Round 21: empire, redacted
Title: empire, redacted
Team: Canon/AR
Rating: PG
Fandom: Winner
Pairing: OT5
Summary: Team A loses, and Seungyoon is lost.
Prompt Used: Ash Gray - Little Prince
“I chose the teams wrong,” Yang-CEO tells them, as though he’s offering a salve.
It’s been two days, although, predictably, it feels as though it’s been a lifetime. Two days, since they stood on that stage. Two days, since they’ve been able to sleep. Two days, since they stopped being Team A.
It’s been two days, since they lost.
Yang-CEO looks at each of them. He is thorough, and utterly pitiless. There are bruises under Minho’s eyes, and a sallow cast to Jinwoo’s skin. They sit crowded together like children. Seungyoon thinks, I wouldn’t have picked us either.
No one’s telling them anything. Their manager says it’s still being decided, but even he looks unconvinced. Taehyun keeps replaying the first episode of WIN, rewinding Yang-CEO’s message to the fledgling teams, “disbanded, disbanded, disbanded”, until Minho disconnected the router and hid it. Seungyoon doesn’t know who to believe. He doesn’t know what he wants to believe.
The CEO’s mouth twists, as if Team A has, once again, disappointed him.
“To be honest, “ he says, “I haven’t decided what to do with you. Some of you, of course, deserve to debut-” he pauses for a moment to let that barb take hold, “and we don’t want to let this all go to waste, but,” he shrugs. “You’re not a priority. That’s not to say we don’t care, and of course we’ll be discussing your future over the next few months, but for now…”
He smiles, a natural predator. ”Wait. Relax. You’ll be the first to know what I decide.”
It’s October, and Team B will debut in three months.
There are no online guides, Seungyoon learns, for repairing your coworkers’ shattered dreams while simultaneously keeping yourself from going insane. There’s alcohol, though, and that’s as good a substitute as any.
True to Yang-CEO’s promise, no one really cares about them right now. Fellow trainees and production staff alike have been avoiding them as if they’re marked men. Their vocal trainer took one look at them and canceled their lessons for the week - “It isn’t worth teaching you if you’re not going to learn”, he says before sending them home. Their manager is busy running around doing damage control, or maybe he's drinking too, Seungyoon doesn't know.
For right now, at least, they're has-beens. No one but the most dedicated fan really gives a shit about Song Minho buying booze at 10 in the morning, and then again at 2 and 8. They toast Yang-CEO for giving up on them, and Team B for beating them, and Minho for going out and getting them more shitty beer.
"I'll have to go back to the island," Jinwoo tells them in a moaning, slushy voice, "and I'll have to learn how to fish."
"We could get a time machine," says Taehyun, "and go back in time to right before YG announces the results and kill him."
"I hate fishing," says Jinwoo.
"This is actually hell," says Seunghoon, before he passes out. They stack empty beer cans on top of his head until they topple to the floor. It makes them feel a little bit better.
It is a kind of hell, though. There’s Yang-CEO’s promise, “someday”, but for now they’re in this limbo stretching on and on with no end in sight. They drink, and they sleep (badly), and they feel obscurity overtaking them with every passing minute. (Or at least Taehyun does; Minho tells him to shut the fuck up and drink more.)
Sometimes, in these hazy days, Seungyoon will find himself suspended in mid-sentence. His heart pounds in his chest, too quickly to be healthy; his heart pulses in his throat, as if his lungs might puncture. He’s a failure, he thinks. He has failed.
It echoes in his ears, the victory cry: Team B, Team B, Team B.
They see the other team - they see Winner - in passing, but never long enough. Hanbin corners Seungyoon in a practice room and tells him, nervously, how sorry he is. Seungyoon shrugs him off, forcing himself to smile and laugh and offer congratulations, the gracious loser. He means it, which is the strange part. He can’t feel resentment, or sympathy, or much of anything but a low, dull headache. He’s happy for Hanbin, he realizes, happy to see him a winner. He just wishes it came at a different price.
Minho’s wallet runs dry just about the same time as the pity of their teachers. They’re told, in no unequivocal terms, that they had better be in the studio first thing Monday morning, ready and eager to work. They all play at protesting, but Seungyoon can see the barely-hidden relief in their faces. Maybe they want to prove themselves; maybe they’re too close to drinking themselves into incompetence for comfort.
It’s strange, to be back in the studio. When Seungyoon thought about life after WIN, he imagined - anything but this. Their teachers continue on right where they’d left off; to Seungyoon’s annoyance his first vocal lesson is “Go Up”, reworking his losing performance over and over until his teacher declares it competent. He’d imagined commercials and interviews; he gets the same warm ups he’s worked on for years.
The other trainees don’t really talk to them. They’re not going out of their way to avoid them, but there’s a distance in the practice room, us versus them, winners versus losers. Yang-CEO continues to ignore them; their teachers continue to ride them. Dara starts cornering Jinwoo in the hallway for conciliatory hugs; Jinwoo starts enlisting Taehyun to check around corners for him.
Their friends try to be understanding. Jiho and Jihoon take Minho out a few times to get fucked up, but even they can’t offer much beyond a temporary distraction. They don’t get it, even the ones who have struggled to debut. They offer advice and consolation and distractions, but it all falls just a little too short.
Eventually the consolation messages stop coming; everyone else has moved on, the silence seems to say, why can’t you?
It’s hard to sleep. His dreams parade a montage of his failures before him: he sees himself letting Jinwoo fade away, pushing Taehyun down, accepting leadership in lieu of Minho, growing too cocky to imagine losing. He wakes up in a cold sweat, paralyzed with guilt and rage; he sleepwalks through his lessons, as if he’s hardly even there.
“You have to actually pretend to care,” his vocal trainer tells him, looking disappointed. “You can’t act like you’re too good to be here, Seungyoon, or else you really will get cut.”
‘I don’t think I’m too good to be here,’ Seungyoon wants to tell him, ‘just the opposite,’ but he knows it will fall on deaf ears. Instead he does his scales again, and winces at the imperfections, and tries to forget that it’s his fault, it’s all, all his fault.
Winner’s debut date is officially set, and the YG Entertainment machine kicks into gear. Hanbin produces an abundance of songs, all good enough to chart; the photoshoots and haircuts begin in earnest. Seungyoon is enlisted to help mix the final album cut, which is an exercise in both humility and treachery.
“It’s good,” he admits to Seunghoon, “probably better than anything I could have done.” He’s not sure he’s just trying to be the bigger person or if that’s actually true, but it’s too painful to dwell in that alternate reality so he lets it go.
Teddy asks Seungyoon if he’s interested in helping them with some upcoming projects, maybe even taking on a few of his own in the future. “I think you’ve got a real talent,” he says, and seems to really mean it. It’s a lifeline, one Seungyoon feels dangerously close to grabbing. He doesn’t tell anyone about it, though; it feels like a betrayal.
“What if I leave?” Minho asks him.
Seungyoon doesn’t answer him for a moment. It’s a thought they’ve all had, even if none of them have admitted it. Even Jinwoo is being pushed to the breaking point: it’s grating to see Winner’s posters littering the hallways, to laugh when reporters ask them how it feels to see their former competitors vault ahead. Taehyun talks about going back to art school. Seungyoon thinks about his lifeline.
“Don’t,” he says finally. “At least, for right now. Stay.” It’s cowardice, to drag Minho down with them, and Minho’s expression says he knows it too. But Minho smiles at him and shrugs, like it was only a passing fancy, like it isn’t the most rational decision.
Seungyoon is scared of dragging them all down with him, but he’s even more afraid of letting them go.
They try composing again. Or, their teachers threaten them with elimination if they don’t start composing again. Seungyoon turns it into a mandatory group bonding session.
They scrap the songs written in the last frenzied weeks of the competition. It’s too painful revisiting them now; they’re hopeful songs, built to debut with. Besides, Taehyun says, “I hate writing pop songs.” Everyone tells him to shut up.
It helps, composing, if only temporarily. They fall into their old routine, sneaking verses in between vocal training and dance practice. Their songs are mostly scraps, too rough around the edges to come to much of anything, but it keeps them sane. They hang back in the practice room after everyone else goes home, refining lyrics and remixing old failures. Jinwoo acts as a vocal guinea pig, while Seunghoon sleeps or makes fun of Taehyun’s lyrics.
It’s different, composing without the constant threat of competition hanging around their necks. Seunghoon and Minho try to teach Jinwoo how to rap, which ends up being a not-so-beautiful disaster; Taehyun and Seungyoon stay up for a 48 hours straight composition session, the results of which their teacher calls “amazingly unlistenable”.
It feels precious, these moments, if just on the edge of fleeting. He wants this, Seungyoon realizes. He wants this music; he wants their voices, together.
Winner debuts, and they all get drunk.
(It's number one, it breaks all the records, it’s an instant classic, it makes a lot of money.)
In interviews, Bobby says that Team A is still working hard, and that they still hang out a lot, and that they're all really excited to see what they do in the future.
In their apartment, Taehyun does shots, and Seunghoon and Minho argue over which solo is better, Junhoe or Hanbin's. Jinwoo is laughing; Taehyun is flushed. They lean over each other, poking at the screen and laughing. Taehyun tries to imitate Bobby’s rap solo; Minho tells him, his voice dead, that he’s glad Taehyun will never debut.
“We didn’t lose because of my rapping,” Taehyun says, his words slurring slightly. Seunghoon makes an offended noise from the floor. Minho lobs a throw pillow at Taehyun’s head. Jinwoo takes another shot.
Seungyoon doesn’t feel happy, but he doesn’t feel hopeless, either. He watches them all, and he laughs, and he hopes, kind of desperately, that he could stay in this moment forever.
The summons comes the next week. Their manager is tight-lipped and pale. They prod him for information but he bats them away: "He'll tell you everything you need to know." It's just cryptic enough to be terrifying.
The door is closed when they get there. They can hear voices from inside, raised, almost shouting. Seungyoon doubts anyone is about to go to bat for them. Jinwoo is pale. Taehyun is shaking, although he's trying not to show it. Seunghoon touches his shoulders, soothing; Taehyun leans into him, and closes his eyes. The shaking stops.
The losing team will be disbanded.
Seungyoon meets Minho's gaze. They stare at each other, level. If Minho is scared, he's not giving it up. Seungyoon hopes it's the same with him, although he doubts it.
Taehyun says, his voice pitched low enough to be a whisper, "Do you think you'll be able to leave it all behind? If it ends up... If it goes bad. Will it be hard to walk away?"
Seungyoon looks at him. He feels something hot in his throat, burning like a star or a sob. He finds he can't answer. He has nothing to say.
The doors open.
Poll
Team: Canon/AR
Rating: PG
Fandom: Winner
Pairing: OT5
Summary: Team A loses, and Seungyoon is lost.
Prompt Used: Ash Gray - Little Prince
“I chose the teams wrong,” Yang-CEO tells them, as though he’s offering a salve.
It’s been two days, although, predictably, it feels as though it’s been a lifetime. Two days, since they stood on that stage. Two days, since they’ve been able to sleep. Two days, since they stopped being Team A.
It’s been two days, since they lost.
Yang-CEO looks at each of them. He is thorough, and utterly pitiless. There are bruises under Minho’s eyes, and a sallow cast to Jinwoo’s skin. They sit crowded together like children. Seungyoon thinks, I wouldn’t have picked us either.
No one’s telling them anything. Their manager says it’s still being decided, but even he looks unconvinced. Taehyun keeps replaying the first episode of WIN, rewinding Yang-CEO’s message to the fledgling teams, “disbanded, disbanded, disbanded”, until Minho disconnected the router and hid it. Seungyoon doesn’t know who to believe. He doesn’t know what he wants to believe.
The CEO’s mouth twists, as if Team A has, once again, disappointed him.
“To be honest, “ he says, “I haven’t decided what to do with you. Some of you, of course, deserve to debut-” he pauses for a moment to let that barb take hold, “and we don’t want to let this all go to waste, but,” he shrugs. “You’re not a priority. That’s not to say we don’t care, and of course we’ll be discussing your future over the next few months, but for now…”
He smiles, a natural predator. ”Wait. Relax. You’ll be the first to know what I decide.”
It’s October, and Team B will debut in three months.
There are no online guides, Seungyoon learns, for repairing your coworkers’ shattered dreams while simultaneously keeping yourself from going insane. There’s alcohol, though, and that’s as good a substitute as any.
True to Yang-CEO’s promise, no one really cares about them right now. Fellow trainees and production staff alike have been avoiding them as if they’re marked men. Their vocal trainer took one look at them and canceled their lessons for the week - “It isn’t worth teaching you if you’re not going to learn”, he says before sending them home. Their manager is busy running around doing damage control, or maybe he's drinking too, Seungyoon doesn't know.
For right now, at least, they're has-beens. No one but the most dedicated fan really gives a shit about Song Minho buying booze at 10 in the morning, and then again at 2 and 8. They toast Yang-CEO for giving up on them, and Team B for beating them, and Minho for going out and getting them more shitty beer.
"I'll have to go back to the island," Jinwoo tells them in a moaning, slushy voice, "and I'll have to learn how to fish."
"We could get a time machine," says Taehyun, "and go back in time to right before YG announces the results and kill him."
"I hate fishing," says Jinwoo.
"This is actually hell," says Seunghoon, before he passes out. They stack empty beer cans on top of his head until they topple to the floor. It makes them feel a little bit better.
It is a kind of hell, though. There’s Yang-CEO’s promise, “someday”, but for now they’re in this limbo stretching on and on with no end in sight. They drink, and they sleep (badly), and they feel obscurity overtaking them with every passing minute. (Or at least Taehyun does; Minho tells him to shut the fuck up and drink more.)
Sometimes, in these hazy days, Seungyoon will find himself suspended in mid-sentence. His heart pounds in his chest, too quickly to be healthy; his heart pulses in his throat, as if his lungs might puncture. He’s a failure, he thinks. He has failed.
It echoes in his ears, the victory cry: Team B, Team B, Team B.
They see the other team - they see Winner - in passing, but never long enough. Hanbin corners Seungyoon in a practice room and tells him, nervously, how sorry he is. Seungyoon shrugs him off, forcing himself to smile and laugh and offer congratulations, the gracious loser. He means it, which is the strange part. He can’t feel resentment, or sympathy, or much of anything but a low, dull headache. He’s happy for Hanbin, he realizes, happy to see him a winner. He just wishes it came at a different price.
Minho’s wallet runs dry just about the same time as the pity of their teachers. They’re told, in no unequivocal terms, that they had better be in the studio first thing Monday morning, ready and eager to work. They all play at protesting, but Seungyoon can see the barely-hidden relief in their faces. Maybe they want to prove themselves; maybe they’re too close to drinking themselves into incompetence for comfort.
It’s strange, to be back in the studio. When Seungyoon thought about life after WIN, he imagined - anything but this. Their teachers continue on right where they’d left off; to Seungyoon’s annoyance his first vocal lesson is “Go Up”, reworking his losing performance over and over until his teacher declares it competent. He’d imagined commercials and interviews; he gets the same warm ups he’s worked on for years.
The other trainees don’t really talk to them. They’re not going out of their way to avoid them, but there’s a distance in the practice room, us versus them, winners versus losers. Yang-CEO continues to ignore them; their teachers continue to ride them. Dara starts cornering Jinwoo in the hallway for conciliatory hugs; Jinwoo starts enlisting Taehyun to check around corners for him.
Their friends try to be understanding. Jiho and Jihoon take Minho out a few times to get fucked up, but even they can’t offer much beyond a temporary distraction. They don’t get it, even the ones who have struggled to debut. They offer advice and consolation and distractions, but it all falls just a little too short.
Eventually the consolation messages stop coming; everyone else has moved on, the silence seems to say, why can’t you?
It’s hard to sleep. His dreams parade a montage of his failures before him: he sees himself letting Jinwoo fade away, pushing Taehyun down, accepting leadership in lieu of Minho, growing too cocky to imagine losing. He wakes up in a cold sweat, paralyzed with guilt and rage; he sleepwalks through his lessons, as if he’s hardly even there.
“You have to actually pretend to care,” his vocal trainer tells him, looking disappointed. “You can’t act like you’re too good to be here, Seungyoon, or else you really will get cut.”
‘I don’t think I’m too good to be here,’ Seungyoon wants to tell him, ‘just the opposite,’ but he knows it will fall on deaf ears. Instead he does his scales again, and winces at the imperfections, and tries to forget that it’s his fault, it’s all, all his fault.
Winner’s debut date is officially set, and the YG Entertainment machine kicks into gear. Hanbin produces an abundance of songs, all good enough to chart; the photoshoots and haircuts begin in earnest. Seungyoon is enlisted to help mix the final album cut, which is an exercise in both humility and treachery.
“It’s good,” he admits to Seunghoon, “probably better than anything I could have done.” He’s not sure he’s just trying to be the bigger person or if that’s actually true, but it’s too painful to dwell in that alternate reality so he lets it go.
Teddy asks Seungyoon if he’s interested in helping them with some upcoming projects, maybe even taking on a few of his own in the future. “I think you’ve got a real talent,” he says, and seems to really mean it. It’s a lifeline, one Seungyoon feels dangerously close to grabbing. He doesn’t tell anyone about it, though; it feels like a betrayal.
“What if I leave?” Minho asks him.
Seungyoon doesn’t answer him for a moment. It’s a thought they’ve all had, even if none of them have admitted it. Even Jinwoo is being pushed to the breaking point: it’s grating to see Winner’s posters littering the hallways, to laugh when reporters ask them how it feels to see their former competitors vault ahead. Taehyun talks about going back to art school. Seungyoon thinks about his lifeline.
“Don’t,” he says finally. “At least, for right now. Stay.” It’s cowardice, to drag Minho down with them, and Minho’s expression says he knows it too. But Minho smiles at him and shrugs, like it was only a passing fancy, like it isn’t the most rational decision.
Seungyoon is scared of dragging them all down with him, but he’s even more afraid of letting them go.
They try composing again. Or, their teachers threaten them with elimination if they don’t start composing again. Seungyoon turns it into a mandatory group bonding session.
They scrap the songs written in the last frenzied weeks of the competition. It’s too painful revisiting them now; they’re hopeful songs, built to debut with. Besides, Taehyun says, “I hate writing pop songs.” Everyone tells him to shut up.
It helps, composing, if only temporarily. They fall into their old routine, sneaking verses in between vocal training and dance practice. Their songs are mostly scraps, too rough around the edges to come to much of anything, but it keeps them sane. They hang back in the practice room after everyone else goes home, refining lyrics and remixing old failures. Jinwoo acts as a vocal guinea pig, while Seunghoon sleeps or makes fun of Taehyun’s lyrics.
It’s different, composing without the constant threat of competition hanging around their necks. Seunghoon and Minho try to teach Jinwoo how to rap, which ends up being a not-so-beautiful disaster; Taehyun and Seungyoon stay up for a 48 hours straight composition session, the results of which their teacher calls “amazingly unlistenable”.
It feels precious, these moments, if just on the edge of fleeting. He wants this, Seungyoon realizes. He wants this music; he wants their voices, together.
Winner debuts, and they all get drunk.
(It's number one, it breaks all the records, it’s an instant classic, it makes a lot of money.)
In interviews, Bobby says that Team A is still working hard, and that they still hang out a lot, and that they're all really excited to see what they do in the future.
In their apartment, Taehyun does shots, and Seunghoon and Minho argue over which solo is better, Junhoe or Hanbin's. Jinwoo is laughing; Taehyun is flushed. They lean over each other, poking at the screen and laughing. Taehyun tries to imitate Bobby’s rap solo; Minho tells him, his voice dead, that he’s glad Taehyun will never debut.
“We didn’t lose because of my rapping,” Taehyun says, his words slurring slightly. Seunghoon makes an offended noise from the floor. Minho lobs a throw pillow at Taehyun’s head. Jinwoo takes another shot.
Seungyoon doesn’t feel happy, but he doesn’t feel hopeless, either. He watches them all, and he laughs, and he hopes, kind of desperately, that he could stay in this moment forever.
The summons comes the next week. Their manager is tight-lipped and pale. They prod him for information but he bats them away: "He'll tell you everything you need to know." It's just cryptic enough to be terrifying.
The door is closed when they get there. They can hear voices from inside, raised, almost shouting. Seungyoon doubts anyone is about to go to bat for them. Jinwoo is pale. Taehyun is shaking, although he's trying not to show it. Seunghoon touches his shoulders, soothing; Taehyun leans into him, and closes his eyes. The shaking stops.
The losing team will be disbanded.
Seungyoon meets Minho's gaze. They stare at each other, level. If Minho is scared, he's not giving it up. Seungyoon hopes it's the same with him, although he doubts it.
Taehyun says, his voice pitched low enough to be a whisper, "Do you think you'll be able to leave it all behind? If it ends up... If it goes bad. Will it be hard to walk away?"
Seungyoon looks at him. He feels something hot in his throat, burning like a star or a sob. He finds he can't answer. He has nothing to say.
The doors open.
Poll