CHINGUX 2014: attachment theory (1/3) for mouthwash
Title: Attachment Theory
Author: markerlimes
Recipient: mouthwash
Pairing/Focus: Chanyeol/Kyungsoo
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: minor mentions of underage alcohol consumption, minor mentions of the lawsuit and the events leading up to it
Length: 23000
Summary: Even before the matching bruises and the couple rings, Chanyeol thinks he might have been Kyungsoo’s soulmate all along. A remix of EXO’s history from debut to now with a dash of magical realism. Canon fic.
The new vocal trainee isn’t much to fawn over. Then and again, they rarely ever are.
First off he’s pretty short, maybe even shorter than Jinho. The way he walks is a little reserved, but that’s nothing new either. All the new trainees either come in on their first day bursting with energy and ambition, or meandering around hopelessly lost. The new kid looks like he’ll be the latter. He comes in on his first day dressed in black from head to toe like a ninja trainee instead of a future idol. If Chanyeol were a bit more mean spirited, he wouldn’t have hesitated to make Naruto jokes to his face.
“Give him a chance,” Jinho says, idly picking at his rice. There isn’t much in the bowl to begin with and Chanyeol watches him pathetically try to make the few remaining grains last as long as possible.
“Why though? Shouldn’t you be trying to get rid of him?” Chanyeol teases. There’s no heat behind his words though. The news has barely been out for a day and yet all of SM from the managers to the newest trainees know that Cho Jinho is set to debut with a new group.
“It’s just a project group ,” Jinho corrects with an embarrassed smile. Chanyeol knows deep down that Jinho is over the moon with this news though. He just tries to hide it. “Who knows if it’ll even last?”
“Now you’re just being pessimistic,” Chanyeol shoots back, taking a bite of his own meal. Jinho watches him swallow an actual mouthful a little enviously.
“Maybe, but I’m not worried about him,” Jinho contemplates. His chopsticks settle on the edge of his plate with a light cling. “Besides he’s a good kid. I wouldn’t mind debuting with him you know, as opposed to some of the others.”
“Some of the others being?” Chanyeol poses seriously. Jinho laughs.
“You know who I’m talking about,” he shrugs. The inner politics of traineehood go on and on. Another vocal trainee accepted into SM presents another threat regardless of how green they are. Chanyeol is lucky that good rappers in SM in comparison are few and far between. He doesn’t want to get ahead of himself and say he’s already a shoe-in for debut, but a highlight in an SNSD MV carries its own weight.
“So what makes this kid different?” Chanyeol prods. He’s just trying to make small talk at this point to ignore the burning of sore muscles in his thighs for as long as he can. Lunch hours and their measly breaks are barely enough to give their muscles and battered bodies the recuperation time they need.
“He’s nice,” Jinho comments after a slight pause. “A little weird, but in a good way.”
“I’m weird in a really good way,” Chanyeol says in the face of Jinho’s skepticism. “Also really nice and handsome and tall.”
The last bit manages to wring a chuckle out of Jinho.
“How do you always manage to make everything about yourself?” Jinho sighs and Chanyeol shoots him a cheeky grin.
“It’s a talent,” he replies, shoveling down the last bit of his food. Jinho watches him with a pained expression.
“Sure whatever,” he sighs. “But you should give the new kid a chance though. He’s very-”
Chanyeol doesn’t hear the end of Jinho’s sentence. It’s not like he does normally with Jinho’s strange habit of half-mumbling and then trailing off before he completes his thought, but this time there’s something different. There’s a strange tugging in his chest, a fine fiber of attention that’s been snagged out of his hands and hooked taut like a fishing line. It pulls the breath out of his chest inexplicably, and Chanyeol turns his head in confusion, trying to sense out the direction of the pull.
The feeling is strong, undeniable as it clings onto Chanyeol’s senses, but finding it is as fruitless as peering into the ocean where a fishing line disappears and expecting to find the lure. The movement of SM trainees flows in and out of the cafeteria like waves. The world rocks back and forth like Chanyeol is on a boat and the only thing holding him on board is that lifeline tugging for him to follow.
“Chanyeol?” Jinho’s voice cuts in. He sounds far away, almost like an echo and Chanyeol vaguely registers that he’s somehow standing up now. He trips over something, someone, he’s not sure anymore and keeps wading his way forward until just as abruptly as the tugging began, it’s over.
“Chanyeol?!” Jinho yells again over the din of the cafeteria noise and Chanyeol blinks, coming out of his strange trance. He’s maybe made like four steps out of his chair and when he comes to, he realizes that he’s standing on top of the cafeteria bench in front of another set of trainees. A quick look behind him reveals another flustered trainee that Chanyeol may or may not have just stepped on.
“Umm,” he mumbles intelligently in the face of indignation when Jinho pulls him down with a well-timed yank.
“Sorry about that,” Jinho mumbles, bowing to the other trainee who instantly narrows his eyes in recognition. Chanyeol opens his mouth to apologize too when Jinho shoves him in the opposite direction with a surprising amount of force for someone so proportionally tiny.
“You win, okay?” Jinho says hurriedly, pushing Chanyeol away from the amused chuckles around them. “You’re really fucking weird.”
The sensation keeps Chanyeol up at night. By then, it’s no longer a boat rocking lurch but more of a subtle thrum. It doesn’t drag Chanyeol along with its movement this time. It’s just simply there, humming along with the ticks of the alarm clock beside his bed.
He tosses in bed the entire night and the one time he’s yanked awake is by the unmistakable urge to pee. It’s not uncommon to be sleep deprived as a trainee, but by the time the sun rises Chanyeol stumbles out of bed feeling shittier than regular levels of sleep deprived shit.
“Do you think you might be sick?” Joonmyun asks, peering into Chanyeol’s eyes seriously as he stumbles into the SM building late. Chanyeol shrugs but before he knows it, Joonmyun pulls out a thermometer.
Several beeps later, a reading of 37 degrees ruled out sickness and Chanyeol glares at the thermometer like it’s betrayed him. He doesn’t get the day off and the most he gets as consolation is Joonmyun doting around him with these soft concerned sighs.
“Maybe it’s homesickness,” Joonmyun concludes after lunch when Chanyeol eats no more than two bites of his food, too distracted by the possibility of the invisible tug again. It makes no sense seeing as Chanyeol still lives at home, but he just shrugs. It’s easier to let Joonmyun believe what he wants rather than nitpick with him over something that can’t be explained in the first place.
The supernatural pull dies down to a simmer for the next few days, but when it surges up again it spares Chanyeol no mercy. It hits Chanyeol just as he stumbles out of dance practice, feeling properly destroyed both mentally and physically. His feet ache, his thighs ache, everything aches.
But the invisible line goes taut again, drawing the already short breaths out of his body in one swift yank. Suddenly the fatigue plaguing his entire body vanishes leaving Chanyeol with nothing but a sheer single-mindedness to find what’s at the end of the string.
It’s late and luckily the perpetually crowded hallways of SM are beginning to thin out. It makes the rocking sensation much lighter, dampening down to a gentle back and forth sway. Luckily for Chanyeol, it doesn’t give him tunnel vision either making it much easier to weave through the hallways.
The sensation gets tighter and tighter, clenching down on Chanyeol’s lungs when he finally finds himself in front of a door. His mind barely registers the cold metal of the knob in his hand before he pushes in. The sensation lifts like it never existed, leaving Chanyeol stranded in the room. He stands around aimlessly as his lungs fill back up with disappointment. The room is empty upon first glance when a dry cough from the corner catches his attention.
“Can I...help you?” the voice asks and Chanyeol whirls around to see the tiny ninja kid, looking at Chanyeol like a foreign entity. To be fair, Chanyeol must look like a mess, sweaty and sticky, fresh from dance torture.
“I’m good,” Chanyeol croaks out, throat suddenly dry. He coughs a little, trying to clear it and the kid dressed in black resumes packing, seemingly intent on ignoring Chanyeol’s existence.
“Wait,” Chanyeol calls out for some reason and ninja kid perks up again, looking ruffled. It’s a refreshing turn of events for sure.
“You know Jinho right?” Chanyeol asks slowly, not entirely sure where he’s going with his train of thought. “What’s your name?”
“Do, Do Kyungsoo,” the guy replies, his eyes wide. Even from across the room, Chanyeol can see the whites of his eyes expanding until Chanyeol isn’t sure if he’s just been greeted or challenged to a staring contest.
It’s creepy.
“Park Chanyeol,” he offers, widening his own eyes to their limits. The effect is probably a little comical and Do Kyungsoo laughs in response. The corner of his lips quirk up for the slightest moment and Chanyeol’s breath hitches, yanked forward by the same strange sensation..
“It’s nice to meet you,” Kyungsoo says. His next words seem hesitant almost. “I take it you’re a trainee. What do you do?”
“I’m a main vocal,” Chanyeol lies through his teeth and Kyungsoo instantly pulls back a little.
“With a voice like that?” Kyungsoo murmurs a little skeptical. He probably didn’t mean to say it out loud with the way he immediately looks regretful. Chanyeol just keeps staring at him.
“What’s wrong with my voice?” Chanyeol teases. “Are you gonna tell me to go be a rapper?”
“No. No, not at all,” Kyungsoo apologizes quickly, bowing his head low. Too low for Chanyeol’s tastes. It’s never fun when people take him too seriously, but he’s willing to cut the new guy some slack.
“That’s a pity,” Chanyeol shrugs. Kyungsoo’s eyes go even wider as he looks up at Chanyeol in confusion. At this point Chanyeol can't tell if he's acting weird or just plain slow.
“The funny thing is, I am a rapper,” Chanyeol admits with a chuckle. The look on Kyungsoo’s face is wary, like he’s unsure if Chanyeol is playing him for another round. “You should always go with your gut instinct.”
“Gut instinct huh,” Kyungsoo muses. He’s not smiling like Chanyeol hoped he would.
“Yeah,” Chanyeol drawls out, feeling the awkwardness settle around them. “It was a joke,” he tacks on for emphasis.
“I got that,” Kyungsoo says and Chanyeol watches him cram a few more music sheets into his bag. He shoots Chanyeol a strange look before continuing to pack.
“Are you heading home?” Chanyeol asks, trying not to sound too desperate or stalkerish. By the look on Kyungsoo’s face it probably came off as a little bit of both.
“Yeah,” Kyungsoo replies evenly. “Sorry to be like this, but I have to catch the train back home and I don’t want to be too late.”
He shuffles, side stepping Chanyeol to leave when Chanyeol catches his arm. The sensation tugs again, licking at his chest like a small flame sparked to life with the initial contact. Chanyeol closes his fingers around Kyungsoo’s arm and for a second he’s sure Kyungsoo is going to throw him off. But instead he leans into Chanyeol’s touch. The movement is so subtle, so slight that Chanyeol wonders if he’d imagined it, but the shock in Kyungsoo’s already wide eyes betrays the motion itself.
“Sorry about that,” Kyungsoo says sheepishly, detaching Chanyeol’s arm from his own after a beat. Yet even after that he doesn’t move on immediately, instead choosing to linger by the doorway.
“Yeah,” Chanyeol replies, running a hand through his still sweaty hair. There’s madness, a brief second of irrationality running through his veins that he chalks up as a byproduct of lack of sleep. “I actually have to head back too.”
The look Kyungsoo gives him is incredulous but it’s also a little hopeful, and it gives Chanyeol the confidence he needs to keep going.
“Do you mind if we ride together?”
Kyungsoo, as it turns out, lives a mere two stations away from Chanyeol. Their fingers trace the metro map together, sliding down the same red trail from Apgujeong station back home. Kyungsoo shoots him a funny look when Chanyeol’s finger passes his, but he stays silent.
They shuffle on, catching the subway right after the bulk of traffic hour is over. It’s empty enough for them to get their own compartment. Chanyeol takes it as a blessing given how sweaty he still is.The cool steel of the railing against his back is a relief against the humid Seoul afternoon. If there were more people around, he’d feel a lot more self-conscious about how he smells.
Kyungsoo doesn’t seem to mind though. He takes a seat next to Chanyeol, leaning into his arm again as Chanyeol pulls out his iPod.
“Got anything good?” Kyungsoo wonders aloud, gesturing towards Chanyeol’s music player. It’s an old relic by the standards of mp3 players, but it’s Chanyeol’s most dependable friend when he needs it.
He flicks it on, passing an earbud over to Kyungsoo. “I hope you like Outsider.”
Kyungsoo beams. His smile is oddly ugly for someone so cute and it gives Chanyeol the answer he needs as he presses play and lets the music wash over them both.
The next few weeks go by strangely peaceful. Jinho begins disappearing off to prepare for his impending debut and in his place, Kyungsoo begins to show up with a bright smile and ruffled hair each morning.
“Morning,” Chanyeol waves as Kyungsoo shuffles onto the train with his bags. He hands Chanyeol a pack of Lotte snacks before plopping down on the seat beside him. Their hands brush together briefly and even while he’s half asleep Chanyeol registers the spark between them. The sensation in him has died down to a mere tickle ever since he and Kyungsoo rode home together that first day, but every now and then he’ll get sparks like this, fizzling between them with the near promise of fire.
“Man, you are new,” Chanyeol laughs, accepting the treat anyways. “Don’t you know we’re supposed to be watching our diets already?”
“I’m thinking ahead,” Kyungsoo replies simply, “Let me enjoy what I can when I can.”
“That’s if we debut though,” Chanyeol reminds him and Kyungsoo smirks back to him. He’s full of surprises when Chanyeol is least expecting them.
“True. I guess that’s if we debut at all,” Kyungsoo says and Chanyeol isn’t sure if he misheard the emphasis in Kyungsoo’s sentence.
They part ways once they reach the building. Chanyeol has a separate schedule for rapping practice and from the looks of Kyungsoo’s schedule and Jinho’s disappearances, it’s not nearly as rigorous as what the vocal trainees go through.
Regardless it’s still a pain in the ass on top of their school work. Some trainees drop out of school to concentrate on their talents, but Chanyeol can’t imagine ever doing the same. It’s too risky to put all his eggs in one basket on the off chance that he never debuts. It’s enough that Yura is already doing well for the whole family, but Chanyeol doesn’t want to be the disappointment child on top of everything he already is.
It’s nice to learn that Kyungsoo shares his thoughts. He’s got an older sibling too and like Chanyeol, he’s not ready to let idol life be the only one he knows. Music is the shared string between them and with each train ride home Chanyeol learns more and more of how similar their tastes align.
“I feel replaced,” Jinho comments offhandedly one rare day when he has enough time to grab lunch with all of them again. Chanyeol answers him with a teasing poke.
“It’s not a replacement if you got promoted and left me in the first place,” Chanyeol laughs and Jinho offers him a wry smile back. Joonmyun sits across from them today, poking at his food and offering Kyungsoo advice. To their left, Sehun and Jongin are giggling about something they found on Naver. Chanyeol takes a second to appreciate his surroundings and thinks he wouldn’t mind debuting like this.
A year passes in and out of their busy schedules. Sehun grows at least another 5 cms and Joonmyun gains nothing but a stubborn wrinkle etched in his forehead which causes him another wave of stress within itself.
Jinho returns from SM the ballad a little wiser, but still short as ever. Both he and Kyungsoo haven’t grown at all. It works out perfectly for Chanyeol who can sling one tiny vocalist in each arm and walk down the street leaning on them like a pair of tiny crutches.
“I’m gonna kill you some day,” Kyungsoo tells him when he leans all of his weight on the two of them and kicks his feet up into the air. Jinho gives him a pained smile which turns into an encouraging one at Kyungsoo’s suggestion.
“I like this idea,” Jinho says as Kyungsoo turns around to face Chanyeol head on. “Do it for me Kyungsoo-yah. Think of all of our short pain together.”
Kyungsoo looks contemplative and a little too murderous for Chanyeol’s tastes.
“He called you the maknae the other day,” Jinho adds, fueling Kyungsoo’s rage. “He said even if Sehun and Jongin debut with us, you’d be so short that you would be the maknae anyways.”
Kyungsoo’s eyes snap up in outrage before narrowing down to dangerous slits.
“It was a joke. No one will mistake you as the maknae,” Chanyeol reassures him, but the grin on Jinho’s face is enough for Kyungsoo to shove them both away.
“Kyungsoo-yah,” Chanyeol calls sprinting out of Kyungsoo’s rampaging path. Kyungsoo chases him down the street with outstretched arms as Chanyeol keeps turning back to laugh. “I’m sorry!”
He ducks behind Jinho who gets the full brunt of Kyungsoo’s tackle as it brings them all to the floor laughing and wheezing. Chanyeol’s back hits the cement with a crack and it hurts so badly for a second that all he can do is lie there on the pavement, winded. It hurts, but Chanyeol thinks that it’s a good thing he ended up on the bottom of their giant pile. Chanyeol’s weight would have surely broken at least one of Jinho and Kyungsoo’s precious vocalist ribs.
He rolls his head back in pain, feeling the bones grate in his neck. The sky above them is gold, casted in lovely rays that stretch the horizon a pale pink. It’s mesmerizing and for a second all Chanyeol can do is laugh in wonder with how careless and light he feels. He’s still laughing through the pain when Kyungsoo’s owly grin enters his vision from above, offering a hand to Chanyeol. He pulls him up with surprising strength and Chanyeol gives his back a sore rub. It takes him a second to notice that Kyungsoo is doing the same.
“This is what you get,” Chanyeol laughs despite Kyungsoo’s threatening pose and Jinho’s squably pleas for mercy between them. His fingers rub into his battered back and Kyungsoo inexplicably winces too.
“Are you two hurt?” Jinho asks, immediately looking concerned.
“Nah I’m good,” Chanyeol answers, snickering as Kyungsoo still looks confused. “You might wanna check up on grandpa over there though.”
“Okay wisecrack,” Jinho shrugs, rolling his own shoulder with a slight wince. “Let’s go home.”
“We might need to get grandpa Kyungsoo a wheelchair first,” Chanyeol grins as Kyungsoo continues to run a hand down his own back in confusion. Kyungsoo raises his other fist threateningly as if challenging Chanyeol to repeat himself.
“A what?” Kyungsoo asks quietly. Jinho shakes his head even though he knows its useless.
Chanyeol opens his mouth to answer when Kyungsoo beats him to the punch by tackling him into the ground again.
It’s dark by the time Jinho leaves them and the two of them shuffle back to Apgujeong station with a few bruises and scrapes. Chanyeol pulls out his wallet when Kyungsoo gives him an expectant look and orders takoyaki for two.
In September another crop of trainees drop out, citing mental fatigue and pressure from parents. All the usual.
Chanyeol isn’t perturbed though. As strange as it sounds, it’s energizing to be around Kyungsoo who is as pragmatic about trainee life as they come. Every train ride home becomes less about sharing music in near silence between the two of them and more about uncovering each other’s pasts instead.
In time Chanyeol learns that Kyungsoo has a best friend by the name of Lim Hyunsik, has loved music since grade school and thinks if he doesn’t debut by the time he’s 24, his parents will pull him out of this rat race of an industry. Chanyeol in comparison has to address his history with ferrets, courtesy of old CyWorld posts that should have never seen the light of day, and hasn’t thought long enough about the possibility of not debuting to know what his parents will do. Kyungsoo scoffs at that, already filling in for Jinho’s anti-Chanyeol’s ego role, and tells him not to worry his pretty head about it too much.
As if in reaction to the drop in trainees, SM staff start making vague announcements about a series of tests and screening trials for the remaining trainees. It doesn’t really bother Chanyeol until the rumors of a new group debuting start to kick up. It’s been 3 years since SM’s last boygroup and following F(x)’s debut, it’s only natural that the next group to debut will also be a boygroup.
By midday the air is buzzing with anticipation. They’re all smiles on the surface, gleaming teeth and bowed backs presented to each other to hide the ambition in their eyes. No one is fooled though and Chanyeol thinks vaguely that it’s not a bad precursor to have.
He texts Kyungsoo that night, wondering if the news made him just as restless. Kyungsoo texts back almost immediately and even though his texts are short, almost telegraphic in their length, Chanyeol can still read the worry between the characters. There’s excitement too, charged between each one of their exchanges. Chanyeol spends the night, thumbing his phone wondering if he should just call.
Yura peeks in, a worried crease on her forehead when the lights in Chanyeol’s room are still on when she gets up for her early shift.
“You’re up early,” she comments dryly as Chanyeol scrambles off the bed to pick his blankets off the floor.
“I am,” Chanyeol laughs, rubbing his eyes. The clock beside his bed reads 4:48AM and it dawns on him that Kyungsoo is still up at this hour too. Yura looks decidedly unimpressed.
“Don’t be late for-” she starts and Chanyeol beams. It’s supposed to be disarming, but Yura is his sister and she uses the exact same tactic to avoid curfew punishments from their parents. She frowns, plopping down on the mattress beside him, and smooths down the bedsheet.
“Well,” she prompts when Chanyeol turns his back to her childishly. She runs a hand, fond and comforting, down his shoulder like they’re children again. Chanyeol milks the sympathy for as long as he can until she spot his phone clutched between his fingers and misinterprets everything.
“Ahhh,” she sighs. “Don’t be too sad, Chanyeol. You’ll have tons of pretty girls after you when you’re famous.”
He snickers into his blankets, softly at first but then louder until Yura sees straight through his bluff and smacks him on his back, hard.
“Forget it,” she groans, pushing Chanyeol playfully. “You’re going to be single forever.”
The train ride to SM in the morning is oddly tense between the two of them the next day. They plug an earbud in each and let Beenzino’s tracks do the talking for them.
The SM building is no better. Overnight the air in the entire building has gone restless as the rumors keep circulating back and forth. It’s suffocating, like being in a room with no ventilation with the same news recycled back and forth, passed between hushes whispers and hopeful voices. The humidity of promise clings to their lungs, like a dense fog no one wants to outright acknowledge.
Sehun of all people brings it up late in the evening when they’re all dead tired and trying to catch the last few trains home.
“Do you guys think you’ll debut?” he starts softly. His eyes are downcast. “Do you think SM will actually debut a new boygroup?”
It’s a rare moment for them to talk about it this so openly. Chanyeol watches Kyungsoo tense under the weight of the question. As if linked together, Chanyeol feels the same tension fizzle in his own chest. Of course they all want to debut, but it’s just not possible for them all to debut.
“I try not to,” Joonmyun admits. He’s been here long enough to be immune to news like this. Chanyeol thinks idly that maybe the frantic air of possibilities and crushed dreams doesn’t get to Joonmyun anymore, because in the end hope will always make disappointment hurt infinitely more.
There’s an awkward pause between them as Chanyeol slings his bag over his shoulder and steers Kyungsoo out the door with his other hand. It’s enough to have the question and its uncertainty eat on their mind so constantly. They don’t need anymore wild speculation.
“It’s a good thought to have,” Joonmyun says finally, as Chanyeol is exiting the door. “Just work hard for now and everything will work out. I promise.”
Chanyeol works hard, harder than he has ever in his life. His rapping is steadily improving, but it’s his dancing that’ll be the death of him for sure. He spends extra hours practicing into the night, accompanied by a just as concerned Kyungsoo.
As for Kyungsoo, his vocal lessons are going well and at this rate Chanyeol wonders idly if Kyungsoo will be the one debuting without him. It’s not a thought he can stomach though and in the few spare waking hours he has, Chanyeol begins to worry. It’s almost as bad as the invisible tug when it comes to keeping him awake at night.
“You look alive,” Sehun comments one sleepy morning. Beside him Jongin is swaying in his feet, maybe asleep, maybe awake. No one is ever sure.
He’s awake when the music comes on and that’s what counts in the end. They’re going through dance routines when Chanyeol finally realizes that Kyungsoo and a few other boys who normally aren’t in this block of dance practice have filed into the room.
He shoots Kyungsoo a questioning look and gets one just as confused back. Even Joonmyun who normally has a good understanding of everything that’s going on appears a little flustered. No one in the room except the dance instructor seems to have any inkling of what’s going on.
Chanyeol does a quick headcount: 12, not including the SM staff members. The current rumors floating around hint at a group of 7, maybe one even as big as 9, but 12 seems to be pushing it a little. Among the trainees Chanyeol knows well there’s also a good number of foreign trainees. He spots Lu Han and a dancer by the name of Yixing besides him looking just as perplexed as Chanyeol feels.
They’re an odd mix of trainees and judging by the way the entire group looks confused, Chanyeol isn’t the only one thinking it. It’s too early for a debut announcement, but there’s still the undeniable spark of excitement in his gut, wondering if this is it.
The shred of excitement turns into a full blown fire, sparked by the entrance of none other than Lee Sooman himself through the double doors. The clouds on the curtain part as another good chunk of SM staff enter the room.
This is it, Chanyeol thinks, bowing swiftly. From behind him, he sees his own triumphant expression painted on Kyungsoo’s face.
The train ride home is silent. They’re both maybe still a little in shock when Chanyeol finally yanks his earbuds out when the train is a station away from Kyungsoo’s stop. Kyungsoo gives a little jump at the sudden motion, waving his hands in front of his face like he doesn’t know what to do with them.
“Kyungsoo,” Chanyeol says a slow smile spreading across his face. “I think we’re going to debut.”
Kyungsoo looks relieved, overwhelmed almost. His lips twitch like he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but Chanyeol grabs his face in his hands and decides for him, smushing his cheeks upwards. At that, Kyungsoo lets out a laugh and breaks out of Chanyeol’s grasp.
His grin is infectious with how unashamedly pleased it is. In the time Chanyeol has known Kyungsoo he’s seen him smile in two distinct ways. One for the cameras, a pleased smirk that shows off just enough of his teeth to be handsome and charming. One for himself, when he smiles so widely he bares all of his gums and the smile itself scrunches his cheeks into unattractive bulges.
The latter is Chanyeol’s favorite.
“God, I didn’t think,” Kyungsoo starts but Chanyeol cuts him off with a jubilant yell.
“Good, stop thinking and let’s go celebrate.” Chanyeol hollers into the air and Kyungsoo takes a careful look behind them to make sure no one is watching. He leans into Chanyeol, suffocating him with a giant hug Chanyeol didn’t even know he was capable of.
“I’m so glad,” Kyungsoo admits breathlessly and Chanyeol smiles back into his shoulder, feeling lightheaded with the news.
“Me too,” Chanyeol snickers, pulling him off the train in a rush to head back. “I can’t wait to see the look on Jinho face. C’mon Kyungsoo let’s go celebrate, we’re gonna fucking debut.”
Jinho is not in the dorm that Chanyeol moves into the following Spring nor is he anywhere in the SM building for the following four months when EXO are officially preparing to debut.
There’s 12 of them in total, 2 sub-units of Korean and Mandarin, and Chanyeol has never been gladder to have Kyungsoo at his side even though he knows most of them.
Joonmyun has been a trainee at SM for years. The casual passing joke among trainees is that Joonmyun is almost as old as the SM building itself. Sehun too has been a presence between Chanyeol and Joonmyun even back when he was shorter than Joonmyun and of course there’s not a single SM trainee that doesn’t know about SM’s golden boy, Jongin who’s basically conjoined at the hip with Taemin even when Taemin is overseas promoting with the rest of SHINee.
Chanyeol had met Baekhyun months ago and it only now strikes him how oddly like Jinho he looks. Baekhyun is nothing like Jinho though. He’s loud, annoyingly enthusiastic and 100% Chanyeol’s type except for the fact that he’s neither Jinho nor Kyungsoo and he seems to already have a serious thing for a certain SNSD member.
That just leaves their M counterparts, who Chanyeol is as much intrigued by as he is wary of them. Zitao is friendly enough, greeting them all in eager Korean that Chanyeol has trouble deciphering. Yixing is a little strange, but he dances in the way Chanyeol wishes he could. Jongdae is sweet and the mischievous quirk of his lips leaves Chanyeol wanted to know him better. He hasn’t trained for very long, but in Chanyeol’s opinion that only seems to give more weight to his talents. Minseok’s status as the eldest of all of EXO makes Chanyeol hesitant to approach him in general. He’s still pleasant enough if a little introverted and Chanyeol gets the feeling that he and Minseok will get along just fine so as long Chanyeol showers at least once a day.
Kyungsoo for the most part seems pretty pleased with the outcome. If he’s unsettled, it’s for different reasons altogether.
Chanyeol catches him one day, talking to Jinho of all people. Chanyeol freezes at the doorway, not sure how to approach either of them. Jinho had texted him congratulations the night he found out about EXO, but beyond that they haven’t talked since.
“Sometimes it happens,” Chanyeol hears Jinho says with a small smile. “You freeze and you move on. It gets easier with time.”
Kyungsoo murmurs something back gratefully and Jinho shakes his head. “Don’t worry about me. You have a debut to worry about now. I’m sure I still have opportunities coming. Don’t count me out yet.”
It’s the most optimistic thing Chanyeol has ever heard him say. Numbly, Chanyeol backs out of the doorway completely unseen, and wonders what a braver person would have done.
EXO debuts in a month. In due time, Chanyeol won’t have time to sleep, let alone look back.
Kyungsoo watches the squares on the calendar fly by with a sort of uncanny dread like he’s counting down to doomsday rather than their long awaited debut. There’s an unsettled feeling hovering above them all- a back and forth mantra of- you’re going to debut, debut, debut. now don’t’ fuck it up, fuck it up, fuck it up.
The wariness gnaws on and by the 7th teaser, all of them with the exception of Jongin, have trouble sleeping. Kyungsoo in particular begins sleeping less and less, dark eye bags stretched around his eyes as thin as his patience, and as a result it keeps Chanyeol up awake at night too- too restless from the invisible tug in his chest and the moments of sharp panic shared between them.
One night maybe with a little less than week until debut, he finds Kyungsoo shuffling around the dorm. It startles the sleep straight out of Chanyeol as Kyungsoo in his black night shirt circles the corridor like a ghost. He appears to be chanting something and Chanyeol wonders sleepily if the hours of Gregorian chanting have finally gone to his head.
Chanyeol sits up on his bed, careful not to wake Baekhyun as Kyungsoo turns back around and continues muttering under his breath. His socked feet drag on the wooden floor like he’s physically weighed down by all the expectations and the ensuing static makes his hair stick up on end.
It would be comical if Chanyeol couldn’t physically feel the unsettled tension spreading inside his own nerves. When Chanyeol gets closer he deciphers Kyungsoo muttering his opening lines of MAMA over and over again with earbuds plugged in. Chanyeol watches him shuffle back and forth with a quiet fascination as he mimes the choreography quietly.
“Oh hey,” he says. He’s chewing on his lip again, the exact way that their makeup artists keep telling him not to.
Chanyeol plops down on the couch next to him, blinking sleep out of his eyes. Kyungsoo offers Chanyeol an earbud out of habit, before remembering that Chanyeol most definitely knew what their debut song sounded like. He moves to withdraw his hand, but Chanyeol stops him.
“Slow down,” Chanyeol yawns, taking the earbud anyways. He plugs it in just as the song lapses over to Jongin’s screamo section and pulls it straight back out with a grimace. Kyungsoo pays him little attention, too concentrated on the lines.
“You that worried?” Chanyeol asks, interrupting Kyungsoo’s lipsynching.
“Yeah,” Kyungsoo admits, looking down. “I’m terrified actually.”
Chanyeol watches him clutch his mp3 player tightly, knuckles going white under pressure.
It’s not just Kyungsoo. From the day their debut was announced Chanyeol has been keeping track of the dates between them and Inkigayo. They tell him not to, that once reality settles in they’ll make their way on stage and the hard hours of practice will take over their limbs. It’ll be simple, SHINee did it. Super Junior did it and even before them DBSK, H.O.T. and Shinhwa all debuted and soared into fame. There’s no reason EXO can’t.
But the off chance that EXO doesn’t is what keeps them all up at night. 7 teasers in and hundreds of hours of practice later, Chanyeol finds that weight hasn’t lessened in the slightest.
“It’ll be okay,” Chanyeol says although his words feel a little hollow to himself. It feels a little like Joonmyun’s advice slipping out of his mouth, rehearsed and a little detached.
Kyungsoo scoffs. “You sounded just like Joonmyun,” he groans. “Please don’t ever do that again.”
Chanyeol shrugs, embarrassed. Kyungsoo presses skip back to the beginning of MAMA and lets out a soft sigh, leaning into Chanyeol’s arm like it’s the last bridge of support he has. Chanyeol plugs his respective earbud in and hums along until his arm goes numb under Kyungsoo and his neck cramps up. They fall asleep on the couch that night huddled together in the cold without the comfort of blankets.
Their muscles ache the following morning as they peeling their weary bodies off the couch straight into the group van. Chanyeol lets Baekhyun steer his uncoordinated limbs into the building, too tired to move on his own accord. He’s so out of it that it’s not until lunch break when he stretches his mouth wide open to shovel food in that he notices that his bottom lip is bleeding.
Chanyeol grabs a napkin, blotting at it gingerly. He runs a finger across his lips and feels cracked skin but can’t for the life of him remember biting them.
Kyungsoo cracks his first note in the opening of MAMA and Chanyeol feels a stone drop in his stomach even before the note leaves Kyungsoo’s throat.
It startles everyone on stage, but no one more so than Kyungsoo himself. Chanyeol can’t stop the heat creeping into his cheeks while a quick glance at Kyungsoo shows the opposite. Where Chanyeol flushes under the pressure, Kyungsoo grows paler by the second, looking like a ghost under two layers of bb cream. His eyes are wide, but still laser focused and Chanyeol watches him battle himself on stage to keep his voice from shaking even more. There’s an icy feeling in Chanyeol’s veins even as he takes over to the rap section, executing it without a hitch. It’s not his own panic and it doesn’t take even half of Chanyeol’s brain cells to figure out whose it is.
Their performance is a disaster but it’s not an explosive one. There are no glaring mistake besides Kyungsoo’s cracked note. No one slips up the choreography. No one forgets their lines. Everything is in place, but at the same time lacking. Worse than a disaster, they’re forgettable. Beyond the unique visuals, the SMP sound and the screamo section, they’re painfully forgettable.
Chanyeol can already envision the netizen comments, tearing their lackluster performance apart like ravenous hyenas. He shuts his eyes, shaking off the sinking feeling when Kyungsoo’s face comes back into view looking pale but grimly determined.
Beyond the loud beating of his own heart, he can hear the fanchants continuing despite the hiccups and figures they’ve done something right. A verse, a chorus and then another verse fly by before Jongin screams, flailing his limbs around for dramatic effect. It startles Chanyeol back into action, beaming up to the camera like he’s practice a million times before.
And then it’s all over.
They stumble off stage in a daze. Joonmyun passes them waterbottles as Chanyeol watches Jongin curl his hand into Kyungsoo’s hesitantly. It takes a second for Kyungsoo to respond. For a brief second, Jongin just stands there waiting and then Kyungsoo folds, letting the stiff air within him out in a soft exhale.
Baekhyun is the only one brave or stupid, maybe both, enough to approach him, a cocksure grin on his face. Kyungsoo tenses up immediately hand gripping Jongin’s a little tighter.
Baekhyun simply smiles and Chanyeol is sure he doesn’t mean any harm, but the problem with Baekhyun is that he misjudges how close he is to others at times. He overplays his jokes without a care for boundaries, but it’s all done with mostly good intentions. The weight of which Kyungsoo takes himself seriously is counterbalanced in all the wrong ways in which Baekhyun tries to make everything a joke.
“Can I get a main vocal fist bump for a stage well done?” he offers and to everyone around them it’s a joke. The petrified, stony look on Kyungsoo’s face says otherwise. It’s not his usual death glare. It’s something entirely colder and a little in shock.
Kyungsoo opens his mouth, but then decides against it entirely.
“Give ‘em hell D.Orchestra,” Baekhyun smirks as Chanyeol watches Kyungsoo brush Baekhyun’s hand aside coldly. The anger burning in his gut isn’t his own and it leaves Chanyeol even more confused as Baekhyun shoots him a look as if asking: What’s his problem?
Naver is unsurprisingly useless in the field of searching up the specifics of enhanced empathy.
Half an hour of searching and combing through key words like ‘empathy’ and ‘mood swings’ leads Chanyeol to a list of links about menopause. He frowns, clears his browser history and starts over again.
“The key is soul compatibility.” Chanyeol reads, squinting at his screen. “This is energetic compatibility on the Higher Dimensions. Shared feelings, physical trauma and separation anxiety are all signs of a potential soulmate. The people who form a soulmate bond will have souls whose light and sound harmonics match closely enough for there to be the potential for the two souls to merge completely.”
Whatever the hell that meant.
Chanyeol half-heartedly scrolls through the rest of it, exiting his browser when he reaches the end of the nonsense. Normally, he isn’t one to believe in supernatural bullshit, but he’s aware enough to know something is up.
Once is a surprise. Twice is cause for suspicion and everything after that builds a case for a possible correlation.
And beyond his and Kyungsoo’s shared emotions, there’s also something else Chanyeol doesn’t know what to make of.
In mid-May, Joonmyun calls for an early weekly meeting one morning and Chanyeol sits up so fast that his head collides with the floor lamp beside his bed. Pain splinters through his skull like a nail driven through a plank of hapless wood.
“Fuck,” Chanyeol curses loudly through the dorm. He flops back down onto the bed, cradling his unfortunately thick skull. He kicks out at the lamp in pain, knocking it down the floor and the impact shatters the light bulb. The commotion sends a concerned Joonmyun rushing into his room with a slightly less urgent Sehun trailing in behind him.
Once they realize that no one is in mortal danger, they linger by the doorway watching as Chanyeol writhers around in pain on the bed. Sehun actually laughs, that little shit.
“He’ll live,” Baekhyun calls, still lying down in his own bed flicking through his texts. Byun Baekhyun is a good friend. He’s seen Chanyeol’s clumsiness firsthand so often that at this point he knows creating a fuss will just make Chanyeol’s head hurt more.
“Forget it,” Joonmyun groans, rubbing fingers into his temple. It’s pretty easy to win sympathy points from Joonmyun, but just to be sure, Chanyeol gives him a helpless look before moaning a little more in pain.
“Forget it, just go back to sleep,” Joonmyun sighs, leaning down to carefully sweep up the broken shards of glass.
Chanyeol shoots him a grateful look, wrapping his blankets snugly around himself. He’s half finished with his blanket cocoon when he hears Joonmyun muttering something about Kyungsoo having a headache. If Chanyeol were in any state to think he would have pondered Joonmyun’s words a bit more, but for now he just keeps groaning and whining until Baekhyun launches a pillow at him from his side of the room.
They don’t win a number 1 with MAMA, not that Chanyeol really expected them to.
In a way it’s almost a relief that EXO didn’t live up to its hype. Chanyeol hadn’t expected fame and instant riches debuting although he’s not sure the same sentiment rings true for all 12 of them. There’s disappointment in the air sure, but no one writes them off except a few diehard antis. For Kyungsoo’s sake no one brings up their debut stage train wreck either.
Chanyeol’s glad to be finished promoting MAMA and judging from Lu Han’s triumphant grin when EXO-M return from China, he’s not the only one.
“The song doesn’t even make sense in Chinese,” Chanyeol hears Lu Han complaining to a half asleep Minseok one night. “It just comes off weirdly incestuous if you really think about it.”
Chanyeol doesn’t get it and judging by the look on Jongdae’s face he doesn’t understand either. Half a year of Beijing air and touring across China seems to have failed Jongdae in the realm of linguistics entirely. He shrugs.
“No one understands MAMA. It doesn’t even make much sense in Korean, if you think about it,” he tells Chanyeol, stretching his arms behind his neck with a carefree air. Chanyeol likes to think otherwise. It’s just the Gregorian Chanting and Jongin’s screamo section that gets to him sometimes.
All in all, they've reached a silent consensus that any song from the album, with the obvious exception of Two Moons, would have made a better title track. Chanyeol doesn’t take that jibe personally and if he’s honest with himself Angel is actually his favorite track to perform live.
For starters, Kyungsoo looks a lot more at peace without the weight of the opening high note breathing down his neck. He’s fluid, dancing and singing in the same way he did pre-debut without a care in the world for the camera or crowds. He jumps around, a little hyperactive, off in his own little world at times. Chanyeol misses that too.
The first time they perform Angel live outside of their debut showcase, Chanyeol sees Kyungsoo tense up again out of the corner of his eye.
Kyungsoo doesn’t let the nervousness show on his face. It comes out in other forms, the tremble of his legs right before it’s his turn and the nervous tapping of his fingers against his mic when no one is looking. His nervous habit of touching his face when it’s his turn in the limelight is painfully obvious to Chanyeol. Not everyone can execute a sexy lip swipe as candidly as Jongin.
They’re a verse and then some in when Kyungsoo starts tapping again, his other hand gripped tightly into a fist and without thinking Chanyeol reaches a hand out.
Kyungsoo gives him a wary look.
This isn’t part of the choreography, Kyungsoo mouths seriously, twisting to show his back to the camera. Chanyeol gives him a half shrug moving with the beat and mouths back, I know.
He lifts his hand again, moving it closer to Kyungsoo who keeps casting him suspicious glances. Kyungsoo’s brows twitch a little in effort to not smile when Chanyeol makes a dramatic flipper movement and finally, he caves.
Kyungsoo makes a step forward to bring his hand over when Chanyeol pulls his hand back with a teasing smirk. Kyungsoo’s eyes widen for a second, realizing he’s been cheated before he rounds them on Chanyeol in mock rage.
With his back to the camera, Chanyeol doesn’t hesitate to stick his tongue out. The message is clear and Kyungsoo smirks back, bringing his mic to his mouth with confidence that Chanyeol hasn’t seen in months.
They actually complete the high-five a few more times throughout the month and Chanyeol feels a tingle in his spine as the invisible cord between them wraps tighter and tighter with each point of physical contact until it feels nothing but natural to have Kyungsoo at his side.
They finally lay MAMA down into the grave of debuts better off forgotten with the year end Gayo Daejuns. It’s celebrated with the return of Jongin’s original sparkly drop crotch pants and for a second Chanyeol is fearful that they might even crimp his poor, tortured hair for old time’s sake.
They look powerful on stage as EXO. Not M or K, but together. The stage goes without a hitch and it’s not until the encores that Chanyeol remembers it’s no longer April. He’s been an idol for the better half of a year and it’s now freezing outside. The stage costumes are made more out of sequins than any actual cloth that could shield them from the bone-chilling cold.
It helps that EXO-M are with them switching out between verses, but the minimal heat of 6 other bodies on stage does nothing aside from helping them mentality with the knowledge that they suffer together as ‘one’.
Kyungsoo’s lips are tinged blue by the time they’ve finished their encore. Baekhyun’s eyeliner looks permanently frozen in place and Chanyeol is sure the only reason why Jongin is still awake is because it’s so damn cold.
Yet, the crowds still cheer for them enthusiastic as ever. It makes Chanyeol feel guilty.
Sorry we couldn’t do more, please wait for us. It’ll be better when we come back. It’s what they’re all thinking, but they can’t say it out loud here. Instead they bow. The fireworks go off around them as they all head back, eyes watering from the cold and the sensation of a year well done.
They shuffle back and forth and in the midst of the closing, Chanyeol curls a hand around to find Kyungsoo’s stone cold fingers and locks them together briefly. Kyungsoo smiles, or at the very least he tries to in his rigid state. He smoothes his thumb down the back of Chanyeol’s hand and keeps doing it even as the cameras and fans filter out of the area.
Chanyeol’s hair is stiff, possibly frozen by the time they crawl back into the van. At Sehun’s behest the heater is blasted on high, but even then Kyungsoo’s fingers stayed interlocked with Chanyeol’s own making him feel warmer than physically possible out in the tundra.
Thank god, Chanyeol thinks, looping an arm around Baekhyun as Kyungsoo huddles in beside him with Jongin. Sehun keeps rubbing his eyes, clearly exhausted. The heater blows in their faces, harsh and dry against their cheeks. Chanyeol sinks down into his seat with a content sigh and thinks naively, Thank god we’re done with that.
→ PART 2
Author: markerlimes
Recipient: mouthwash
Pairing/Focus: Chanyeol/Kyungsoo
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: minor mentions of underage alcohol consumption, minor mentions of the lawsuit and the events leading up to it
Length: 23000
Summary: Even before the matching bruises and the couple rings, Chanyeol thinks he might have been Kyungsoo’s soulmate all along. A remix of EXO’s history from debut to now with a dash of magical realism. Canon fic.
The new vocal trainee isn’t much to fawn over. Then and again, they rarely ever are.
First off he’s pretty short, maybe even shorter than Jinho. The way he walks is a little reserved, but that’s nothing new either. All the new trainees either come in on their first day bursting with energy and ambition, or meandering around hopelessly lost. The new kid looks like he’ll be the latter. He comes in on his first day dressed in black from head to toe like a ninja trainee instead of a future idol. If Chanyeol were a bit more mean spirited, he wouldn’t have hesitated to make Naruto jokes to his face.
“Give him a chance,” Jinho says, idly picking at his rice. There isn’t much in the bowl to begin with and Chanyeol watches him pathetically try to make the few remaining grains last as long as possible.
“Why though? Shouldn’t you be trying to get rid of him?” Chanyeol teases. There’s no heat behind his words though. The news has barely been out for a day and yet all of SM from the managers to the newest trainees know that Cho Jinho is set to debut with a new group.
“It’s just a project group ,” Jinho corrects with an embarrassed smile. Chanyeol knows deep down that Jinho is over the moon with this news though. He just tries to hide it. “Who knows if it’ll even last?”
“Now you’re just being pessimistic,” Chanyeol shoots back, taking a bite of his own meal. Jinho watches him swallow an actual mouthful a little enviously.
“Maybe, but I’m not worried about him,” Jinho contemplates. His chopsticks settle on the edge of his plate with a light cling. “Besides he’s a good kid. I wouldn’t mind debuting with him you know, as opposed to some of the others.”
“Some of the others being?” Chanyeol poses seriously. Jinho laughs.
“You know who I’m talking about,” he shrugs. The inner politics of traineehood go on and on. Another vocal trainee accepted into SM presents another threat regardless of how green they are. Chanyeol is lucky that good rappers in SM in comparison are few and far between. He doesn’t want to get ahead of himself and say he’s already a shoe-in for debut, but a highlight in an SNSD MV carries its own weight.
“So what makes this kid different?” Chanyeol prods. He’s just trying to make small talk at this point to ignore the burning of sore muscles in his thighs for as long as he can. Lunch hours and their measly breaks are barely enough to give their muscles and battered bodies the recuperation time they need.
“He’s nice,” Jinho comments after a slight pause. “A little weird, but in a good way.”
“I’m weird in a really good way,” Chanyeol says in the face of Jinho’s skepticism. “Also really nice and handsome and tall.”
The last bit manages to wring a chuckle out of Jinho.
“How do you always manage to make everything about yourself?” Jinho sighs and Chanyeol shoots him a cheeky grin.
“It’s a talent,” he replies, shoveling down the last bit of his food. Jinho watches him with a pained expression.
“Sure whatever,” he sighs. “But you should give the new kid a chance though. He’s very-”
Chanyeol doesn’t hear the end of Jinho’s sentence. It’s not like he does normally with Jinho’s strange habit of half-mumbling and then trailing off before he completes his thought, but this time there’s something different. There’s a strange tugging in his chest, a fine fiber of attention that’s been snagged out of his hands and hooked taut like a fishing line. It pulls the breath out of his chest inexplicably, and Chanyeol turns his head in confusion, trying to sense out the direction of the pull.
The feeling is strong, undeniable as it clings onto Chanyeol’s senses, but finding it is as fruitless as peering into the ocean where a fishing line disappears and expecting to find the lure. The movement of SM trainees flows in and out of the cafeteria like waves. The world rocks back and forth like Chanyeol is on a boat and the only thing holding him on board is that lifeline tugging for him to follow.
“Chanyeol?” Jinho’s voice cuts in. He sounds far away, almost like an echo and Chanyeol vaguely registers that he’s somehow standing up now. He trips over something, someone, he’s not sure anymore and keeps wading his way forward until just as abruptly as the tugging began, it’s over.
“Chanyeol?!” Jinho yells again over the din of the cafeteria noise and Chanyeol blinks, coming out of his strange trance. He’s maybe made like four steps out of his chair and when he comes to, he realizes that he’s standing on top of the cafeteria bench in front of another set of trainees. A quick look behind him reveals another flustered trainee that Chanyeol may or may not have just stepped on.
“Umm,” he mumbles intelligently in the face of indignation when Jinho pulls him down with a well-timed yank.
“Sorry about that,” Jinho mumbles, bowing to the other trainee who instantly narrows his eyes in recognition. Chanyeol opens his mouth to apologize too when Jinho shoves him in the opposite direction with a surprising amount of force for someone so proportionally tiny.
“You win, okay?” Jinho says hurriedly, pushing Chanyeol away from the amused chuckles around them. “You’re really fucking weird.”
The sensation keeps Chanyeol up at night. By then, it’s no longer a boat rocking lurch but more of a subtle thrum. It doesn’t drag Chanyeol along with its movement this time. It’s just simply there, humming along with the ticks of the alarm clock beside his bed.
He tosses in bed the entire night and the one time he’s yanked awake is by the unmistakable urge to pee. It’s not uncommon to be sleep deprived as a trainee, but by the time the sun rises Chanyeol stumbles out of bed feeling shittier than regular levels of sleep deprived shit.
“Do you think you might be sick?” Joonmyun asks, peering into Chanyeol’s eyes seriously as he stumbles into the SM building late. Chanyeol shrugs but before he knows it, Joonmyun pulls out a thermometer.
Several beeps later, a reading of 37 degrees ruled out sickness and Chanyeol glares at the thermometer like it’s betrayed him. He doesn’t get the day off and the most he gets as consolation is Joonmyun doting around him with these soft concerned sighs.
“Maybe it’s homesickness,” Joonmyun concludes after lunch when Chanyeol eats no more than two bites of his food, too distracted by the possibility of the invisible tug again. It makes no sense seeing as Chanyeol still lives at home, but he just shrugs. It’s easier to let Joonmyun believe what he wants rather than nitpick with him over something that can’t be explained in the first place.
The supernatural pull dies down to a simmer for the next few days, but when it surges up again it spares Chanyeol no mercy. It hits Chanyeol just as he stumbles out of dance practice, feeling properly destroyed both mentally and physically. His feet ache, his thighs ache, everything aches.
But the invisible line goes taut again, drawing the already short breaths out of his body in one swift yank. Suddenly the fatigue plaguing his entire body vanishes leaving Chanyeol with nothing but a sheer single-mindedness to find what’s at the end of the string.
It’s late and luckily the perpetually crowded hallways of SM are beginning to thin out. It makes the rocking sensation much lighter, dampening down to a gentle back and forth sway. Luckily for Chanyeol, it doesn’t give him tunnel vision either making it much easier to weave through the hallways.
The sensation gets tighter and tighter, clenching down on Chanyeol’s lungs when he finally finds himself in front of a door. His mind barely registers the cold metal of the knob in his hand before he pushes in. The sensation lifts like it never existed, leaving Chanyeol stranded in the room. He stands around aimlessly as his lungs fill back up with disappointment. The room is empty upon first glance when a dry cough from the corner catches his attention.
“Can I...help you?” the voice asks and Chanyeol whirls around to see the tiny ninja kid, looking at Chanyeol like a foreign entity. To be fair, Chanyeol must look like a mess, sweaty and sticky, fresh from dance torture.
“I’m good,” Chanyeol croaks out, throat suddenly dry. He coughs a little, trying to clear it and the kid dressed in black resumes packing, seemingly intent on ignoring Chanyeol’s existence.
“Wait,” Chanyeol calls out for some reason and ninja kid perks up again, looking ruffled. It’s a refreshing turn of events for sure.
“You know Jinho right?” Chanyeol asks slowly, not entirely sure where he’s going with his train of thought. “What’s your name?”
“Do, Do Kyungsoo,” the guy replies, his eyes wide. Even from across the room, Chanyeol can see the whites of his eyes expanding until Chanyeol isn’t sure if he’s just been greeted or challenged to a staring contest.
It’s creepy.
“Park Chanyeol,” he offers, widening his own eyes to their limits. The effect is probably a little comical and Do Kyungsoo laughs in response. The corner of his lips quirk up for the slightest moment and Chanyeol’s breath hitches, yanked forward by the same strange sensation..
“It’s nice to meet you,” Kyungsoo says. His next words seem hesitant almost. “I take it you’re a trainee. What do you do?”
“I’m a main vocal,” Chanyeol lies through his teeth and Kyungsoo instantly pulls back a little.
“With a voice like that?” Kyungsoo murmurs a little skeptical. He probably didn’t mean to say it out loud with the way he immediately looks regretful. Chanyeol just keeps staring at him.
“What’s wrong with my voice?” Chanyeol teases. “Are you gonna tell me to go be a rapper?”
“No. No, not at all,” Kyungsoo apologizes quickly, bowing his head low. Too low for Chanyeol’s tastes. It’s never fun when people take him too seriously, but he’s willing to cut the new guy some slack.
“That’s a pity,” Chanyeol shrugs. Kyungsoo’s eyes go even wider as he looks up at Chanyeol in confusion. At this point Chanyeol can't tell if he's acting weird or just plain slow.
“The funny thing is, I am a rapper,” Chanyeol admits with a chuckle. The look on Kyungsoo’s face is wary, like he’s unsure if Chanyeol is playing him for another round. “You should always go with your gut instinct.”
“Gut instinct huh,” Kyungsoo muses. He’s not smiling like Chanyeol hoped he would.
“Yeah,” Chanyeol drawls out, feeling the awkwardness settle around them. “It was a joke,” he tacks on for emphasis.
“I got that,” Kyungsoo says and Chanyeol watches him cram a few more music sheets into his bag. He shoots Chanyeol a strange look before continuing to pack.
“Are you heading home?” Chanyeol asks, trying not to sound too desperate or stalkerish. By the look on Kyungsoo’s face it probably came off as a little bit of both.
“Yeah,” Kyungsoo replies evenly. “Sorry to be like this, but I have to catch the train back home and I don’t want to be too late.”
He shuffles, side stepping Chanyeol to leave when Chanyeol catches his arm. The sensation tugs again, licking at his chest like a small flame sparked to life with the initial contact. Chanyeol closes his fingers around Kyungsoo’s arm and for a second he’s sure Kyungsoo is going to throw him off. But instead he leans into Chanyeol’s touch. The movement is so subtle, so slight that Chanyeol wonders if he’d imagined it, but the shock in Kyungsoo’s already wide eyes betrays the motion itself.
“Sorry about that,” Kyungsoo says sheepishly, detaching Chanyeol’s arm from his own after a beat. Yet even after that he doesn’t move on immediately, instead choosing to linger by the doorway.
“Yeah,” Chanyeol replies, running a hand through his still sweaty hair. There’s madness, a brief second of irrationality running through his veins that he chalks up as a byproduct of lack of sleep. “I actually have to head back too.”
The look Kyungsoo gives him is incredulous but it’s also a little hopeful, and it gives Chanyeol the confidence he needs to keep going.
“Do you mind if we ride together?”
Kyungsoo, as it turns out, lives a mere two stations away from Chanyeol. Their fingers trace the metro map together, sliding down the same red trail from Apgujeong station back home. Kyungsoo shoots him a funny look when Chanyeol’s finger passes his, but he stays silent.
They shuffle on, catching the subway right after the bulk of traffic hour is over. It’s empty enough for them to get their own compartment. Chanyeol takes it as a blessing given how sweaty he still is.The cool steel of the railing against his back is a relief against the humid Seoul afternoon. If there were more people around, he’d feel a lot more self-conscious about how he smells.
Kyungsoo doesn’t seem to mind though. He takes a seat next to Chanyeol, leaning into his arm again as Chanyeol pulls out his iPod.
“Got anything good?” Kyungsoo wonders aloud, gesturing towards Chanyeol’s music player. It’s an old relic by the standards of mp3 players, but it’s Chanyeol’s most dependable friend when he needs it.
He flicks it on, passing an earbud over to Kyungsoo. “I hope you like Outsider.”
Kyungsoo beams. His smile is oddly ugly for someone so cute and it gives Chanyeol the answer he needs as he presses play and lets the music wash over them both.
The next few weeks go by strangely peaceful. Jinho begins disappearing off to prepare for his impending debut and in his place, Kyungsoo begins to show up with a bright smile and ruffled hair each morning.
“Morning,” Chanyeol waves as Kyungsoo shuffles onto the train with his bags. He hands Chanyeol a pack of Lotte snacks before plopping down on the seat beside him. Their hands brush together briefly and even while he’s half asleep Chanyeol registers the spark between them. The sensation in him has died down to a mere tickle ever since he and Kyungsoo rode home together that first day, but every now and then he’ll get sparks like this, fizzling between them with the near promise of fire.
“Man, you are new,” Chanyeol laughs, accepting the treat anyways. “Don’t you know we’re supposed to be watching our diets already?”
“I’m thinking ahead,” Kyungsoo replies simply, “Let me enjoy what I can when I can.”
“That’s if we debut though,” Chanyeol reminds him and Kyungsoo smirks back to him. He’s full of surprises when Chanyeol is least expecting them.
“True. I guess that’s if we debut at all,” Kyungsoo says and Chanyeol isn’t sure if he misheard the emphasis in Kyungsoo’s sentence.
They part ways once they reach the building. Chanyeol has a separate schedule for rapping practice and from the looks of Kyungsoo’s schedule and Jinho’s disappearances, it’s not nearly as rigorous as what the vocal trainees go through.
Regardless it’s still a pain in the ass on top of their school work. Some trainees drop out of school to concentrate on their talents, but Chanyeol can’t imagine ever doing the same. It’s too risky to put all his eggs in one basket on the off chance that he never debuts. It’s enough that Yura is already doing well for the whole family, but Chanyeol doesn’t want to be the disappointment child on top of everything he already is.
It’s nice to learn that Kyungsoo shares his thoughts. He’s got an older sibling too and like Chanyeol, he’s not ready to let idol life be the only one he knows. Music is the shared string between them and with each train ride home Chanyeol learns more and more of how similar their tastes align.
“I feel replaced,” Jinho comments offhandedly one rare day when he has enough time to grab lunch with all of them again. Chanyeol answers him with a teasing poke.
“It’s not a replacement if you got promoted and left me in the first place,” Chanyeol laughs and Jinho offers him a wry smile back. Joonmyun sits across from them today, poking at his food and offering Kyungsoo advice. To their left, Sehun and Jongin are giggling about something they found on Naver. Chanyeol takes a second to appreciate his surroundings and thinks he wouldn’t mind debuting like this.
A year passes in and out of their busy schedules. Sehun grows at least another 5 cms and Joonmyun gains nothing but a stubborn wrinkle etched in his forehead which causes him another wave of stress within itself.
Jinho returns from SM the ballad a little wiser, but still short as ever. Both he and Kyungsoo haven’t grown at all. It works out perfectly for Chanyeol who can sling one tiny vocalist in each arm and walk down the street leaning on them like a pair of tiny crutches.
“I’m gonna kill you some day,” Kyungsoo tells him when he leans all of his weight on the two of them and kicks his feet up into the air. Jinho gives him a pained smile which turns into an encouraging one at Kyungsoo’s suggestion.
“I like this idea,” Jinho says as Kyungsoo turns around to face Chanyeol head on. “Do it for me Kyungsoo-yah. Think of all of our short pain together.”
Kyungsoo looks contemplative and a little too murderous for Chanyeol’s tastes.
“He called you the maknae the other day,” Jinho adds, fueling Kyungsoo’s rage. “He said even if Sehun and Jongin debut with us, you’d be so short that you would be the maknae anyways.”
Kyungsoo’s eyes snap up in outrage before narrowing down to dangerous slits.
“It was a joke. No one will mistake you as the maknae,” Chanyeol reassures him, but the grin on Jinho’s face is enough for Kyungsoo to shove them both away.
“Kyungsoo-yah,” Chanyeol calls sprinting out of Kyungsoo’s rampaging path. Kyungsoo chases him down the street with outstretched arms as Chanyeol keeps turning back to laugh. “I’m sorry!”
He ducks behind Jinho who gets the full brunt of Kyungsoo’s tackle as it brings them all to the floor laughing and wheezing. Chanyeol’s back hits the cement with a crack and it hurts so badly for a second that all he can do is lie there on the pavement, winded. It hurts, but Chanyeol thinks that it’s a good thing he ended up on the bottom of their giant pile. Chanyeol’s weight would have surely broken at least one of Jinho and Kyungsoo’s precious vocalist ribs.
He rolls his head back in pain, feeling the bones grate in his neck. The sky above them is gold, casted in lovely rays that stretch the horizon a pale pink. It’s mesmerizing and for a second all Chanyeol can do is laugh in wonder with how careless and light he feels. He’s still laughing through the pain when Kyungsoo’s owly grin enters his vision from above, offering a hand to Chanyeol. He pulls him up with surprising strength and Chanyeol gives his back a sore rub. It takes him a second to notice that Kyungsoo is doing the same.
“This is what you get,” Chanyeol laughs despite Kyungsoo’s threatening pose and Jinho’s squably pleas for mercy between them. His fingers rub into his battered back and Kyungsoo inexplicably winces too.
“Are you two hurt?” Jinho asks, immediately looking concerned.
“Nah I’m good,” Chanyeol answers, snickering as Kyungsoo still looks confused. “You might wanna check up on grandpa over there though.”
“Okay wisecrack,” Jinho shrugs, rolling his own shoulder with a slight wince. “Let’s go home.”
“We might need to get grandpa Kyungsoo a wheelchair first,” Chanyeol grins as Kyungsoo continues to run a hand down his own back in confusion. Kyungsoo raises his other fist threateningly as if challenging Chanyeol to repeat himself.
“A what?” Kyungsoo asks quietly. Jinho shakes his head even though he knows its useless.
Chanyeol opens his mouth to answer when Kyungsoo beats him to the punch by tackling him into the ground again.
It’s dark by the time Jinho leaves them and the two of them shuffle back to Apgujeong station with a few bruises and scrapes. Chanyeol pulls out his wallet when Kyungsoo gives him an expectant look and orders takoyaki for two.
In September another crop of trainees drop out, citing mental fatigue and pressure from parents. All the usual.
Chanyeol isn’t perturbed though. As strange as it sounds, it’s energizing to be around Kyungsoo who is as pragmatic about trainee life as they come. Every train ride home becomes less about sharing music in near silence between the two of them and more about uncovering each other’s pasts instead.
In time Chanyeol learns that Kyungsoo has a best friend by the name of Lim Hyunsik, has loved music since grade school and thinks if he doesn’t debut by the time he’s 24, his parents will pull him out of this rat race of an industry. Chanyeol in comparison has to address his history with ferrets, courtesy of old CyWorld posts that should have never seen the light of day, and hasn’t thought long enough about the possibility of not debuting to know what his parents will do. Kyungsoo scoffs at that, already filling in for Jinho’s anti-Chanyeol’s ego role, and tells him not to worry his pretty head about it too much.
As if in reaction to the drop in trainees, SM staff start making vague announcements about a series of tests and screening trials for the remaining trainees. It doesn’t really bother Chanyeol until the rumors of a new group debuting start to kick up. It’s been 3 years since SM’s last boygroup and following F(x)’s debut, it’s only natural that the next group to debut will also be a boygroup.
By midday the air is buzzing with anticipation. They’re all smiles on the surface, gleaming teeth and bowed backs presented to each other to hide the ambition in their eyes. No one is fooled though and Chanyeol thinks vaguely that it’s not a bad precursor to have.
He texts Kyungsoo that night, wondering if the news made him just as restless. Kyungsoo texts back almost immediately and even though his texts are short, almost telegraphic in their length, Chanyeol can still read the worry between the characters. There’s excitement too, charged between each one of their exchanges. Chanyeol spends the night, thumbing his phone wondering if he should just call.
Yura peeks in, a worried crease on her forehead when the lights in Chanyeol’s room are still on when she gets up for her early shift.
“You’re up early,” she comments dryly as Chanyeol scrambles off the bed to pick his blankets off the floor.
“I am,” Chanyeol laughs, rubbing his eyes. The clock beside his bed reads 4:48AM and it dawns on him that Kyungsoo is still up at this hour too. Yura looks decidedly unimpressed.
“Don’t be late for-” she starts and Chanyeol beams. It’s supposed to be disarming, but Yura is his sister and she uses the exact same tactic to avoid curfew punishments from their parents. She frowns, plopping down on the mattress beside him, and smooths down the bedsheet.
“Well,” she prompts when Chanyeol turns his back to her childishly. She runs a hand, fond and comforting, down his shoulder like they’re children again. Chanyeol milks the sympathy for as long as he can until she spot his phone clutched between his fingers and misinterprets everything.
“Ahhh,” she sighs. “Don’t be too sad, Chanyeol. You’ll have tons of pretty girls after you when you’re famous.”
He snickers into his blankets, softly at first but then louder until Yura sees straight through his bluff and smacks him on his back, hard.
“Forget it,” she groans, pushing Chanyeol playfully. “You’re going to be single forever.”
The train ride to SM in the morning is oddly tense between the two of them the next day. They plug an earbud in each and let Beenzino’s tracks do the talking for them.
The SM building is no better. Overnight the air in the entire building has gone restless as the rumors keep circulating back and forth. It’s suffocating, like being in a room with no ventilation with the same news recycled back and forth, passed between hushes whispers and hopeful voices. The humidity of promise clings to their lungs, like a dense fog no one wants to outright acknowledge.
Sehun of all people brings it up late in the evening when they’re all dead tired and trying to catch the last few trains home.
“Do you guys think you’ll debut?” he starts softly. His eyes are downcast. “Do you think SM will actually debut a new boygroup?”
It’s a rare moment for them to talk about it this so openly. Chanyeol watches Kyungsoo tense under the weight of the question. As if linked together, Chanyeol feels the same tension fizzle in his own chest. Of course they all want to debut, but it’s just not possible for them all to debut.
“I try not to,” Joonmyun admits. He’s been here long enough to be immune to news like this. Chanyeol thinks idly that maybe the frantic air of possibilities and crushed dreams doesn’t get to Joonmyun anymore, because in the end hope will always make disappointment hurt infinitely more.
There’s an awkward pause between them as Chanyeol slings his bag over his shoulder and steers Kyungsoo out the door with his other hand. It’s enough to have the question and its uncertainty eat on their mind so constantly. They don’t need anymore wild speculation.
“It’s a good thought to have,” Joonmyun says finally, as Chanyeol is exiting the door. “Just work hard for now and everything will work out. I promise.”
Chanyeol works hard, harder than he has ever in his life. His rapping is steadily improving, but it’s his dancing that’ll be the death of him for sure. He spends extra hours practicing into the night, accompanied by a just as concerned Kyungsoo.
As for Kyungsoo, his vocal lessons are going well and at this rate Chanyeol wonders idly if Kyungsoo will be the one debuting without him. It’s not a thought he can stomach though and in the few spare waking hours he has, Chanyeol begins to worry. It’s almost as bad as the invisible tug when it comes to keeping him awake at night.
“You look alive,” Sehun comments one sleepy morning. Beside him Jongin is swaying in his feet, maybe asleep, maybe awake. No one is ever sure.
He’s awake when the music comes on and that’s what counts in the end. They’re going through dance routines when Chanyeol finally realizes that Kyungsoo and a few other boys who normally aren’t in this block of dance practice have filed into the room.
He shoots Kyungsoo a questioning look and gets one just as confused back. Even Joonmyun who normally has a good understanding of everything that’s going on appears a little flustered. No one in the room except the dance instructor seems to have any inkling of what’s going on.
Chanyeol does a quick headcount: 12, not including the SM staff members. The current rumors floating around hint at a group of 7, maybe one even as big as 9, but 12 seems to be pushing it a little. Among the trainees Chanyeol knows well there’s also a good number of foreign trainees. He spots Lu Han and a dancer by the name of Yixing besides him looking just as perplexed as Chanyeol feels.
They’re an odd mix of trainees and judging by the way the entire group looks confused, Chanyeol isn’t the only one thinking it. It’s too early for a debut announcement, but there’s still the undeniable spark of excitement in his gut, wondering if this is it.
The shred of excitement turns into a full blown fire, sparked by the entrance of none other than Lee Sooman himself through the double doors. The clouds on the curtain part as another good chunk of SM staff enter the room.
This is it, Chanyeol thinks, bowing swiftly. From behind him, he sees his own triumphant expression painted on Kyungsoo’s face.
The train ride home is silent. They’re both maybe still a little in shock when Chanyeol finally yanks his earbuds out when the train is a station away from Kyungsoo’s stop. Kyungsoo gives a little jump at the sudden motion, waving his hands in front of his face like he doesn’t know what to do with them.
“Kyungsoo,” Chanyeol says a slow smile spreading across his face. “I think we’re going to debut.”
Kyungsoo looks relieved, overwhelmed almost. His lips twitch like he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but Chanyeol grabs his face in his hands and decides for him, smushing his cheeks upwards. At that, Kyungsoo lets out a laugh and breaks out of Chanyeol’s grasp.
His grin is infectious with how unashamedly pleased it is. In the time Chanyeol has known Kyungsoo he’s seen him smile in two distinct ways. One for the cameras, a pleased smirk that shows off just enough of his teeth to be handsome and charming. One for himself, when he smiles so widely he bares all of his gums and the smile itself scrunches his cheeks into unattractive bulges.
The latter is Chanyeol’s favorite.
“God, I didn’t think,” Kyungsoo starts but Chanyeol cuts him off with a jubilant yell.
“Good, stop thinking and let’s go celebrate.” Chanyeol hollers into the air and Kyungsoo takes a careful look behind them to make sure no one is watching. He leans into Chanyeol, suffocating him with a giant hug Chanyeol didn’t even know he was capable of.
“I’m so glad,” Kyungsoo admits breathlessly and Chanyeol smiles back into his shoulder, feeling lightheaded with the news.
“Me too,” Chanyeol snickers, pulling him off the train in a rush to head back. “I can’t wait to see the look on Jinho face. C’mon Kyungsoo let’s go celebrate, we’re gonna fucking debut.”
Jinho is not in the dorm that Chanyeol moves into the following Spring nor is he anywhere in the SM building for the following four months when EXO are officially preparing to debut.
There’s 12 of them in total, 2 sub-units of Korean and Mandarin, and Chanyeol has never been gladder to have Kyungsoo at his side even though he knows most of them.
Joonmyun has been a trainee at SM for years. The casual passing joke among trainees is that Joonmyun is almost as old as the SM building itself. Sehun too has been a presence between Chanyeol and Joonmyun even back when he was shorter than Joonmyun and of course there’s not a single SM trainee that doesn’t know about SM’s golden boy, Jongin who’s basically conjoined at the hip with Taemin even when Taemin is overseas promoting with the rest of SHINee.
Chanyeol had met Baekhyun months ago and it only now strikes him how oddly like Jinho he looks. Baekhyun is nothing like Jinho though. He’s loud, annoyingly enthusiastic and 100% Chanyeol’s type except for the fact that he’s neither Jinho nor Kyungsoo and he seems to already have a serious thing for a certain SNSD member.
That just leaves their M counterparts, who Chanyeol is as much intrigued by as he is wary of them. Zitao is friendly enough, greeting them all in eager Korean that Chanyeol has trouble deciphering. Yixing is a little strange, but he dances in the way Chanyeol wishes he could. Jongdae is sweet and the mischievous quirk of his lips leaves Chanyeol wanted to know him better. He hasn’t trained for very long, but in Chanyeol’s opinion that only seems to give more weight to his talents. Minseok’s status as the eldest of all of EXO makes Chanyeol hesitant to approach him in general. He’s still pleasant enough if a little introverted and Chanyeol gets the feeling that he and Minseok will get along just fine so as long Chanyeol showers at least once a day.
Kyungsoo for the most part seems pretty pleased with the outcome. If he’s unsettled, it’s for different reasons altogether.
Chanyeol catches him one day, talking to Jinho of all people. Chanyeol freezes at the doorway, not sure how to approach either of them. Jinho had texted him congratulations the night he found out about EXO, but beyond that they haven’t talked since.
“Sometimes it happens,” Chanyeol hears Jinho says with a small smile. “You freeze and you move on. It gets easier with time.”
Kyungsoo murmurs something back gratefully and Jinho shakes his head. “Don’t worry about me. You have a debut to worry about now. I’m sure I still have opportunities coming. Don’t count me out yet.”
It’s the most optimistic thing Chanyeol has ever heard him say. Numbly, Chanyeol backs out of the doorway completely unseen, and wonders what a braver person would have done.
EXO debuts in a month. In due time, Chanyeol won’t have time to sleep, let alone look back.
Kyungsoo watches the squares on the calendar fly by with a sort of uncanny dread like he’s counting down to doomsday rather than their long awaited debut. There’s an unsettled feeling hovering above them all- a back and forth mantra of- you’re going to debut, debut, debut. now don’t’ fuck it up, fuck it up, fuck it up.
The wariness gnaws on and by the 7th teaser, all of them with the exception of Jongin, have trouble sleeping. Kyungsoo in particular begins sleeping less and less, dark eye bags stretched around his eyes as thin as his patience, and as a result it keeps Chanyeol up awake at night too- too restless from the invisible tug in his chest and the moments of sharp panic shared between them.
One night maybe with a little less than week until debut, he finds Kyungsoo shuffling around the dorm. It startles the sleep straight out of Chanyeol as Kyungsoo in his black night shirt circles the corridor like a ghost. He appears to be chanting something and Chanyeol wonders sleepily if the hours of Gregorian chanting have finally gone to his head.
Chanyeol sits up on his bed, careful not to wake Baekhyun as Kyungsoo turns back around and continues muttering under his breath. His socked feet drag on the wooden floor like he’s physically weighed down by all the expectations and the ensuing static makes his hair stick up on end.
It would be comical if Chanyeol couldn’t physically feel the unsettled tension spreading inside his own nerves. When Chanyeol gets closer he deciphers Kyungsoo muttering his opening lines of MAMA over and over again with earbuds plugged in. Chanyeol watches him shuffle back and forth with a quiet fascination as he mimes the choreography quietly.
“Oh hey,” he says. He’s chewing on his lip again, the exact way that their makeup artists keep telling him not to.
Chanyeol plops down on the couch next to him, blinking sleep out of his eyes. Kyungsoo offers Chanyeol an earbud out of habit, before remembering that Chanyeol most definitely knew what their debut song sounded like. He moves to withdraw his hand, but Chanyeol stops him.
“Slow down,” Chanyeol yawns, taking the earbud anyways. He plugs it in just as the song lapses over to Jongin’s screamo section and pulls it straight back out with a grimace. Kyungsoo pays him little attention, too concentrated on the lines.
“You that worried?” Chanyeol asks, interrupting Kyungsoo’s lipsynching.
“Yeah,” Kyungsoo admits, looking down. “I’m terrified actually.”
Chanyeol watches him clutch his mp3 player tightly, knuckles going white under pressure.
It’s not just Kyungsoo. From the day their debut was announced Chanyeol has been keeping track of the dates between them and Inkigayo. They tell him not to, that once reality settles in they’ll make their way on stage and the hard hours of practice will take over their limbs. It’ll be simple, SHINee did it. Super Junior did it and even before them DBSK, H.O.T. and Shinhwa all debuted and soared into fame. There’s no reason EXO can’t.
But the off chance that EXO doesn’t is what keeps them all up at night. 7 teasers in and hundreds of hours of practice later, Chanyeol finds that weight hasn’t lessened in the slightest.
“It’ll be okay,” Chanyeol says although his words feel a little hollow to himself. It feels a little like Joonmyun’s advice slipping out of his mouth, rehearsed and a little detached.
Kyungsoo scoffs. “You sounded just like Joonmyun,” he groans. “Please don’t ever do that again.”
Chanyeol shrugs, embarrassed. Kyungsoo presses skip back to the beginning of MAMA and lets out a soft sigh, leaning into Chanyeol’s arm like it’s the last bridge of support he has. Chanyeol plugs his respective earbud in and hums along until his arm goes numb under Kyungsoo and his neck cramps up. They fall asleep on the couch that night huddled together in the cold without the comfort of blankets.
Their muscles ache the following morning as they peeling their weary bodies off the couch straight into the group van. Chanyeol lets Baekhyun steer his uncoordinated limbs into the building, too tired to move on his own accord. He’s so out of it that it’s not until lunch break when he stretches his mouth wide open to shovel food in that he notices that his bottom lip is bleeding.
Chanyeol grabs a napkin, blotting at it gingerly. He runs a finger across his lips and feels cracked skin but can’t for the life of him remember biting them.
Kyungsoo cracks his first note in the opening of MAMA and Chanyeol feels a stone drop in his stomach even before the note leaves Kyungsoo’s throat.
It startles everyone on stage, but no one more so than Kyungsoo himself. Chanyeol can’t stop the heat creeping into his cheeks while a quick glance at Kyungsoo shows the opposite. Where Chanyeol flushes under the pressure, Kyungsoo grows paler by the second, looking like a ghost under two layers of bb cream. His eyes are wide, but still laser focused and Chanyeol watches him battle himself on stage to keep his voice from shaking even more. There’s an icy feeling in Chanyeol’s veins even as he takes over to the rap section, executing it without a hitch. It’s not his own panic and it doesn’t take even half of Chanyeol’s brain cells to figure out whose it is.
Their performance is a disaster but it’s not an explosive one. There are no glaring mistake besides Kyungsoo’s cracked note. No one slips up the choreography. No one forgets their lines. Everything is in place, but at the same time lacking. Worse than a disaster, they’re forgettable. Beyond the unique visuals, the SMP sound and the screamo section, they’re painfully forgettable.
Chanyeol can already envision the netizen comments, tearing their lackluster performance apart like ravenous hyenas. He shuts his eyes, shaking off the sinking feeling when Kyungsoo’s face comes back into view looking pale but grimly determined.
Beyond the loud beating of his own heart, he can hear the fanchants continuing despite the hiccups and figures they’ve done something right. A verse, a chorus and then another verse fly by before Jongin screams, flailing his limbs around for dramatic effect. It startles Chanyeol back into action, beaming up to the camera like he’s practice a million times before.
And then it’s all over.
They stumble off stage in a daze. Joonmyun passes them waterbottles as Chanyeol watches Jongin curl his hand into Kyungsoo’s hesitantly. It takes a second for Kyungsoo to respond. For a brief second, Jongin just stands there waiting and then Kyungsoo folds, letting the stiff air within him out in a soft exhale.
Baekhyun is the only one brave or stupid, maybe both, enough to approach him, a cocksure grin on his face. Kyungsoo tenses up immediately hand gripping Jongin’s a little tighter.
Baekhyun simply smiles and Chanyeol is sure he doesn’t mean any harm, but the problem with Baekhyun is that he misjudges how close he is to others at times. He overplays his jokes without a care for boundaries, but it’s all done with mostly good intentions. The weight of which Kyungsoo takes himself seriously is counterbalanced in all the wrong ways in which Baekhyun tries to make everything a joke.
“Can I get a main vocal fist bump for a stage well done?” he offers and to everyone around them it’s a joke. The petrified, stony look on Kyungsoo’s face says otherwise. It’s not his usual death glare. It’s something entirely colder and a little in shock.
Kyungsoo opens his mouth, but then decides against it entirely.
“Give ‘em hell D.Orchestra,” Baekhyun smirks as Chanyeol watches Kyungsoo brush Baekhyun’s hand aside coldly. The anger burning in his gut isn’t his own and it leaves Chanyeol even more confused as Baekhyun shoots him a look as if asking: What’s his problem?
Naver is unsurprisingly useless in the field of searching up the specifics of enhanced empathy.
Half an hour of searching and combing through key words like ‘empathy’ and ‘mood swings’ leads Chanyeol to a list of links about menopause. He frowns, clears his browser history and starts over again.
“The key is soul compatibility.” Chanyeol reads, squinting at his screen. “This is energetic compatibility on the Higher Dimensions. Shared feelings, physical trauma and separation anxiety are all signs of a potential soulmate. The people who form a soulmate bond will have souls whose light and sound harmonics match closely enough for there to be the potential for the two souls to merge completely.”
Whatever the hell that meant.
Chanyeol half-heartedly scrolls through the rest of it, exiting his browser when he reaches the end of the nonsense. Normally, he isn’t one to believe in supernatural bullshit, but he’s aware enough to know something is up.
Once is a surprise. Twice is cause for suspicion and everything after that builds a case for a possible correlation.
And beyond his and Kyungsoo’s shared emotions, there’s also something else Chanyeol doesn’t know what to make of.
In mid-May, Joonmyun calls for an early weekly meeting one morning and Chanyeol sits up so fast that his head collides with the floor lamp beside his bed. Pain splinters through his skull like a nail driven through a plank of hapless wood.
“Fuck,” Chanyeol curses loudly through the dorm. He flops back down onto the bed, cradling his unfortunately thick skull. He kicks out at the lamp in pain, knocking it down the floor and the impact shatters the light bulb. The commotion sends a concerned Joonmyun rushing into his room with a slightly less urgent Sehun trailing in behind him.
Once they realize that no one is in mortal danger, they linger by the doorway watching as Chanyeol writhers around in pain on the bed. Sehun actually laughs, that little shit.
“He’ll live,” Baekhyun calls, still lying down in his own bed flicking through his texts. Byun Baekhyun is a good friend. He’s seen Chanyeol’s clumsiness firsthand so often that at this point he knows creating a fuss will just make Chanyeol’s head hurt more.
“Forget it,” Joonmyun groans, rubbing fingers into his temple. It’s pretty easy to win sympathy points from Joonmyun, but just to be sure, Chanyeol gives him a helpless look before moaning a little more in pain.
“Forget it, just go back to sleep,” Joonmyun sighs, leaning down to carefully sweep up the broken shards of glass.
Chanyeol shoots him a grateful look, wrapping his blankets snugly around himself. He’s half finished with his blanket cocoon when he hears Joonmyun muttering something about Kyungsoo having a headache. If Chanyeol were in any state to think he would have pondered Joonmyun’s words a bit more, but for now he just keeps groaning and whining until Baekhyun launches a pillow at him from his side of the room.
They don’t win a number 1 with MAMA, not that Chanyeol really expected them to.
In a way it’s almost a relief that EXO didn’t live up to its hype. Chanyeol hadn’t expected fame and instant riches debuting although he’s not sure the same sentiment rings true for all 12 of them. There’s disappointment in the air sure, but no one writes them off except a few diehard antis. For Kyungsoo’s sake no one brings up their debut stage train wreck either.
Chanyeol’s glad to be finished promoting MAMA and judging from Lu Han’s triumphant grin when EXO-M return from China, he’s not the only one.
“The song doesn’t even make sense in Chinese,” Chanyeol hears Lu Han complaining to a half asleep Minseok one night. “It just comes off weirdly incestuous if you really think about it.”
Chanyeol doesn’t get it and judging by the look on Jongdae’s face he doesn’t understand either. Half a year of Beijing air and touring across China seems to have failed Jongdae in the realm of linguistics entirely. He shrugs.
“No one understands MAMA. It doesn’t even make much sense in Korean, if you think about it,” he tells Chanyeol, stretching his arms behind his neck with a carefree air. Chanyeol likes to think otherwise. It’s just the Gregorian Chanting and Jongin’s screamo section that gets to him sometimes.
All in all, they've reached a silent consensus that any song from the album, with the obvious exception of Two Moons, would have made a better title track. Chanyeol doesn’t take that jibe personally and if he’s honest with himself Angel is actually his favorite track to perform live.
For starters, Kyungsoo looks a lot more at peace without the weight of the opening high note breathing down his neck. He’s fluid, dancing and singing in the same way he did pre-debut without a care in the world for the camera or crowds. He jumps around, a little hyperactive, off in his own little world at times. Chanyeol misses that too.
The first time they perform Angel live outside of their debut showcase, Chanyeol sees Kyungsoo tense up again out of the corner of his eye.
Kyungsoo doesn’t let the nervousness show on his face. It comes out in other forms, the tremble of his legs right before it’s his turn and the nervous tapping of his fingers against his mic when no one is looking. His nervous habit of touching his face when it’s his turn in the limelight is painfully obvious to Chanyeol. Not everyone can execute a sexy lip swipe as candidly as Jongin.
They’re a verse and then some in when Kyungsoo starts tapping again, his other hand gripped tightly into a fist and without thinking Chanyeol reaches a hand out.
Kyungsoo gives him a wary look.
This isn’t part of the choreography, Kyungsoo mouths seriously, twisting to show his back to the camera. Chanyeol gives him a half shrug moving with the beat and mouths back, I know.
He lifts his hand again, moving it closer to Kyungsoo who keeps casting him suspicious glances. Kyungsoo’s brows twitch a little in effort to not smile when Chanyeol makes a dramatic flipper movement and finally, he caves.
Kyungsoo makes a step forward to bring his hand over when Chanyeol pulls his hand back with a teasing smirk. Kyungsoo’s eyes widen for a second, realizing he’s been cheated before he rounds them on Chanyeol in mock rage.
With his back to the camera, Chanyeol doesn’t hesitate to stick his tongue out. The message is clear and Kyungsoo smirks back, bringing his mic to his mouth with confidence that Chanyeol hasn’t seen in months.
They actually complete the high-five a few more times throughout the month and Chanyeol feels a tingle in his spine as the invisible cord between them wraps tighter and tighter with each point of physical contact until it feels nothing but natural to have Kyungsoo at his side.
They finally lay MAMA down into the grave of debuts better off forgotten with the year end Gayo Daejuns. It’s celebrated with the return of Jongin’s original sparkly drop crotch pants and for a second Chanyeol is fearful that they might even crimp his poor, tortured hair for old time’s sake.
They look powerful on stage as EXO. Not M or K, but together. The stage goes without a hitch and it’s not until the encores that Chanyeol remembers it’s no longer April. He’s been an idol for the better half of a year and it’s now freezing outside. The stage costumes are made more out of sequins than any actual cloth that could shield them from the bone-chilling cold.
It helps that EXO-M are with them switching out between verses, but the minimal heat of 6 other bodies on stage does nothing aside from helping them mentality with the knowledge that they suffer together as ‘one’.
Kyungsoo’s lips are tinged blue by the time they’ve finished their encore. Baekhyun’s eyeliner looks permanently frozen in place and Chanyeol is sure the only reason why Jongin is still awake is because it’s so damn cold.
Yet, the crowds still cheer for them enthusiastic as ever. It makes Chanyeol feel guilty.
Sorry we couldn’t do more, please wait for us. It’ll be better when we come back. It’s what they’re all thinking, but they can’t say it out loud here. Instead they bow. The fireworks go off around them as they all head back, eyes watering from the cold and the sensation of a year well done.
They shuffle back and forth and in the midst of the closing, Chanyeol curls a hand around to find Kyungsoo’s stone cold fingers and locks them together briefly. Kyungsoo smiles, or at the very least he tries to in his rigid state. He smoothes his thumb down the back of Chanyeol’s hand and keeps doing it even as the cameras and fans filter out of the area.
Chanyeol’s hair is stiff, possibly frozen by the time they crawl back into the van. At Sehun’s behest the heater is blasted on high, but even then Kyungsoo’s fingers stayed interlocked with Chanyeol’s own making him feel warmer than physically possible out in the tundra.
Thank god, Chanyeol thinks, looping an arm around Baekhyun as Kyungsoo huddles in beside him with Jongin. Sehun keeps rubbing his eyes, clearly exhausted. The heater blows in their faces, harsh and dry against their cheeks. Chanyeol sinks down into his seat with a content sigh and thinks naively, Thank god we’re done with that.
→ PART 2