Round 25: Playing Hard To Get Lucky
Title: Playing Hard To Get Lucky
Team: Canon/AR
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: BIGFLO
Pairing: Gen; Jiwook and Hyuntae-centric
Summary: Jiwook and Hyuntae go out to make bad decisions. Along the way, Jiwook questions whether his entire life might be one giant bad decision.
Warnings: Alcohol. Lots of alcohol. Lots.
Author's Note: To all of the wonderful members of Team Canon/agents of Team Spy: you have been such an amazing team, and I have really enjoyed spending these last few months with you. May we have many more sunglasses-devil-emoji adventures to come ... and, of course, never ever ever get our shit together. (Title is from Block B's Jackpot. Please suspend your disbelief. Suspend all of it.)
Prompt Used: Block B - Jackpot: lyrics + two supplementaries (heavily based on supplementaries)
Three hours into Bigflo's weekend off, Hyuntae kicks open the dorm's bedroom door and ruins everything. "Come on. We're going out."
Jiwook doesn't look up from his phone until a snapback and a leather jacket hit him in the face. Until then, he continues to hold onto hope that maybe Hyuntae will spontaneously dissolve into the atmosphere and his peace and quiet will return. "Where are we going?"
"To make bad decisions, obviously."
"Why?"
"Because we can."
From a factual standpoint, the logic is sound. After all, no one is exactly stopping them - Jungkyun's gone to visit his parents, Yuseong's taken his hamsters to some kind of pet show, and Byeonghwa, as usual, is trying to pretend they don't exist. They have been left entirely unsupervised. These are the exact circumstances in which they're supposed to get in trouble. In fact, Hyuntae would probably argue it's their solemn duty as maknaes to misbehave. Of course there are their idol reputations to worry about, but Jiwook's not too concerned; the likelihood of them being recognised is fairly low, and at the moment, their reputation mostly consists of "climbed a giant ladder in a music video" and "wrote horrible calligraphy poems involving hamburgers". At any rate, Jiwook doubts they'll do anything wild enough to have real consequences. The worst-case scenario is probably receiving the Very Official CEO Version of "don't do the thing again". With this considered, Jiwook puts on the clothing that was flung at him and rolls off his bed towards the door.
"Okay."
"That was way too easy." Hyuntae shakes his head, but his mouth is curving into a grin. "You're the hyung here. Aren't you supposed to give me some shit about responsibility and making good choices or whatever?"
Jiwook rummages in the closet for a pair of shoes. "That's Jungkyun's job."
"He's not here."
"Exactly."
Hyuntae's grin widens. "Fair enough."
The night streets of Hongdae are ablaze with neon lights, humming with the songs of street performers and punctuated with the yells of drunken groups stumbling out of nightclubs. Throngs of university students crowd the pavement, occasionally veering off into the bars and cafes cluttering each block. In uneven intervals, the breeze carries over different street food smells. Being out here in the open air, Jiwook feels alive again. There's adrenaline in the flow of so many sights and sounds, an energy shared like a common thread between all the people caught up in it; Jiwook can only describe it as the rush of living.
Hyuntae is looking up at the half-moon in the sky. Most people wouldn't understand why, not with so much to see at eye level, but Jiwook gets it. There's no moon on their practice room ceiling.
Hyuntae catches him looking and gives the moon a lazy half-smile. "Kinda nice to get out, isn't it?"
It is. After weeks locked up in them, rooms start to feel stuffy - not just physically, but mentally. Out here, with no walls boxing him in, Jiwook feels like he can breathe again. He's gotten used to that high-pressure feeling of comeback practices, where it feels like they've never made enough progress, and a split-second mistake is enough to offset a whole hour of work. The unhurried pace of the Hongdae streets has become something foreign to him. It's been a while since he's had the luxury of walking with no urgency behind his steps, or going somewhere that isn't part of a convoluted map of practices and schedules and filmings and three-hour naps that has to be raced through in a very specific order.
What Jiwook ends up saying is, "Yeah." It's a good enough answer for Hyuntae.
Jiwook recognises a few of the nightclubs they pass - he might've been in a few of them himself, back before this whole boy band thing performed a magical vanishing act on his social life - but they don't stop at any of those. Hyuntae leads him past the pulsing beats emanating from the clubs and down a much quieter side street, where they duck into a shady-looking bar. Despite the crowds in the more travelled areas, this place is almost empty.
"This is more like it," says Hyuntae. "It's time to get drunk off our shapely, appealing asses."
"That's probably a bad idea," Jiwook says, with no real conviction.
"Yes, it's a terrible idea. That's exactly why we're doing it." Hyuntae slaps him on the back. "I knew you'd catch on eventually. Let's get started."
As it turns out, Hyuntae thinks "just fuck us up" is an acceptable drink order. It's less than a half hour before he's leaning on Jiwook's shoulder, reminiscing about "the good old days". "The good old days", in Hyuntae's view, apparently consists of a highlight reel of some of Jiwook's most unfortunate moments. They've already covered Jiwook falling off things, falling down things, losing every game ever played on Bigflo TV, and being forced to sleep outside on a mountain. They are now entering a more recent phase of history.
"Remember when you lost a bet to me and your punishment was to do a girl group dance in the middle of a street in Hongdae?" Hyuntae smiles peacefully. "Oh wait. That was five minutes ago. And you still owe me that dance."
"Fuck you," says Jiwook, in an amicable tone, and shoves Hyuntae off his shoulder.
(In retrospect, this was probably Jiwook's own fault. He should've run for his life as soon as Hyuntae gave him that cheshire cat smile and said, "I want to play a game." The last time Jiwook heard that, it was in a movie where people had to saw their own limbs off. That line never foreshadows anything good.)
"Not in public. I'm a lady," Hyuntae counters, and downs his last shot. "Come on, let's get out of here."
Jiwook's eyes widen. "Wait, we're not really going to - ?"
"Of course not. I know how little you make. You couldn't afford me." Hyuntae cackles. "No, we're just moving this party to a second location. Ah, poor, naive Jiwook. You only wish."
They end up in another bar. This one is louder, a little more wild, with a makeshift dance floor packed full of drunk students jumping up and down to some local indie rock band Jiwook's never heard of. The chaos is welcome, because with the drummer breaking a drumstick up in the front and tossing it into the dance floor crowd, Jiwook and Hyuntae blend into the background more easily when they stake out a small table in the far corner with their (many) drinks. Noisy wild chaos is a little more Hyuntae's scene than Jiwook's, but it's cool. At this point, Jiwook is just along for the ride.
Jiwook got used to Hyuntae pretty quickly, mostly. He got used to Hyuntae's shit-talking, his loud and boisterous personality, even the way he easily sinks into the nascent rhythm of a freestyle rap when Jiwook takes a little longer to get his bearings. The thing Jiwook thinks he might never get used to is how Hyuntae talks about success like it's a given.
"It'll be great when we get really famous," says Hyuntae. "We're gonna get so rich. Even though we'll be growing older, our wallets will be growing fatter. When I golf, the caddie will say "nice shot" even if I miss, just to kiss my ass."
Jiwook makes a derisive noise. "You stole that from a Block B song."
"Yeah, but I added the ass-kissing part."
They drink in silence for a while. Silence is very uncharacteristic of Hyuntae, who has been known to let out a bloodcurdling shriek just for the sake of making any sound at all. Although it's possible that he's actually listening to the discordant jangle of the band's guitarist fumbling a chord and the vocalist howling over it, it's more likely that he's making a prolonged effort to have a deep and serious thought about life. As Hyuntae never stays quiet for long, Jiwook soon finds out.
"Here's the thing about the entertainment industry." Hyuntae's consonants are a bit slurred, but he says it like he's confident he's figured out the secrets of the universe. "They're greedy. The music companies, the broadcasting agencies, the everyone. They're greedy, because they're humans. Humans are so greedy. And the thing is, nothing's changing - it's just the same mistakes, over and over, the same fuck-ups. Because they don't want to change. Because people are still greedy. Because people are still humans."
Jiwook must be way more drunk than he thought, because at this very moment, he feels like Hyuntae actually has disclosed the secrets of the universe. "Damn. That's deep, man."
"Yeah." Hyuntae nods slowly, gazing off into the distance, and then his eyes light up with a new train of thought. "So is the ocean. Did you know scientists only know, like, 5% of what's going on in the ocean? There could be Atlantis down there. There could be dinosaurs - like, water T-Rexes. There could even be a portal to Neptune."
"Theoretically, anything is possible," Jiwook points out. This blows Hyuntae's mind enough to shut him up for a full thirty seconds.
Although he doesn't really want to think about it, Hyuntae is actually kind of right - well, about the greed thing, at least (Jiwook's going to have to consult the internet about the ocean thing before he makes a final decision). Jiwook can feel the greed in the atmosphere, and it scares him a little sometimes. Though Bigflo is a little more insulated from it than some other groups due to their relative obscurity and slightly more lenient management, that doesn't mean they're not still playing the same game as all those other groups. They can still feel the pressure of high expectations, and how quickly groups can fold under that pressure or fall short of those superhuman standards. They've seen how easily it happened to the two groups Jungkyun was in before joining Bigflo, and it could happen to them too. Jiwook wonders if, as the pressure gets worse, the insulation will begin to peel away until they are fully exposed to the greed.
When he looks at Hyuntae, Hyuntae is deep in thought too. "If Godzilla crawled out of the ocean and started attacking Seoul, would you stay and fight him, or would you flee?"
"I'd run for my fucking life," says Jiwook, and drains his drink.
Down another dark side street, they light two cigarettes from the pack in Hyuntae's jacket pocket. Jiwook's balance and depth perception are no longer keeping up with their current activity level, so he leans against the front of a closed restaurant as he inhales the first smoky buzz of nicotine. A cluster of club-hopping girls totters past the mouth of the alley on impossibly high heels, and Jiwook suppresses a snort at the way Hyuntae's eyes follow them.
"Want to go in there next?" Hyuntae asks, indicating the nightclub on the corner where he must have theorised the girls are headed. "We could dance."
Jiwook lets out a horrible groan. "No."
"You're a dancer. Don't you want to dance?"
"All we ever do is dance." Even thinking about dancing hurts. Jiwook takes another drag from his cigarette and tries to block out the way the endless dance practices of the past week have left him with sore muscles and aching joints. Every alteration he's had to make to their choreography only lengthened the process, until the early morning hours blended together into a 10-second loop of the same difficult section played over the steady rhythm of the throbbing blood flow to his swollen ankle. Even during their weekend off, he still finds himself replaying that section in his head, remembering how the beat synchronised perfectly with each stab of pain.
"So what harm will a little more dancing do?" Hyuntae's smile is conniving. Jiwook shakes his head.
"We are not dancing tonight."
"Fine, fine."
Already, Jiwook's mind is back in their practice room. He tries to keep it there, because it's better than thinking of what it will be like to perform their new choreography on a stage or a music video set. It's surprising how quickly their stage outfits can begin to feel like straightjackets, and how heavy their layers of jewellery can become. Under the heat of the lights, it all becomes suffocating in a matter of seconds. Sometimes, it feels less like dancing and more like running for his life to the end of the song. Jiwook doesn't realise he has mentally left Hongdae entirely until he hears Hyuntae's voice back in reality.
"Been working on something for the new album," Hyuntae says, as he stomps out the last cinder of his cigarette.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. It's about this cool handsome guy who's just trying to party, but his friend is being a loser and not wanting to do fun things, so the cool handsome guy kicks his loser friend's ass."
"Sounds to me like the cool handsome guy is the real loser," says Jiwook, and then runs before Hyuntae can get to the ass-kicking part of the plotline.
The chase is pretty anti-climactic. After half a block, Jiwook loses his balance and Hyuntae trips over Jiwook's shoe as he falls. It takes a full sixty seconds and a conveniently-placed cafe fence for them to get disentangled from each other and back on their feet. They agree never to speak of the incident again, and return to their aimless wandering. Somewhere along the line, Hyuntae has obtained a bucket hat with marijuana leaves printed all over it.
"Where are we going?" Jiwook asks, becoming dimly aware that they have meandered through the background of several different things being filmed. He hopes none of them belong to anyone who is famous on the internet.
"I don't know. A booking club?" Hyuntae grins. He's probably joking, but Hyuntae is never entirely joking. Jiwook wrinkles his nose.
"No."
"Ah, that's right. You can't afford it. You'd be too broke to invite any girls to our table. Maybe if you stopped breaking my phone, you'd have money."
It's true, sort of - Jiwook isn't broke, exactly, but he does seem to spend a lot of money on repairing Hyuntae's phone. Given their pitifully small monthly allowances, it's clear that he can't sustain this level of spending for many more breakages. But really, it's not his fault he keeps appearing at the worst possible moments, such as jumping up from under a table or leaping around a corner or bumping into people without looking -
Alright, maybe it's kind of his fault.
As if it was fated, their aimless wandering abruptly halts in front of a neon sign with a microphone on it. The bright red lettering says noraebang, flickering slightly as if to catch their attention. Hyuntae's eyes light up, and he turns to Jiwook with the same cheshire cat smile that always precedes a disaster. "We have arrived."
"No. We're rappers. We can't sing," Jiwook points out.
"We're drunk," Hyuntae shrugs. "We can do anything."
To Jiwook's eternal regret, this actually makes sense.
Disproportionate to its tiny size, the noraebang has a fairly extensive and unusual drink menu. They take full advantage of it. In record time, Jiwook has some kind of pink tropical-fruit-vodka thing that he's pretty sure Hyuntae would make fun of him for drinking if he wasn't halfway through one himself. The lure of the tiny umbrella, it seems, is irresistible to even the most swag of souls.
"Y'know, this is good. This is the life," says Hyuntae, lounging on the unusually shiny sofa cushions as he clicks through the song selections on the screen, holding the remote upside down. "I think it's fair to say, at this point in time, we have officially made it. Who gives a fuck if our whole lives are an uncertain gamble in a hyper-competitive industry that destroys the hopes and dreams of the vast majority of unlucky souls who dare to enter it. Who fucking cares if people think we're stupid for even trying. We have drinks with tiny umbrellas in them. I think we win."
"That's a really good point." Jiwook chews thoughtfully on a mango slice that has somehow found its way into the bottom of his now-empty glass; it appears to be part of an entire fruit salad. "What if success is really measured in tiny umbrellas? We need more tiny umbrellas. And more drinks."
"Fuck the haters," Hyuntae says, very solemnly.
"Fuck the haters," Jiwook repeats.
"Fuck the haters."
"Fuck the haters!"
As it turns out, neither of them know any of the songs Hyuntae's clumsy button-mashing fingers manage to put on. Hyuntae makes a valiant attempt to keep up with the onscreen lyrics, substituting vulgar freestyle raps when his blurry vision fails him, but Jiwook mostly relies on excessive use of tambourine and wild hand gestures.
"We are so talented," says Hyuntae, nearly incomprehensible after they were forced by The Way Of The World to down another round of colourful fruit drinks for their corresponding Tiny Success Umbrellas. "How are we not already worldwide superstars? We are so good."
"We will be worldwide superstars. Tambourine is the universal language," Jiwook assures him, and gives the helpless instrument another dramatic shake. "We have four tiny umbrellas. We will not fail."
"Let us go and take the world by storm." Hyuntae begins to get up from the sofa, then visibly reconsiders after about half a second. "Or, y'know, we could stay here, eat these assorted tropical fruits, and prove everyone wrong a little later?"
"Yeah, that works."
"You should get another tattoo."
"Yeah?"
Jiwook's already got two: a quote on his left arm, and something complicated involving lots of chains and stars on his chest. He's been thinking for a while about getting a third, but never really settled on anything. Except now, the alcohol is telling him that Hyuntae's horrible suggestion is actually an awesome idea, divine inspiration will strike, and he will end up with the most badass tattoo the world has ever seen.
"Yeah. Definitely. I know a place around here."
Here, which consists of whichever direction they marched off in after another hour of mangling SNSD songs, could honestly be anywhere. However, Jiwook doesn't question how or why Hyuntae knows a place. He just looks sideways-down at his right bicep, which suddenly seems surprisingly empty. What it really needs, he thinks, is a tattoo. And so he nods.
"Let's go."
Hyuntae links their arms together and leads him on a swerving, careening path past cat cafes, hip-hop clubs, impromptu concerts and a playground full of people dancing to music Jiwook can't hear. They duck and weave through huge crowds of young people dressed to party, before abruptly detouring through several side streets. Amongst a row of buildings that are mostly dark, up a precarious-looking flight of stairs, there is an unmarked, dimly-lit shop. Hyuntae points to it. "There."
The shop is almost certainly not a legal operation. "You swear this place is good?"
"Yeah. I know at least three people who got inked here. Like, two or something."
The math adds up in Jiwook's alcohol-swirled brain. "Okay."
They head up the narrow, steep stairs, Hyuntae nearly falling twice, and somehow make it in the door. Sample designs line the walls, along with an assortment of unusual decorations and a random clown mask that's kind of freaking Jiwook the fuck out. Swaying a little, Hyuntae detaches himself from Jiwook to call out to a guy lounging on what appears to be a sofa in the corner.
"Hey, can you do the thing?"
The guy rises out of the shadows like a behemoth from the depths. "I can do a lot of things, for the right price. You're gonna have to specify."
"This thing," says Hyuntae, grabbing Jiwook's arm and shoving up his sleeve to point at an existing tattoo. "For what price can you do this thing?"
"For a pretty fair price. Depends on what you want." The guy's eyes flick over Jiwook's current ink, both the indicated quote and the portions of his chest tattoo visible above the low neckline of his shirt. "Know what you want?"
"No," says Jiwook. "I'm drunk."
"Just fuck him up," Hyuntae suggests.
With a shrug, the guy swipes Jiwook's credit card, shoves a form into his hand and leads them into a room in the back. Giving the leering clown mask one last glance, Jiwook resigns himself to his fate.
The good thing about being drunk as fuck is Jiwook can't really feel the pain. Instead, the steady buzz of the tattoo machine fades into background noise as he watches Hyuntae draw smiley faces on himself with a permanent marker, intermittently holding a one-sided conversation with the clown mask outside. Jiwook loses track of how much time passes, and also loses track of what exactly it was he finally decided he wanted placed permanently on his arm; he prays it wasn't a tiny umbrella or a tambourine, but he's well aware the worst case scenario is a clown mask in a marijuana-patterned bucket hat. He recalls seeing a lot of squares on the design transfer, which he did approve of, but in a world filled with modern art, a bunch of squares could be anything. He's started wondering if maybe risking a lifetime as a modern art piece was a bad idea, when the buzzing stops and then it's done.
"Damn," says Hyuntae, in a maddeningly unreadable tone. "Damn."
"What?" Jiwook asks, but Hyuntae points to the mirror on the wall. Slowly, Jiwook turns.
A spread of three playing cards is fanned out on Jiwook's right bicep. Nine of hearts, ace of clubs, ten of hearts. Granted wishes, prosperity, success. Triumph over adversity, wealth, dreams come true. Good fortune. Permanent luck engraved into his skin. The outline is red and sore, and he resists the urge to trace it with his fingertips.
"Looks good," Hyuntae finally says, and then turns to the door. "Clown Mask agrees."
It's definitely time to get out of here.
Jiwook gets Hyuntae to take a picture of the tattoo before the guy covers it with a bandage, just in case he forgets what it is again on the way home. After an apathetic run-through of some instructions Jiwook's pretty sure he won't remember, they're back outside again.
"Fuck," says Hyuntae, frowning at Jiwook's phone as they head back in the direction they came. "I fucked up. Somehow, I put that picture on Instagram."
"Maybe no one will ever see it?"
"It's already got two hundred likes."
"Fuck."
Because Jiwook is a man of his word, he executes the dance to Kara's "Mister" perfectly in front of a cafe with a sheep on the sign. It takes about thirty seconds for a group of girls to recognise him, whip out their phones, and document his misadventures for the entirety of the internet. Upon completion of Jiwook's final booty shake, they both flee the scene.
"We're dead as soon as they upload those fancams," says Jiwook, not particularly bothered, as they sprint past several clothing stores. "At least I've led a fairly decent life."
"Yeah, we've had some good times," sighs Hyuntae.
It's true. Jiwook thinks especially of the time Hyuntae tried to filibuster a dance practice with a freestyle rap about how the other members needed to stop nagging him for leaving his underwear all over the floor; he made it about five minutes in before Byeonghwa threw a pair of socks at his face and cut the whole affair short. Or the time one of Yuseong's hamsters escaped and Hyuntae sat on top of a table intermittently screaming for an hour. There was also time Hyuntae got Ken from VIXX's number, tried to send him a text, and fell victim to the worst autocorrect fail in history without realising until it had already been sent. The time they set up a hidden camera where people jumped out of a box and scared the fuck out of Hyuntae.
Now that he thinks about it, a lot of his good memories involve terrible things happening to Hyuntae. Maybe because it's a nice change from Jiwook himself being the unlucky one.
"Well, the good times aren't over yet. We're not dead until we go home," Hyuntae grins.
"We should go shopping," says Jiwook.
"Aren't you broke?"
"Oh. Right. Damn."
As it turns out, Jiwook has just enough left in his wallet for one last meal. They grab street food on their way to Hyuntae's favourite 24-hour samgyeopsal place. It reminds Jiwook of the Busan street fair they went to back when they were filming Bigflo TV. It had food on sticks, which, he thinks, is a good memory that doesn't involve the humiliation of Hyuntae. That was a good day, wandering through the bustle and noise and delicious smells of the fair with the other four Bigflo members. He hopes he looks back on tonight just as fondly, and not as a giant train wreck of mistakes.
Jiwook realises he's said it out loud when Hyuntae snorts, stuffing another tteokboki in his mouth. "Hey, a giant train wreck of mistakes is what we set out for. That sounds like mission accomplished to me."
They get lost twice on the way to the samgyeopsal restaurant. Taking this into consideration, along with a careful review of the night's events, they opt out of ordering any more soju.
"We should've tried to get into a VIP area somewhere," Hyuntae says, a bit wistfully, as they crouch over the grill waiting for the meat to cook. Hyuntae keeps snipping at it with the scissors and prodding it with the tongs, as if this will speed the process along. "I bet we could've done it."
"Nah." Jiwook shakes his head. "We're not really VIPs. I mean, not yet."
It's the closest he's going to come to that thing Hyuntae does, the one where he talks about success like it's inevitable, but he tries. Hyuntae nods reluctantly. "Fine, not yet. But the next time we come here, we definitely will be."
"How do you know?"
With the way Hyuntae seemed so certain earlier that he had discovered the secrets of the universe, Jiwook expects a similar response. He certainly doesn't expect Hyuntae to shrug. "I don't. No one does. Who the fuck can see the future? But if you want to be successful, you can't go around acting like you think you're gonna fail. Don't half-ass anything, especially your attitude. All I know is, there's gotta be a reason we made it this far, and we damn well didn't get here by acting like we didn't deserve to." The samgyeopsal is sizzling by now, browning on the underside, and Hyuntae begins haphazardly flipping the pieces. "You gotta have the VIP mentality. Go hard or go home, right?"
"Go hard or go home," Jiwook repeats, thoughtfully, before being interrupted by a chorus of notifications from Hyuntae's pocket.
"Fuck," Hyuntae swears, and puts down the tongs to fumble for the source of the noise. When he finally gets his phone out, the screen is filled with KakaoTalk notifications. Jiwook leans over the table and reads upside-down as Hyuntae opens their group chat and begins to scroll.
Byeonghwa (00:04): hey zuk hightop where r u
Byeonghwa (01:10): u comin back?
Byeonghwa (01:41): ok then
Jungkyun (1:43): Where did you guys go?
Jungkyun (2:39): Hello?
Jungkyun (4:51): What are these videos online of Jiwook doing Kara's butt dance??
Jungkyun (5:21): Is that a new tattoo picture on Jiwook's Instagram???
Jungkyun (5:27): CALL ME
Yuseong (06:14): Doori won the pet show last night!! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ
Yuseong (06:15): [photo]
Yuseong (06:15): [photo]
Yuseong (06:15): [photo]
Yuseong (06:16): [photo]
Yuseong (06:16): [photo]
"That's a lot of hamster pictures."
Hyuntae growls. "I don't like hamsters."
"Let me reply." Jiwook grabs Hyuntae's phone, already beginning to type out the first few letters of an inappropriate word. Hyuntae's eyes widen.
"No! Don't acknowledge him! He'll send more hamsters," Hyuntae screeches, and tries to grab the phone back. He yanks hard on it just as Jiwook lets go, and the phone goes flying.
It all happens in slow motion. Jiwook hears Hyuntae's voice in the background, drawn out and horrified, yelling something incomprehensible as the phone performs a graceful arc through the air. He sees Hyuntae make a wild dive for it, a split-second too late to keep it from hitting the floor, and everything comes back into focus with the sickening crack as the phone lands face-down. Hyuntae kneels beside it and picks it up tenderly, gazing with a broken-hearted expression at the glass spiderweb of cracks across the screen. For the fourth time. "My baby. My poor baby." He looks up at Jiwook, his voice accusing as he pets the shattered screen. "What did my phone ever do to you?"
"Fuck," says Jiwook, very elegantly. After tonight's trip, his bank account is officially empty. "Uhh. Can I replace it in a month?"
"Fine, fine," says Hyuntae, "But on one condition. You have to do another girl group dance."
Jiwook has no choice. "Fuck."
"Hey, I had a dream last night," says Hyuntae, as they stumble along down the street with their arms draped over each other's shoulders.
"Yeah?" Jiwook's only half-listening. The other half of his mind is trying to calculate how much he's going to regret those fancams of him performing EXID's Up & Down in front of the samgyeopsal place in Hyuntae's marijuana bucket hat.
"Yeah. It was pretty awesome. I was in an office; I guess I was a CEO or something, someone rich. I was all dressed up - new shoes, tuxedo, everything. I looked damn good. There was this hot secretary bringing me food. I was about to go to some party, a party all for me. Isn't that great?"
"I think that's from a Block B song too." Jiwook yawns. "It is great, though."
"Think that'll ever really happen to us?"
"Who knows."
They walk towards the sunrise, cringing at the light. Jiwook's head is starting to hurt like hell, but he doesn't really care. He's tired in a good way, the pleasant kind of tired that comes with a fun night out, not the horrible bone-aching soul-crushing kind of tired that comes from weeks of nonstop comeback practice. It's a nice change.
But then again, Jiwook can't say he'll mind when the weekend ends and they're back to their usual routine. There are only so many terrible decisions he can make in a row, after all. The idol world might be a difficult and uncertain business, with more detractors than the average line of work, but it doesn't matter. At this moment, with Hyuntae and the others at his side, Jiwook feels like he can take on anything. This comeback won't be easy - it never is - but the thing is, he knows they'll get through it. It's weird, but he feels like they really are going to make it. One day, they'll prove everyone wrong. For now, just by getting this far, they've hit the jackpot.
Poll
Team: Canon/AR
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: BIGFLO
Pairing: Gen; Jiwook and Hyuntae-centric
Summary: Jiwook and Hyuntae go out to make bad decisions. Along the way, Jiwook questions whether his entire life might be one giant bad decision.
Warnings: Alcohol. Lots of alcohol. Lots.
Author's Note: To all of the wonderful members of Team Canon/agents of Team Spy: you have been such an amazing team, and I have really enjoyed spending these last few months with you. May we have many more sunglasses-devil-emoji adventures to come ... and, of course, never ever ever get our shit together. (Title is from Block B's Jackpot. Please suspend your disbelief. Suspend all of it.)
Prompt Used: Block B - Jackpot: lyrics + two supplementaries (heavily based on supplementaries)
Three hours into Bigflo's weekend off, Hyuntae kicks open the dorm's bedroom door and ruins everything. "Come on. We're going out."
Jiwook doesn't look up from his phone until a snapback and a leather jacket hit him in the face. Until then, he continues to hold onto hope that maybe Hyuntae will spontaneously dissolve into the atmosphere and his peace and quiet will return. "Where are we going?"
"To make bad decisions, obviously."
"Why?"
"Because we can."
From a factual standpoint, the logic is sound. After all, no one is exactly stopping them - Jungkyun's gone to visit his parents, Yuseong's taken his hamsters to some kind of pet show, and Byeonghwa, as usual, is trying to pretend they don't exist. They have been left entirely unsupervised. These are the exact circumstances in which they're supposed to get in trouble. In fact, Hyuntae would probably argue it's their solemn duty as maknaes to misbehave. Of course there are their idol reputations to worry about, but Jiwook's not too concerned; the likelihood of them being recognised is fairly low, and at the moment, their reputation mostly consists of "climbed a giant ladder in a music video" and "wrote horrible calligraphy poems involving hamburgers". At any rate, Jiwook doubts they'll do anything wild enough to have real consequences. The worst-case scenario is probably receiving the Very Official CEO Version of "don't do the thing again". With this considered, Jiwook puts on the clothing that was flung at him and rolls off his bed towards the door.
"Okay."
"That was way too easy." Hyuntae shakes his head, but his mouth is curving into a grin. "You're the hyung here. Aren't you supposed to give me some shit about responsibility and making good choices or whatever?"
Jiwook rummages in the closet for a pair of shoes. "That's Jungkyun's job."
"He's not here."
"Exactly."
Hyuntae's grin widens. "Fair enough."
The night streets of Hongdae are ablaze with neon lights, humming with the songs of street performers and punctuated with the yells of drunken groups stumbling out of nightclubs. Throngs of university students crowd the pavement, occasionally veering off into the bars and cafes cluttering each block. In uneven intervals, the breeze carries over different street food smells. Being out here in the open air, Jiwook feels alive again. There's adrenaline in the flow of so many sights and sounds, an energy shared like a common thread between all the people caught up in it; Jiwook can only describe it as the rush of living.
Hyuntae is looking up at the half-moon in the sky. Most people wouldn't understand why, not with so much to see at eye level, but Jiwook gets it. There's no moon on their practice room ceiling.
Hyuntae catches him looking and gives the moon a lazy half-smile. "Kinda nice to get out, isn't it?"
It is. After weeks locked up in them, rooms start to feel stuffy - not just physically, but mentally. Out here, with no walls boxing him in, Jiwook feels like he can breathe again. He's gotten used to that high-pressure feeling of comeback practices, where it feels like they've never made enough progress, and a split-second mistake is enough to offset a whole hour of work. The unhurried pace of the Hongdae streets has become something foreign to him. It's been a while since he's had the luxury of walking with no urgency behind his steps, or going somewhere that isn't part of a convoluted map of practices and schedules and filmings and three-hour naps that has to be raced through in a very specific order.
What Jiwook ends up saying is, "Yeah." It's a good enough answer for Hyuntae.
Jiwook recognises a few of the nightclubs they pass - he might've been in a few of them himself, back before this whole boy band thing performed a magical vanishing act on his social life - but they don't stop at any of those. Hyuntae leads him past the pulsing beats emanating from the clubs and down a much quieter side street, where they duck into a shady-looking bar. Despite the crowds in the more travelled areas, this place is almost empty.
"This is more like it," says Hyuntae. "It's time to get drunk off our shapely, appealing asses."
"That's probably a bad idea," Jiwook says, with no real conviction.
"Yes, it's a terrible idea. That's exactly why we're doing it." Hyuntae slaps him on the back. "I knew you'd catch on eventually. Let's get started."
As it turns out, Hyuntae thinks "just fuck us up" is an acceptable drink order. It's less than a half hour before he's leaning on Jiwook's shoulder, reminiscing about "the good old days". "The good old days", in Hyuntae's view, apparently consists of a highlight reel of some of Jiwook's most unfortunate moments. They've already covered Jiwook falling off things, falling down things, losing every game ever played on Bigflo TV, and being forced to sleep outside on a mountain. They are now entering a more recent phase of history.
"Remember when you lost a bet to me and your punishment was to do a girl group dance in the middle of a street in Hongdae?" Hyuntae smiles peacefully. "Oh wait. That was five minutes ago. And you still owe me that dance."
"Fuck you," says Jiwook, in an amicable tone, and shoves Hyuntae off his shoulder.
(In retrospect, this was probably Jiwook's own fault. He should've run for his life as soon as Hyuntae gave him that cheshire cat smile and said, "I want to play a game." The last time Jiwook heard that, it was in a movie where people had to saw their own limbs off. That line never foreshadows anything good.)
"Not in public. I'm a lady," Hyuntae counters, and downs his last shot. "Come on, let's get out of here."
Jiwook's eyes widen. "Wait, we're not really going to - ?"
"Of course not. I know how little you make. You couldn't afford me." Hyuntae cackles. "No, we're just moving this party to a second location. Ah, poor, naive Jiwook. You only wish."
They end up in another bar. This one is louder, a little more wild, with a makeshift dance floor packed full of drunk students jumping up and down to some local indie rock band Jiwook's never heard of. The chaos is welcome, because with the drummer breaking a drumstick up in the front and tossing it into the dance floor crowd, Jiwook and Hyuntae blend into the background more easily when they stake out a small table in the far corner with their (many) drinks. Noisy wild chaos is a little more Hyuntae's scene than Jiwook's, but it's cool. At this point, Jiwook is just along for the ride.
Jiwook got used to Hyuntae pretty quickly, mostly. He got used to Hyuntae's shit-talking, his loud and boisterous personality, even the way he easily sinks into the nascent rhythm of a freestyle rap when Jiwook takes a little longer to get his bearings. The thing Jiwook thinks he might never get used to is how Hyuntae talks about success like it's a given.
"It'll be great when we get really famous," says Hyuntae. "We're gonna get so rich. Even though we'll be growing older, our wallets will be growing fatter. When I golf, the caddie will say "nice shot" even if I miss, just to kiss my ass."
Jiwook makes a derisive noise. "You stole that from a Block B song."
"Yeah, but I added the ass-kissing part."
They drink in silence for a while. Silence is very uncharacteristic of Hyuntae, who has been known to let out a bloodcurdling shriek just for the sake of making any sound at all. Although it's possible that he's actually listening to the discordant jangle of the band's guitarist fumbling a chord and the vocalist howling over it, it's more likely that he's making a prolonged effort to have a deep and serious thought about life. As Hyuntae never stays quiet for long, Jiwook soon finds out.
"Here's the thing about the entertainment industry." Hyuntae's consonants are a bit slurred, but he says it like he's confident he's figured out the secrets of the universe. "They're greedy. The music companies, the broadcasting agencies, the everyone. They're greedy, because they're humans. Humans are so greedy. And the thing is, nothing's changing - it's just the same mistakes, over and over, the same fuck-ups. Because they don't want to change. Because people are still greedy. Because people are still humans."
Jiwook must be way more drunk than he thought, because at this very moment, he feels like Hyuntae actually has disclosed the secrets of the universe. "Damn. That's deep, man."
"Yeah." Hyuntae nods slowly, gazing off into the distance, and then his eyes light up with a new train of thought. "So is the ocean. Did you know scientists only know, like, 5% of what's going on in the ocean? There could be Atlantis down there. There could be dinosaurs - like, water T-Rexes. There could even be a portal to Neptune."
"Theoretically, anything is possible," Jiwook points out. This blows Hyuntae's mind enough to shut him up for a full thirty seconds.
Although he doesn't really want to think about it, Hyuntae is actually kind of right - well, about the greed thing, at least (Jiwook's going to have to consult the internet about the ocean thing before he makes a final decision). Jiwook can feel the greed in the atmosphere, and it scares him a little sometimes. Though Bigflo is a little more insulated from it than some other groups due to their relative obscurity and slightly more lenient management, that doesn't mean they're not still playing the same game as all those other groups. They can still feel the pressure of high expectations, and how quickly groups can fold under that pressure or fall short of those superhuman standards. They've seen how easily it happened to the two groups Jungkyun was in before joining Bigflo, and it could happen to them too. Jiwook wonders if, as the pressure gets worse, the insulation will begin to peel away until they are fully exposed to the greed.
When he looks at Hyuntae, Hyuntae is deep in thought too. "If Godzilla crawled out of the ocean and started attacking Seoul, would you stay and fight him, or would you flee?"
"I'd run for my fucking life," says Jiwook, and drains his drink.
Down another dark side street, they light two cigarettes from the pack in Hyuntae's jacket pocket. Jiwook's balance and depth perception are no longer keeping up with their current activity level, so he leans against the front of a closed restaurant as he inhales the first smoky buzz of nicotine. A cluster of club-hopping girls totters past the mouth of the alley on impossibly high heels, and Jiwook suppresses a snort at the way Hyuntae's eyes follow them.
"Want to go in there next?" Hyuntae asks, indicating the nightclub on the corner where he must have theorised the girls are headed. "We could dance."
Jiwook lets out a horrible groan. "No."
"You're a dancer. Don't you want to dance?"
"All we ever do is dance." Even thinking about dancing hurts. Jiwook takes another drag from his cigarette and tries to block out the way the endless dance practices of the past week have left him with sore muscles and aching joints. Every alteration he's had to make to their choreography only lengthened the process, until the early morning hours blended together into a 10-second loop of the same difficult section played over the steady rhythm of the throbbing blood flow to his swollen ankle. Even during their weekend off, he still finds himself replaying that section in his head, remembering how the beat synchronised perfectly with each stab of pain.
"So what harm will a little more dancing do?" Hyuntae's smile is conniving. Jiwook shakes his head.
"We are not dancing tonight."
"Fine, fine."
Already, Jiwook's mind is back in their practice room. He tries to keep it there, because it's better than thinking of what it will be like to perform their new choreography on a stage or a music video set. It's surprising how quickly their stage outfits can begin to feel like straightjackets, and how heavy their layers of jewellery can become. Under the heat of the lights, it all becomes suffocating in a matter of seconds. Sometimes, it feels less like dancing and more like running for his life to the end of the song. Jiwook doesn't realise he has mentally left Hongdae entirely until he hears Hyuntae's voice back in reality.
"Been working on something for the new album," Hyuntae says, as he stomps out the last cinder of his cigarette.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. It's about this cool handsome guy who's just trying to party, but his friend is being a loser and not wanting to do fun things, so the cool handsome guy kicks his loser friend's ass."
"Sounds to me like the cool handsome guy is the real loser," says Jiwook, and then runs before Hyuntae can get to the ass-kicking part of the plotline.
The chase is pretty anti-climactic. After half a block, Jiwook loses his balance and Hyuntae trips over Jiwook's shoe as he falls. It takes a full sixty seconds and a conveniently-placed cafe fence for them to get disentangled from each other and back on their feet. They agree never to speak of the incident again, and return to their aimless wandering. Somewhere along the line, Hyuntae has obtained a bucket hat with marijuana leaves printed all over it.
"Where are we going?" Jiwook asks, becoming dimly aware that they have meandered through the background of several different things being filmed. He hopes none of them belong to anyone who is famous on the internet.
"I don't know. A booking club?" Hyuntae grins. He's probably joking, but Hyuntae is never entirely joking. Jiwook wrinkles his nose.
"No."
"Ah, that's right. You can't afford it. You'd be too broke to invite any girls to our table. Maybe if you stopped breaking my phone, you'd have money."
It's true, sort of - Jiwook isn't broke, exactly, but he does seem to spend a lot of money on repairing Hyuntae's phone. Given their pitifully small monthly allowances, it's clear that he can't sustain this level of spending for many more breakages. But really, it's not his fault he keeps appearing at the worst possible moments, such as jumping up from under a table or leaping around a corner or bumping into people without looking -
Alright, maybe it's kind of his fault.
As if it was fated, their aimless wandering abruptly halts in front of a neon sign with a microphone on it. The bright red lettering says noraebang, flickering slightly as if to catch their attention. Hyuntae's eyes light up, and he turns to Jiwook with the same cheshire cat smile that always precedes a disaster. "We have arrived."
"No. We're rappers. We can't sing," Jiwook points out.
"We're drunk," Hyuntae shrugs. "We can do anything."
To Jiwook's eternal regret, this actually makes sense.
Disproportionate to its tiny size, the noraebang has a fairly extensive and unusual drink menu. They take full advantage of it. In record time, Jiwook has some kind of pink tropical-fruit-vodka thing that he's pretty sure Hyuntae would make fun of him for drinking if he wasn't halfway through one himself. The lure of the tiny umbrella, it seems, is irresistible to even the most swag of souls.
"Y'know, this is good. This is the life," says Hyuntae, lounging on the unusually shiny sofa cushions as he clicks through the song selections on the screen, holding the remote upside down. "I think it's fair to say, at this point in time, we have officially made it. Who gives a fuck if our whole lives are an uncertain gamble in a hyper-competitive industry that destroys the hopes and dreams of the vast majority of unlucky souls who dare to enter it. Who fucking cares if people think we're stupid for even trying. We have drinks with tiny umbrellas in them. I think we win."
"That's a really good point." Jiwook chews thoughtfully on a mango slice that has somehow found its way into the bottom of his now-empty glass; it appears to be part of an entire fruit salad. "What if success is really measured in tiny umbrellas? We need more tiny umbrellas. And more drinks."
"Fuck the haters," Hyuntae says, very solemnly.
"Fuck the haters," Jiwook repeats.
"Fuck the haters."
"Fuck the haters!"
As it turns out, neither of them know any of the songs Hyuntae's clumsy button-mashing fingers manage to put on. Hyuntae makes a valiant attempt to keep up with the onscreen lyrics, substituting vulgar freestyle raps when his blurry vision fails him, but Jiwook mostly relies on excessive use of tambourine and wild hand gestures.
"We are so talented," says Hyuntae, nearly incomprehensible after they were forced by The Way Of The World to down another round of colourful fruit drinks for their corresponding Tiny Success Umbrellas. "How are we not already worldwide superstars? We are so good."
"We will be worldwide superstars. Tambourine is the universal language," Jiwook assures him, and gives the helpless instrument another dramatic shake. "We have four tiny umbrellas. We will not fail."
"Let us go and take the world by storm." Hyuntae begins to get up from the sofa, then visibly reconsiders after about half a second. "Or, y'know, we could stay here, eat these assorted tropical fruits, and prove everyone wrong a little later?"
"Yeah, that works."
"You should get another tattoo."
"Yeah?"
Jiwook's already got two: a quote on his left arm, and something complicated involving lots of chains and stars on his chest. He's been thinking for a while about getting a third, but never really settled on anything. Except now, the alcohol is telling him that Hyuntae's horrible suggestion is actually an awesome idea, divine inspiration will strike, and he will end up with the most badass tattoo the world has ever seen.
"Yeah. Definitely. I know a place around here."
Here, which consists of whichever direction they marched off in after another hour of mangling SNSD songs, could honestly be anywhere. However, Jiwook doesn't question how or why Hyuntae knows a place. He just looks sideways-down at his right bicep, which suddenly seems surprisingly empty. What it really needs, he thinks, is a tattoo. And so he nods.
"Let's go."
Hyuntae links their arms together and leads him on a swerving, careening path past cat cafes, hip-hop clubs, impromptu concerts and a playground full of people dancing to music Jiwook can't hear. They duck and weave through huge crowds of young people dressed to party, before abruptly detouring through several side streets. Amongst a row of buildings that are mostly dark, up a precarious-looking flight of stairs, there is an unmarked, dimly-lit shop. Hyuntae points to it. "There."
The shop is almost certainly not a legal operation. "You swear this place is good?"
"Yeah. I know at least three people who got inked here. Like, two or something."
The math adds up in Jiwook's alcohol-swirled brain. "Okay."
They head up the narrow, steep stairs, Hyuntae nearly falling twice, and somehow make it in the door. Sample designs line the walls, along with an assortment of unusual decorations and a random clown mask that's kind of freaking Jiwook the fuck out. Swaying a little, Hyuntae detaches himself from Jiwook to call out to a guy lounging on what appears to be a sofa in the corner.
"Hey, can you do the thing?"
The guy rises out of the shadows like a behemoth from the depths. "I can do a lot of things, for the right price. You're gonna have to specify."
"This thing," says Hyuntae, grabbing Jiwook's arm and shoving up his sleeve to point at an existing tattoo. "For what price can you do this thing?"
"For a pretty fair price. Depends on what you want." The guy's eyes flick over Jiwook's current ink, both the indicated quote and the portions of his chest tattoo visible above the low neckline of his shirt. "Know what you want?"
"No," says Jiwook. "I'm drunk."
"Just fuck him up," Hyuntae suggests.
With a shrug, the guy swipes Jiwook's credit card, shoves a form into his hand and leads them into a room in the back. Giving the leering clown mask one last glance, Jiwook resigns himself to his fate.
The good thing about being drunk as fuck is Jiwook can't really feel the pain. Instead, the steady buzz of the tattoo machine fades into background noise as he watches Hyuntae draw smiley faces on himself with a permanent marker, intermittently holding a one-sided conversation with the clown mask outside. Jiwook loses track of how much time passes, and also loses track of what exactly it was he finally decided he wanted placed permanently on his arm; he prays it wasn't a tiny umbrella or a tambourine, but he's well aware the worst case scenario is a clown mask in a marijuana-patterned bucket hat. He recalls seeing a lot of squares on the design transfer, which he did approve of, but in a world filled with modern art, a bunch of squares could be anything. He's started wondering if maybe risking a lifetime as a modern art piece was a bad idea, when the buzzing stops and then it's done.
"Damn," says Hyuntae, in a maddeningly unreadable tone. "Damn."
"What?" Jiwook asks, but Hyuntae points to the mirror on the wall. Slowly, Jiwook turns.
A spread of three playing cards is fanned out on Jiwook's right bicep. Nine of hearts, ace of clubs, ten of hearts. Granted wishes, prosperity, success. Triumph over adversity, wealth, dreams come true. Good fortune. Permanent luck engraved into his skin. The outline is red and sore, and he resists the urge to trace it with his fingertips.
"Looks good," Hyuntae finally says, and then turns to the door. "Clown Mask agrees."
It's definitely time to get out of here.
Jiwook gets Hyuntae to take a picture of the tattoo before the guy covers it with a bandage, just in case he forgets what it is again on the way home. After an apathetic run-through of some instructions Jiwook's pretty sure he won't remember, they're back outside again.
"Fuck," says Hyuntae, frowning at Jiwook's phone as they head back in the direction they came. "I fucked up. Somehow, I put that picture on Instagram."
"Maybe no one will ever see it?"
"It's already got two hundred likes."
"Fuck."
Because Jiwook is a man of his word, he executes the dance to Kara's "Mister" perfectly in front of a cafe with a sheep on the sign. It takes about thirty seconds for a group of girls to recognise him, whip out their phones, and document his misadventures for the entirety of the internet. Upon completion of Jiwook's final booty shake, they both flee the scene.
"We're dead as soon as they upload those fancams," says Jiwook, not particularly bothered, as they sprint past several clothing stores. "At least I've led a fairly decent life."
"Yeah, we've had some good times," sighs Hyuntae.
It's true. Jiwook thinks especially of the time Hyuntae tried to filibuster a dance practice with a freestyle rap about how the other members needed to stop nagging him for leaving his underwear all over the floor; he made it about five minutes in before Byeonghwa threw a pair of socks at his face and cut the whole affair short. Or the time one of Yuseong's hamsters escaped and Hyuntae sat on top of a table intermittently screaming for an hour. There was also time Hyuntae got Ken from VIXX's number, tried to send him a text, and fell victim to the worst autocorrect fail in history without realising until it had already been sent. The time they set up a hidden camera where people jumped out of a box and scared the fuck out of Hyuntae.
Now that he thinks about it, a lot of his good memories involve terrible things happening to Hyuntae. Maybe because it's a nice change from Jiwook himself being the unlucky one.
"Well, the good times aren't over yet. We're not dead until we go home," Hyuntae grins.
"We should go shopping," says Jiwook.
"Aren't you broke?"
"Oh. Right. Damn."
As it turns out, Jiwook has just enough left in his wallet for one last meal. They grab street food on their way to Hyuntae's favourite 24-hour samgyeopsal place. It reminds Jiwook of the Busan street fair they went to back when they were filming Bigflo TV. It had food on sticks, which, he thinks, is a good memory that doesn't involve the humiliation of Hyuntae. That was a good day, wandering through the bustle and noise and delicious smells of the fair with the other four Bigflo members. He hopes he looks back on tonight just as fondly, and not as a giant train wreck of mistakes.
Jiwook realises he's said it out loud when Hyuntae snorts, stuffing another tteokboki in his mouth. "Hey, a giant train wreck of mistakes is what we set out for. That sounds like mission accomplished to me."
They get lost twice on the way to the samgyeopsal restaurant. Taking this into consideration, along with a careful review of the night's events, they opt out of ordering any more soju.
"We should've tried to get into a VIP area somewhere," Hyuntae says, a bit wistfully, as they crouch over the grill waiting for the meat to cook. Hyuntae keeps snipping at it with the scissors and prodding it with the tongs, as if this will speed the process along. "I bet we could've done it."
"Nah." Jiwook shakes his head. "We're not really VIPs. I mean, not yet."
It's the closest he's going to come to that thing Hyuntae does, the one where he talks about success like it's inevitable, but he tries. Hyuntae nods reluctantly. "Fine, not yet. But the next time we come here, we definitely will be."
"How do you know?"
With the way Hyuntae seemed so certain earlier that he had discovered the secrets of the universe, Jiwook expects a similar response. He certainly doesn't expect Hyuntae to shrug. "I don't. No one does. Who the fuck can see the future? But if you want to be successful, you can't go around acting like you think you're gonna fail. Don't half-ass anything, especially your attitude. All I know is, there's gotta be a reason we made it this far, and we damn well didn't get here by acting like we didn't deserve to." The samgyeopsal is sizzling by now, browning on the underside, and Hyuntae begins haphazardly flipping the pieces. "You gotta have the VIP mentality. Go hard or go home, right?"
"Go hard or go home," Jiwook repeats, thoughtfully, before being interrupted by a chorus of notifications from Hyuntae's pocket.
"Fuck," Hyuntae swears, and puts down the tongs to fumble for the source of the noise. When he finally gets his phone out, the screen is filled with KakaoTalk notifications. Jiwook leans over the table and reads upside-down as Hyuntae opens their group chat and begins to scroll.
Byeonghwa (00:04): hey zuk hightop where r u
Byeonghwa (01:10): u comin back?
Byeonghwa (01:41): ok then
Jungkyun (1:43): Where did you guys go?
Jungkyun (2:39): Hello?
Jungkyun (4:51): What are these videos online of Jiwook doing Kara's butt dance??
Jungkyun (5:21): Is that a new tattoo picture on Jiwook's Instagram???
Jungkyun (5:27): CALL ME
Yuseong (06:14): Doori won the pet show last night!! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ
Yuseong (06:15): [photo]
Yuseong (06:15): [photo]
Yuseong (06:15): [photo]
Yuseong (06:16): [photo]
Yuseong (06:16): [photo]
"That's a lot of hamster pictures."
Hyuntae growls. "I don't like hamsters."
"Let me reply." Jiwook grabs Hyuntae's phone, already beginning to type out the first few letters of an inappropriate word. Hyuntae's eyes widen.
"No! Don't acknowledge him! He'll send more hamsters," Hyuntae screeches, and tries to grab the phone back. He yanks hard on it just as Jiwook lets go, and the phone goes flying.
It all happens in slow motion. Jiwook hears Hyuntae's voice in the background, drawn out and horrified, yelling something incomprehensible as the phone performs a graceful arc through the air. He sees Hyuntae make a wild dive for it, a split-second too late to keep it from hitting the floor, and everything comes back into focus with the sickening crack as the phone lands face-down. Hyuntae kneels beside it and picks it up tenderly, gazing with a broken-hearted expression at the glass spiderweb of cracks across the screen. For the fourth time. "My baby. My poor baby." He looks up at Jiwook, his voice accusing as he pets the shattered screen. "What did my phone ever do to you?"
"Fuck," says Jiwook, very elegantly. After tonight's trip, his bank account is officially empty. "Uhh. Can I replace it in a month?"
"Fine, fine," says Hyuntae, "But on one condition. You have to do another girl group dance."
Jiwook has no choice. "Fuck."
"Hey, I had a dream last night," says Hyuntae, as they stumble along down the street with their arms draped over each other's shoulders.
"Yeah?" Jiwook's only half-listening. The other half of his mind is trying to calculate how much he's going to regret those fancams of him performing EXID's Up & Down in front of the samgyeopsal place in Hyuntae's marijuana bucket hat.
"Yeah. It was pretty awesome. I was in an office; I guess I was a CEO or something, someone rich. I was all dressed up - new shoes, tuxedo, everything. I looked damn good. There was this hot secretary bringing me food. I was about to go to some party, a party all for me. Isn't that great?"
"I think that's from a Block B song too." Jiwook yawns. "It is great, though."
"Think that'll ever really happen to us?"
"Who knows."
They walk towards the sunrise, cringing at the light. Jiwook's head is starting to hurt like hell, but he doesn't really care. He's tired in a good way, the pleasant kind of tired that comes with a fun night out, not the horrible bone-aching soul-crushing kind of tired that comes from weeks of nonstop comeback practice. It's a nice change.
But then again, Jiwook can't say he'll mind when the weekend ends and they're back to their usual routine. There are only so many terrible decisions he can make in a row, after all. The idol world might be a difficult and uncertain business, with more detractors than the average line of work, but it doesn't matter. At this moment, with Hyuntae and the others at his side, Jiwook feels like he can take on anything. This comeback won't be easy - it never is - but the thing is, he knows they'll get through it. It's weird, but he feels like they really are going to make it. One day, they'll prove everyone wrong. For now, just by getting this far, they've hit the jackpot.
Poll