured as the idea crashed and crumbled and ingrained itself into him.
Kyungsoo affirmed it. “We’re famous.”
It had been such an extra-terrestrial concept that had crash-landed onto earth. Chanyeol wasn’t ready for the aftermath but it was beginning to dawn on him how much excess baggage came with being an idol, because stardom stripped away a person onstage and put perfection on show. He found it both immensely fulfilling and terrifying.
Chanyeol’s dancing was better. Bubble Tea Tuesdays with Sehun had been traded in for Dance Practice Everydays with Jongin, and often they’d knock out in the corner of the cloud rooms when they got tired.
“You’re getting really good, hyung.” Jongin nodded with approval every now and then. “If you nail the bridge three times in a row we can sleep.”
Jongin knew how to bargain. MAMA was fucking exhausting to practice over and over again but he could somehow nail the moves, the sharp turns, the beat drop, kick drum every time with Herculean energy. For good reason too, because he was pushed to the centre of the limelight and all eyes were on him for most of the time.
Jongi-no, they liked to call him ‘Kai’ now, because it looked prettier in lights-was in no less than eleven of EXO’s twenty three pre-debut teasers. In the dorm room, the members would watch them on a loop to pinpoint the onscreen faults in their dancing or micro-expressions. Mostly Jongin would just watch with his glare unmoving, boring holes into the movements of his televised counterpart. There was never anything wrong with Jongin’s dancing in Chanyeol’s eyes, but whatever in the picture he saw as perfect, Jongin would only see the microcosmic flaw.
“Don’t get so wound up.” Junmyeon would tell Jongin, patting him on the back and bringing him juice boxes in the dorm to replenish his strength. Jongin would always just regain his measured breathing and practice to the point of stiffness. He would practice until his ankles were giving way and his bones were being carved out of lassitude.
They dyed his hair a lighter shade, contoured his face with blunt lines, added growl to his voice and through the lens he was Kai, shrouded in black light, and danced with the grace of an ethereal being and moved his body as if it was made of holy water, wore a smirk on his upper lip where it caught and released hearts by the hundreds.
But when the lights went down and the glitter was swept from the stage, he was Jongin again; naïve and eighteen, pure in essence, adored his dogs like children. His laugh was always low but bright, his smile too but he would often distract from them by clapping and covering his face when he could.
A walking paradox, Chanyeol mused to himself one day, just half of a performer, half a person sewn together with shreds of charisma borrowed from show business veterans, the residue luck of the dream factory. Kai was a construct of bright lights and the blinding Seoulscape, while Jongin was a deconstruct of everything SM plagued him with. He used swirly straws in his drinks and treated his puppies like children of his own lineage and blushed whenever Baekhyun and Jongdae made sex jokes.
Truthfully, he liked Jongin as Jongin much, much more.
►
Title: (Heart)beats
Pairing(s): Chanyeol/Kai (also Chanyeol-centric)
Rating: PG
Warning(s): Language, Kris as a central character, Loosely based on canon, not meant to offend SM as a company in any way.
Length: 10,316w
Summary: SM can stand for Star Makers, Seoul's Magicians or Soul-Maimers, and Chanyeol is stuck in the middle of all that (with Jongin. So maybe it's not so bad.)
Author’s Note: Dear Recipient, I hope you enjoy this since I was really trying to stick to the wonderful prompt you gave me. (Funny thing, I actually started two for you, but since this one turned into a monster, I just went with it, I hope it’s still to your liking-might finish the other one later!) But many thank yous go out to my lovely anonymous beta, who slapped some sense into my convoluted writing, and the YPD mod, who kindly gave me an extension. Again, please enjoy!
Bubble Tea Tuesdays were Sehun’s idea, of course.
“It’s a well-earned break and bonding time between two future band members,” he had willingly pitched. “Plus, they have matcha flavoured tea now too.”
Matcha bubble tea had sold Chanyeol, admittedly. The little tea stall Sehun dragged him to easily earned half its profits from somnolent amateurs up the road trickling out of the anaemic SM building. The white castle where kings and queens of entertainment were sewn together with threads of plastic and gold, humanity undone stich by stitch. That’s what people heard, anyway. SM, the Star Makers, Soul Manufacturers, Seoul’s Magicians, SoMething like that.
Sehun always had an excuse to get out of practice, and the other trainees, Chanyeol included, never really needed a decent one to join him.
“What did you want to talk about, then?”
“Well, there’s this trainee.”
Chanyeol sucked pearls from his matcha milk tea. “There are a lot of trainees. What else is new?”
“This trainee is different, I mean. He’s not like the others.” Sehun mumbled. “You’ve heard of Kim Jongin, right? The dancer.”
The name was familiar. Kim Jongin was that seventeen year old apathetic ballerino, and as far as Chanyeol knew, spoke only when spoken to, danced on air and did revoltades along the clouds splayed across the back wall. His reputation had been constructed with whispers through the curtains pre-production where no show business had begun yet; Jongin was known by everybody before he was somebody, and that was important in the industry.
“Yeah, I’ve heard of him. Why?”
“I went to a showcase he performed at today.” Sehun patted his cheeks in unease. “And he’s just…fucking fantastic. A cross between a hip-hop experimentalist and the Korean Billy Elliot. His routine was insane, and the way he moves his body is like water.”
Chanyeol smirked. “This is a revelation. Flattery of others is pretty rare with you.”
Sehun’s face was straight. “No bullshit. He dances like he’s weightless. He’s a ballerina and you’d think that’d make him delicate, but he’s slick too, strikes every move like an arrow. I’m not kidding, hyung.”
“And why are you so concerned?”
Poor Sehun had looked so troubled, his young brow furrowed with the anxiety lines of someone years his senior. Chanyeol had almost laughed.
“I’m kind of scared he’s going to upstage me, hyung. Everyone knows that Lee Soo Man is preparing the line-up for the new group, and the way things are going, he’s going to be its main dancer instead of me.” Sehun dropped his head onto the table, exhaling loudly. “I really want to debut this year. And as a member people will remember.”
And at that point, Chanyeol, who hadn’t had any knowledge of this Kim Jongin, wasn’t aware that this danseur could throw himself headfirst into the bass line of a dubstep track, rollicking in its sea of synthesized neon beats, was very much the thief of hopes and dreams that Sehun had anticipated he’d be. Not yet, at this point he was just faceless, nameless.
“You’ve trained hard, so don’t underestimate yourself. You’ve got nothing to worry about, Sehun-ah.”
Though after that conversation, Chanyeol made sure to keep his dreams close to his heart. If they were too open he’d be setting them up to be stolen by somebody else.
There were two kinds of dancers floating around the trainee building. The first kind who could actually do pirouettes and arabesques and fancy French shit Chanyeol had a hard time pronouncing. The second could do jazz-hands-and jump around like flashdance on steroids. Chanyeol liked to pretend he was the first kind but he knew otherwise. It was soothing to frequently remind himself that rappers don’t dance.
The first time he saw Kim Jongin dance though, he knew Sehun hadn’t exaggerated. He wasn’t just the first kind of dancer; he was the one person who would come out first among the firsts. About the fluidity of his elastic limbs and the way energy shot through his veins in jolts of clean movements, he hadn’t exaggerated at all.
They were in a group session together, working on a contemporary routine to some mellow remix of a Beenzino song, and from the back of the room Chanyeol only saw Jongin’s reflection in the mirror moving slicker than everyone else, ducking and swooping with every new pulse of the syncopated beat.
Kim Jongin, he had established, was indeed fucking fantastic.
Chanyeol tried not to eyeball but it was very difficult, admittedly. There was something effortless about the way he moved. He absorbed melodies through his movement, washes of sound entered through his ears and exited out of the flourishes of his fingertips, the pointed toes, the flick of wrists and measured gaps between snapping from the first twirl to the second turn to the third breakdown. Chanyeol looked at Jongin like he was made of magic, because that kind of vitality wasn’t taught in any company, anywhere. It stemmed somewhere much deeper, and Jongin was bursting at the seams with it, from inside out.
After practice Chanyeol mostly hung back to talk to Sehun. The kid worked more and played less with the looming project, his energy hit a plateau while Bubble Tea Tuesdays receded in frequency, but they snuck out after curfew every now and again. Sehun ordered taro, Chanyeol stuck to matcha.
“You’ve seen him at practice, right?” Sehun mumbled, rubbing his shiny forehead with the collar of his shirt. “Jongin’s a great, bloody great dancer. But he’s kind of quiet.”
Chanyeol just nodded and had another gulp of tea. “Maybe that’s kind of good for you. Shyness could be his downfall, especially after debut, you never know. Idols have to be good at variety too.”
“He has a lot of friends and everything; he just prefers to be alone. Do you think that gives me a better chance? I’ve been practicing nonstop, between sessions and way into the night time. If Soo Man sees how much I’ve improved…”
Poor foetus-age Sehun looked so weary and lethargic for his seventeen years that the anxiety was crinkled in his brow. Chanyeol almost found it funny. But he restrained himself from spitting his tapioca pearls all over the shop.
He just patted his dongsaeng on the back. “You never know.”
The Beenzino contemporary routine had Chanyeol’s heart beating (at 110bpm) and oscillated in the lifelines, and they were told the steps just get harder from there. For Huckleberry P (at 126bpm), Dok2 (at 138bpm) and Skrillex (at 140bpm), the turns were quick and clean and required military precision to hit effectively, according to the strong-faced instructor. Before they had the urge to collapse, they weren’t working hard enough.
“He’s such a hardhead.” Sehun wheezed to Chanyeol between segments. “If he’d just give us a ten minute break or something-“
The instructors didn’t cut them any slack because in the limelight nobody holds the curtain open for them while they go to the bathroom. The ebbing energy finally fell to the floor when the music cuts. Eventually the trainees all ended up yawning and nestled to the cool comfort of the wooden floorboards.
After practice ended, one by one they started to get up off their backs and the last two left were Chanyeol and a trainee up front. Jongin lay on his back, breathing hard into the timber floor, gazing into the blue backdrop of clouds that taunted them with faraway tranquillity every moment of practice.
“Why are clouds the background for all the practice rooms, do you know?” Jongin murmured, in a voice so muffled that Chanyeol had to ask again.
“I have no idea.” Chanyeol answered, sitting next to them and staring at the cloudscape.
Jongin mused. “I’ve always wanted to know why SM chose that particular wallpaper. Ever since before I came into the company.”
Chanyeol stared back at the clusters of diaphanous white, willowing and blowing in their synthetic foreground. They did make him feel obligated to stay awake, even when it was dark out and it would be nice seeing constellations splattered across the back wall, especially with the real starlight streaming through the glass windows.
Jongin sat up and stretched out his hamstring with a grimace. “Imagine. If they put up a sky full of stars instead of clouds, we would really shine then, you know?”
“Shining stars?”
He chuckled in response. “Yeah. Because that’s what stars do, they shine. And it happens best at night, the time people can see them glowing from the inside out.” Jongin laid his head back on the ground. “I know it sounds kind of stupid, but it makes sense in my head somehow.”
He scratched his head and grinned bashfully, as if to swallow his thoughts, looking at Chanyeol for approval. “Doesn’t it?”
Chanyeol head raised an eyebrow thoughtfully. “You know, we could probably just paint over them.”
“We’d get in so much shit for that.”
They had both laughed about it and imagined how many ways Lee Soo Man would be able to put them in body bags and wheel them into the depths of the oceans if they even touched the famous SM cloud wallpapers.
Jongin was probably right, but that didn’t stop Chanyeol from digging some plastic glow-in-the-dark stars out of the back of a minimart shelf and plastering his bedroom ceiling with them, just because. Then he turned the lights off and gazed up at his synthetic galaxy. Of course they shone brighter in the darkness. He shouldn’t have expected anything else, and it made him wonder why he’d tried in the first place.
Twelve trainees were gathered in the business office that following Tuesday and from then on, those starry-eyed hopefuls became the prototypes for a new project. It was a blueprint that mapped a masterwork of musicality to convert dreams into reality, not to mention being expected to pay them in millions.
Chanyeol hadn’t been familiar with his future bandmates, less Sehun, who was adamant about celebrating with an XL size milk tea afterwards, and wide-eyed, golden throat Do Kyungsoo, his fellow ’92 liner who sometimes caught the bus home with him. Serious-faced and diligent, Kyungsoo would have made it far with or without riding on the coattails of a company.
The rest of the trainees, he wasn’t sure what to think about them. Byun Baekhyun and Kim Jong-something were both freshly recruited and friendly, but Chanyeol wasn’t sure if the rigid work ethic the industry demanded could develop with such a short amount of training. He had only ever seen the Chinese native trainees wandering the halls, floating within their own little group, though individually Yixing, Luhan and Yifan were all quite congenial and competent in conversational Korean. Junmyeon was a veteran of labour, Minseok was too quiet. The wushu boy, Tao, intimidated Chanyeol on sight, only because he could probably beat the shit out of somebody with any given household object lying around, though he never voiced this thought out loud.
Then there was Jongin, and that was expected by almost everybody, that the dancer would dance his dance on a big dancing stage someday, somewhere. But he didn’t relish in the news of debut like some of the others, didn’t holler out loud like Baekhyun or reel from disbelief, speechless like Minseok. He just smiled to himself, and so genuinely that his smile might’ve broken his face in two if it could be any wider.
Chanyeol had glanced over at Sehun. He looked pleased with himself, hiding a brighter smile beneath a satisfied smirk. He’d probably forget about Jongin for a while.
They did go out for Bubble Tea Tuesday right after the meeting. They were expected to move into a dorm together in a few months to get more comfortable with each other. Half would be growing into prodigies of the Shinwha-persona riding the Korean hallyu wave while the other half would be shipped off to China to make magic in mandarin. Chanyeol was hesitant but determined to do his best, if they had to call on him.
Sehun was less open to the idea.
“If we’re training in Korea, shouldn’t we debut in Korea too? I mean, that’s what we signed up for.” He waves his straw irritably in the air before stabbing it into the top of his choco bubble tea.
Chanyeol justified. “They probably want us to have international exposure too, I reckon that wouldn’t be so bad.”
Sehun shook his head. “We’d be half a group though, like, split down the middle.”
“Twelve is already a lot of members, Sehun-ah.”
“I know.” Sehun twirled the plastic straw around in the cup. After a pause, he adds, “I hope they put me with you, hyung.”
He was wearing that embarrassed grin which made his eyes crinkle and cave like little crescent moons glowing on his face. Chanyeol knew he wasn’t just fucking around because that smile was becoming rarer and when it appeared he knew it was real.
“If it means anything to you, I hope we’re together too, forever.”
“You’re friends with Kim Jongin, the dancer, right?”
It was a starless evening, and Chanyeol and Kyungsoo were the only two people left on the 11:05pm bus. Kyungsoo lifted an eyebrow in response. “Sure. I mean, we got off on the wrong foot, but now, I guess we are. Why so curious?”
“What makes you think I’m curious? I could just be asking out of…general interest.”
(He really did try but Kyungsoo was boring holes into his face.)
“You’re a shitty liar. It’s practically inked on your forehead.”
Chanyeol scoffed. “I’m not a-forget it. Anyway, this Jongin; he’s pretty shy, right? I mean, that’s not the best thing to be as an idol. He doesn’t open up very much, you know. I don’t know what to think about him.”
Kyungsoo glanced out the window before answering. “Jongin’s not shy. He’s just quiet, and that’s not the same thing. If he seems closed up, it means there’s a time and place when he’ll open up too. You probably just haven’t found it yet.”
“Have you?”
Kyungsoo didn’t say anything else.
Their group name was announced a few weeks later.
“EXO. What does that name even mean?” Baekhyun had mused.
Sehun shrugged in response. “Maybe it’s like kisses and hugs, like literally spelling out our love and or some shit like that. XOXO, E-XO, E-XO. L-O-V-E. D-R-U-G-S. S-E-X.”
“You’re such a hormonal fuck, Sehun.”
Jongdae grinned. “It could just be cryptic and the board just wants us to self-interpret our own meaning of being EXO.”
Chanyeol had pondered over that notion until he was sleepless in his bed. EXO could mean a whole world of rock and roll, sex and stars, a legion of fans and a long-awaited dream coming true. Though it could also be a daydream turned nightmare, he had considered that possibility too.
It could also just mean nothing at all, and he kind of liked how the meaning was meaningless. It was a nice paradox.
They would be EXO-K and EXO-M, which sounded way more official than their prototype names of M1 and M2. Now they had been established as real somebodies, the dream was descending from the clouds and into the chasms of reality, and it was very scary.
The groups were divided. Chanyeol was put into the K group, as were Sehun and Kyungsoo, he was particularly glad to hear. Junmyeon would be a good leader, he could already tell, and even if Baekhyun sang the telephone book Chanyeol would think it sounded beautiful.
Jongin was put in K too. As he noticed Sehun’s eyes flittering towards him every now and then, Chanyeol was forced to wonder about how the dynamic of this group would be.
Chanyeol quickly ascertained that dance practice was the black hole which ate idols with two left feet and no sense of balance; people like him who teetered on the rim of an abyss and only needed one ankle to snap and send them spinning into dark matter.
It didn’t help that EXO’s debut track was MAMA. After brainstorming the message behind the title (and failing), the twelve battered trainees became subject to a majestic orchestral fusion of dubstep and metal and the bizarre opening mantra of a pseudo-English cult. Along with the shitload of rapping parts Chanyeol was assigned for the song, the dance was physically demanding, fast-paced insanity. He would collapse on the floor after rehearsal and drag out the ten minute break intervals they were rarely granted for as long as possible.
At least he wasn’t the only one struggling. The other rapper and leader of M was Yifan, and Chanyeol felt comforted by the fact they could both be slow, imbalanced giants together.
“Dancing is a burden we will have to bear for as long as we’re a part of EXO.” Yifan had once joked. “Rapping is more our style, see. Once we become idol veterans, we can forget all this dancing stuff. Take the hip-hop underground by storm instead. You and me, Yeol.”
Chanyeol had slung his arm over Yifan’s shoulder and chuckled. “Let’s try and drag Sehun and Zitao into it too. They’d probably appreciate the thought.”
It was a done deal. Dancing just took its toll on Chanyeol’s energy levels. He was starting the day with triple shot Americanos and ending it with sleeping pills because all hours were day hours at SM, the Star Manufacturing Establishment.
Bedtime was never fixed. They would be too busy revising the dances over and over and over again in the cloud-spangled practice rooms, reverberating squeaks of sneakers bouncing off the mirrors into the hollow hallways. Late into the night until the stars fell from grace and turned to drops of morning dew, Chanyeol caught his fair share of sunrises, an iridescent glow streaming into the studio somehow made him sleepier than the dark did.
But twenty-four hour days weren’t just expectation, they were obligation. Time felt as if the clock had been stuck in one second for hours. Chanyeol woke up in the morning looking forward to sleeping again that night.
Rappers don’t dance, he told himself. They should stand and look cool and talk fast.
But Jongin was a rapper too. He stood tall, at nearly 6 feet; he was exceedingly handsome, with sculpted features that were strong but still soft. And he could really fucking dance. He might’ve been the glowing exception to the rapper stereotype but that didn’t cease Chanyeol’s admiration for him.
Chanyeol practiced his dance steps way past midnight, usually half-awake and always alone so nobody would see if he flopped.
“Aren’t you tired?”
Jongin interrupted quietly, leaning against the doorframe of the practice room. It was 2:19AM. Chanyeol looked up and saw his reflection walking towards him. “Exhausted.”
“Then sleep.”
Chanyeol grunted in frustration. “Haven’t gotten the second verse right yet. If I can’t nail them by tomorrow, the instructor will tear me to pieces.”
Jongin walked towards him. “You nearly had it. If you just move your foot inwards with the half-turn, then you can pivot quicker into the next slide.”
Chanyeol paused. “Show me.”
Jongin was hesitant to oblige but when he did, Chanyeol understood. He laid it out slow and smooth for him, pivoted, darted between moves cleanly and coherently. His low voice echoed bass in the practice room, and they both retraced their steps thousands of times, over and over again until sunlight began streaming in through the window.
“Weren’t you going home?” Chanyeol asked.
Jongin just shrugged and said, “I don’t deserve to be asleep when you’re still awake and practicing so diligently, hyung.”
They both slept on the floor that night, curled up in the corner of the practice room and it was the best night of sleep Chanyeol had experienced in a long time.
It wasn’t fair that idols had to be good at everything, not just singing and dancing and rapping. Chanyeol learned this when he was put into lessons for guitar, drums and piano, all of which he was already quite good at, but SM wanted to hone his skills and make him a one-man band, apparently. He learned very quickly that Soo Man expected them to practice for their impending variety shows, so they had to be funny and charismatic and well-mannered at the same time. Then he overheard from Minseok that one of the boys from M had been offered an unspecified procedure on their face, so they had to be physically, impeccably beautiful.
Wherever there were holes in their abilities or personalities, the industry pillowed and overfilled them with sweet, cloying paragons. They were moulded in flawless silhouettes and their blemishes were drowned in the foundations of Midas, gold to the touch. But all that glittered at SM had become so decadent to the point that they dulled, as far as Chanyeol knew. Sometimes things were too perfect, and the compensation for perfection was decay.
If the Soul Maiming Enterprise wanted perfect human beings, they should have started from scratch. No one cares about me indeed, Chanyeol thought. They shouldn’t take beautiful people, inside and out, and make them into animatronic robots.
Sometimes Chanyeol found himself wondering it if was the company that was heartless.
Over the next few months they prepared for the rise of Exoplanet. Photo shoots for the album required Chanyeol to become stiffened with the smells of aerosols from hairspray and the amount of dewy makeup caked onto his face. The clothes were top-end, the expressions had to match.
(Undoubtedly Jongin had the you-me-bed-now photo shoot face downpat, Chanyeol quickly decided. He’d reel in females by the armfuls.)
Bubble Tea Tuesdays went on indefinite hiatus and they decided to swap drinks with dreams in well-earned naps on the practice room floors. Despite the late nights and the negative hours of sleep between destinations in the back of their manager’s van though, it wasn’t all bad.
For the most part, his members were all diligent and considerate people. His new roommate in the dorm was Baekhyun, a loud and husky-voiced chatterbox, an utter idiotic shitbag and possibly his spirit animal sent from an angel in heaven. They made the most noise together and got into the most trouble for it. Kyungsoo cooked kimchi spaghetti for them around noon when they finished practice, and sometimes they didn’t even have to ask for it. Junmyeon tolerated his irritating younger dongsaengs, even spoiled them from time to time with chocolates and street foods that veered away from their calorie controlled diets.
“Fucking spinach salad without salt or seasoning is like eating the garden.” Sehun would always complain sourly. He was skinny enough without eating like a rabbit, all of them were, but funnily enough (or not) the company took little notice.
There were a lot of things they had to deal with themselves, honestly. When they were stressed, when tears were shed, chairs thrown around the room in frustration, SM was there to offer a handkerchief and a shoulder to cry on and nothing more. But if anything, it pushed them closer within their own groups, so maybe that was done on purpose.
EXO-K was called into the main office, and their performance personas were established. Chanyeol, deep-voiced, baby-faced rap monster. Baekhyun, eye-liner king, Kyungsoo, personality of a devil with the voice and face of an angel. Everybody else was pretty standard-Junmyeon was the maternalistic leader, Sehun, the cute maknae, though he hated aegyo. Jongin was given dance and sexiness. Chanyeol found it funny they had to actually assign ‘sexiness’ to someone specifically, but it was fitting.
“You’re in charge of sexy skin tone too.” Baekhyun jokingly dubbed. Jongin punched his arm (because he knew it was true).
When it came down to it, Sehun wasn’t furious when Jongin was assigned the role of main dancer in EXO-K. He remained admirably passive, nodding humbly as he was given the position of lead dancer instead.
“You’re not upset about it at all?” Chanyeol approached Sehun quietly after the meeting. “You seemed pretty good in there.”
“No, I’m not mad.” Sehun’s mouth was a taut line across his narrow face. “But I am disappointed in myself.”
“Lead dancer is just as important as main dancer.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it. Don’t sugar-coat this for me, hyung, I know where I stand in EXO-K.” In a slightly smaller voice, he added. “I’m already his inferior in practice, it won’t make a difference on the main stage.
Chanyeol shook his head, “People will see you for how good you are, no matter what your position is. Plus, people love the good old SM stereotype.”
Sehun smiled a bit, and then scoffed. “What is that supposed to mean, hyung?”
“SM. Satanic Maknaes.”
He made Sehun laugh out loud, at least.
The first teaser was released, and their views would spike at 100,000 and just keep accelerating with every new video. They were already dubbed “promising” and “anticipated” and the video clips were picked to pixelated pieces by eager netizens. Their names were splattered all over search stations, Chanyeol succumbed to curiosity searched up their names. Thousands of results, 0.00593 seconds, fan sites established for non-existent superstars.
He had been sitting with Kyungsoo in the dorm, just endlessly scrolling through picture after picture after picture of themselves. He had no idea where they could’ve gotten half of them.
“We’re famous.” Chanyeol murmured as the idea crashed and crumbled and ingrained itself into him.
Kyungsoo affirmed it. “We’re famous.”
It had been such an extra-terrestrial concept that had crash-landed onto earth. Chanyeol wasn’t ready for the aftermath but it was beginning to dawn on him how much excess baggage came with being an idol, because stardom stripped away a person onstage and put perfection on show. He found it both immensely fulfilling and terrifying.
Chanyeol’s dancing was better. Bubble Tea Tuesdays with Sehun had been traded in for Dance Practice Everydays with Jongin, and often they’d knock out in the corner of the cloud rooms when they got tired.
“You’re getting really good, hyung.” Jongin nodded with approval every now and then. “If you nail the bridge three times in a row we can sleep.”
Jongin knew how to bargain. MAMA was fucking exhausting to practice over and over again but he could somehow nail the moves, the sharp turns, the beat drop, kick drum every time with Herculean energy. For good reason too, because he was pushed to the centre of the limelight and all eyes were on him for most of the time.
Jongi-no, they liked to call him ‘Kai’ now, because it looked prettier in lights-was in no less than eleven of EXO’s twenty three pre-debut teasers. In the dorm room, the members would watch them on a loop to pinpoint the onscreen faults in their dancing or micro-expressions. Mostly Jongin would just watch with his glare unmoving, boring holes into the movements of his televised counterpart. There was never anything wrong with Jongin’s dancing in Chanyeol’s eyes, but whatever in the picture he saw as perfect, Jongin would only see the microcosmic flaw.
“Don’t get so wound up.” Junmyeon would tell Jongin, patting him on the back and bringing him juice boxes in the dorm to replenish his strength. Jongin would always just regain his measured breathing and practice to the point of stiffness. He would practice until his ankles were giving way and his bones were being carved out of lassitude.
They dyed his hair a lighter shade, contoured his face with blunt lines, added growl to his voice and through the lens he was Kai, shrouded in black light, and danced with the grace of an ethereal being and moved his body as if it was made of holy water, wore a smirk on his upper lip where it caught and released hearts by the hundreds.
But when the lights went down and the glitter was swept from the stage, he was Jongin again; naïve and eighteen, pure in essence, adored his dogs like children. His laugh was always low but bright, his smile too but he would often distract from them by clapping and covering his face when he could.
A walking paradox, Chanyeol mused to himself one day, just half of a performer, half a person sewn together with shreds of charisma borrowed from show business veterans, the residue luck of the dream factory. Kai was a construct of bright lights and the blinding Seoulscape, while Jongin was a deconstruct of everything SM plagued him with. He used swirly straws in his drinks and treated his puppies like children of his own lineage and blushed whenever Baekhyun and Jongdae made sex jokes.
Truthfully, he liked Jongin as Jongin much, much more.
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