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todokanu相反的我 // Opposite Me - minseok-centric (xiu min)
but he never says no, not even in his dreams. (g, ~4k w)
相反的我 (The Opposite Me) is the name of both a Zhang Yunjing song and album. Ridiculous historical/artistic liberties were taken with this, especially in regards to Jino and any events in general.O-oh and happy birthday to our favourite kungfu panda ;;
It starts inconspicuously, like everything does.
If he thinks about it closely, maybe the way the dance teacher had greeted him that morning was a little weird, but Minseok forgets about it before the music has even started. Yixing had said he’d be coming in a little late that morning, go ahead without him, so Minseok shrugs and throws himself into dance practice, revelling in the way his body responds so fluidly, pleased with the progress he’s made over the past few years. It starts inconspicuously, but halfway through the morning, a staff member drops into the practice room and calls him away.
“Take your time,” the dance teacher says, and Minseok nods.
They give him a chance to be famous. He takes it.
-
2008. There’s the stage. Lights. The microphone. The crowd. Music. And him.
He wins second, of course, because it’s 2011 now and the past can’t be changed. But sometimes. Sometimes. Sometimes in his dreams he trips, he falls, he stumbles, he misses that high note, his voice cracks unexpectedly and he gets third, or fourth, or nothing at all. Or he could have said no.
But he never says no. Not even in his dreams.
-
“You’re cute.”
“Excuse me?”
Minseok stares at Lu Han, the other boy staring back with unblinking eyes. Lu Han’s bangs sweep just past his eyelids, partially obscuring his doe-brown irises, but not hiding the way they skip across Minseok’s face in scrutiny, as if he’d never seen him before. Minseok scrunches his nose self-consciously. They’re sitting in the company cafeteria, Lu Han with his hands wrapped around a glass of water and Minseok poking morosely at his less than ample dinner. No matter what he does, his diet never seems to go well.
“You’re really cute,” Lu Han repeats.
Ever since Minseok had found out that Lu Han was not, in fact, Korean as he’d first thought, he picks out the nuances, the tones, the lilting syllables that permeate his words with foreign reminders. Sometimes he finds them, sometimes he doesn’t. This is one of those times he doesn’t, so all Minseok does is roll his eyes. “Look who’s talking,” he says, reaching out to poke one of Lu Han’s cheeks.
Lu Han recoils, lips forming a pout as he swats away Minseok’s hand at the same time he blows air into his cheeks. “No I’m serious!” he says, and in retaliation, pinches Minseok’s cheek between his thumb and forefinger. “It’s so soft!”
“Cut it out,” Minseok snaps, jerking his head away. Lu Han is still staring at him intently. Minseok huffs and turns back to his food.
“I got it,” Lu Han says suddenly, snapping his fingers.
“Got what,” Minseok deadpans. He shoves a spoonful of rice into his mouth.
“包子,” Lu Han says, eyes lighting up as the odd sounding Chinese words roll off his tongue. “Mandu! Steamed buns, your face!”
“My face?” Minseok points to himself and Lu Han nods.
“It’s the same,” he says excitedly. “See, it’s soft, it’s white, and round—”
“Are you calling me fat?”
Lu Han shuts up, and Minseok almost regrets the harsh tone of his own words as Lu Han stares down into his water, bringing the cup up to his face and worrying at the edge with his teeth, not meeting Minseok’s eyes. “Cute,” he says, and suddenly Minseok is reminded that Lu Han is Chinese, that every now and then his words sound nothing like Korean.
Minseok holds back a sigh and forces out a chuckle instead. “No, I know, I need to lose weight.”
“No you—” Lu Han protests by reflex, looking up suddenly, and Minseok laughs this time, openly and loudly, and even Lu Han, the weird one who might as well be a girl, looks at him strangely.
“I do, I do,” Minseok says, waving it away. Lu Han does that pouting thing again, head tilted just far enough so that his bangs fall over his eyes entirely, and he has to brush them aside to tuck them behind an ear. Lu Han grins.
“Sehun and I are going out for bubble tea after practice, want to come?”
“Okay, now you’re just being mean, aren’t you?”
“Maybe!”
-
Minseok is in it to sing. Of course he can dance, sort of, school talent shows and things like that, but if he’s honest with himself, all he really wants to do is sing.
No, wait. Not all. It’d be kind of cool to be a firefighter too. He’s always thought that those giant hoses looked fun to spray around.
“We’ll sign you as a trainee,” they say. “We’ll pay for your vocal lessons, dance lessons, any other lessons. You’ll still have school until you graduate, of course, but this is a great opportunity, it’s SM, after all.”
“Of course,” he says. “I know. I want to. Or I wouldn’t be here, would I?”
The woman smiles at him. “Of course,” she agrees. “Come by in a week, and we’ll have finalised the paperwork.”
Minseok glances at his mother who sits beside him. She gives him a tiny nod. He grins back. “Thank you,” he says. “Thank you.”
“See you next week.”
Minseok is in it to sing, but he quickly finds out that he might as well be in it to dance. The first few classes are a disaster, but then something clicks, and he marvels at the way he looks in the mirror, something approaching grace and power in his movements. The teachers notice too, and they move him to the more advanced class, and then the next, and the next.
“I wish I could dance like hyung,” Jinho says to him almost morosely one day, when they’re sitting on a bench in a park not too far from the company building. Minseok slings an arm around his shoulder, shaking him good naturedly.
“Your voice is beautiful,” Minseok tells him. “Cheer up!”
“But I can’t dance,” Jinho whines. He drums his heels against the floor, pouting. “You know how I dance, I mean, the other day I tripped and knocked over Junwoo, and he hasn’t quit bugging me about it. Seriously, hyung, do you think I’ll ever get to debut?”
Minseok smiles at him, ruffling his hair when Jinho looks up at him with wide pleading eyes. “You’re still young,” he says, and is reminded how he’s really not, two full years older than the other boy. “And look, no one ever said you had to be good at dancing. Look at Jomi hyung, and didn’t he just debut? And do you remember what Kyuhyun hyung was like at first?”
“Yes, but he’s Chinese,” Jinho points out. “And Kyuhyun hyung is better than I’ll ever be.”
Minseok laughs, and pulls Jinho closer to him. “Don’t sweat it,” he says. “Work hard, and you’ll be fine. I believe in you! Don’t you trust me?”
“I do, I do,” Jinho says, pushing Minseok away. “But still, I wish I could be like hyung.”
Minseok chuckles. “I wish I could be like you,” he says, and pats Jinho on the shoulder one final time before he stands. “Now come on, home time, go rest well.”
But Jinho is in it to sing. Maybe, but maybe Minseok isn’t.
-
“I didn’t even really want this,” Amber says to him, or that’s what Minseok thinks she says. Talking to the younger girl is always part guessing game, part imaginative hand gestures while attempting not to poke anyone’s eyes out. She sighs and slumps over his back, draping her arms around his neck. He pats her awkwardly on the hand and she pulls back, sidles over so they’re sitting cross-legged side by side on the practice room floor.
“Do you want it now?” he asks her. He teases his fingers through her hair until she pushes him away, giving him a cross look.
(“It’s short!” he explains every time. “Girls’ hair is never so short!”)
“Maybe,” she says after one of those long moments that Minseok is never sure is because she’s thinking, or because she can’t remember the Korean word. “It’s exciting. I have to want it. Think about it. Super Junior, DBSK, SNSD, their fans, people screaming your name. Minseok oppa, Minseok oppa! It’s exciting. Right?”
“Right,” Minseok agrees wryly, watching Amber pull her knees up to her chest out of the corner of his eye. She rests her chin on her knees, staring ahead at the practice room wall—there’s nothing else in front of them. The mirror is to Minseok’s left. “I can scream your name right here. Amber, Amber, Amber,” he says, poking her with every syllable he says of her name, and she laughs, shoving him until he topples over.
“Stop being mean, Minseok hyung,” she whines.
“I’m your oppa!” he protests, still on the floor. He looks up at Amber, at the girl who’s staring over him into the mirror, an emptiness in her eyes that reminds him of the street in front of his house at three in the morning, that time he’d gone back in the middle of the night when he couldn’t sleep and had stood at the curb, staring into the empty darkness, waiting for something to appear.
“What are you thinking about?” Amber’s question jerks him out of his unintentional reverie, and he grins at her.
“That you’re very pretty,” he says.
Amber laughs in that disbelieving way of hers, and hops to her feet. “They don’t need me to be pretty,” she says. “But thanks anyway, oppa.”
“You should call me oppa more often,” Minseok says, getting to his feet as well.
“Dream on,” Amber scoffs. “Hyung.”
-
Minseok likes to keep his room meticulously neat. Chanyeol laughs at this, but Chanyeol laughs at everything. He’ll sit on Minseok’s bed just because he knows his hyung will chase him off and adjust the blankets that he’s mussed. Minseok acts angry, but they both know that an act is all it is, Minseok stopped being angry years ago.
When he was little, he sorted his socks by colour, blue teddy bears and blue trains and then the white ones with red trains and the plain white socks and at the very end, the black socks with no patterns at all. There’s only one colour in his sock drawer now, and most of his shirts have ended up the same colour, the ones he wears to practice. He likes it when his jeans are folded neatly, and his laundry is kept in the laundry hamper until he tosses it into the laundry machine, and the lotions in the top drawer are all upright and in neat rows.
Lu Han watches him curiously when Minseok unpacks until Minseok finally turns, uncomfortable under the scrutiny. “Is something wrong?” he asks, and Lu Han shakes his head, grinning.
“No, I’m just surprised you’re so neat,” he says. “Wu Fan and I, well…”
Lu Han nods to the pile of clothes on the floor of the closet, and Minseok wrinkles his nose at the mess of laundry. “You’re just messy,” Minseok says.
“Am not!” Lu Han protests, throwing himself onto his bed. “Anyway, keep unpacking, I won’t bother you.”
Minseok shakes his head and goes back to folding his shirts and layering them one on top of each other in the second drawer. He thinks there should be a million other thoughts in his head right now, but the only one he has is so ridiculously inane and commonplace that a smile forces its way onto his lips in place of laughter. He shakes his head at himself, and unpacks the rest of his clothes and tosses his laptop onto his bed before calling it a day.
“By the way,” Lu Han says suddenly, “I don’t like it when people go on my bed.”
Minseok tilts his head as he regards the other boy. “Okay,” he agrees. “Do you want to go to bubble tea?”
“Now?” Lu Han sits up and stares at him, eyes wide. “It’s almost one in the morning!”
“I know,” Minseok says, grinning. “I just thought of it, that’s all.”
Lu Han laughs. “Alright, alright. Let’s get the others,” he says, and dashes off before Minseok gets a chance to agree or disagree.
Minseok likes to keep his life meticulously neat too, but it’s harder to organise lives by colour than socks.
-
“How do you feel about China?”
“I—I like Jay Chou?”
The door closes behind him, and Minseok glances over his shoulder before snapping his attention back to the manager who sits in front of him, a sheath of papers under his folded hands. He sucks in a breath, belatedly aware of what the question means, of everything his own answer lacked. But he’d been taken off guard, and Tao had been sharing his headphones with Minseok just yesterday.
“I.”
“You don’t need to answer right away,” the manager hyung says, and Minseok nods blankly.
2011, and he’s not getting any younger.
“I can’t speak Chinese yet,” he says. “I just started.”
“You’ll learn,” the manager hyung says. “They all do.”
“I’ll learn,” Minseok echoes.
“It’s good you like Jay Chou, by the way. You should mention that in interviews if they ever ask.”
If they ever ask, Minseok thinks to himself once he’s out in the hall again. Interviews.
That’s the thing about chances. That’s the thing about being famous.
That’s the thing about dreams.
He doesn’t go back downstairs to the dance practice room—”take your time,” hyung had said—and heads for one of the vocal practice rooms instead. For the first time in a long time, he sings until the lights go on outside.
-
Zitao calls him oppa the first time they see each other, and Minseok laughs and thinks about Amber. “Hyung will take care of you,” Minseok reassures him, although Zitao just looks at him with blank confusion in his eyes.
He doesn’t see the tall Chinese boy around very often at first, Wu Fan having taken him under his wing and Zitao taking a shine to the even taller Chinese boy. But trainees come and go; debut, quit, give up. When Amber writes hyung in her album message, Minseok makes sure to send her a properly scathing text asking her why she can’t be nice like Jinri and why Joonmyun-ah gets to be her oppa and he doesn’t. Amber sends him back a one word reply: LOL. It’s followed by a second one a few minutes later, this one saying nothing but hyung!.
The next time Tao sees him, he calls him hyung like he should, and Minseok laughs and treats him out to lunch, even though the kid insists on paying. “Think of it as a welcome present,” Minseok tells him, forcing Tao’s wallet back into his pocket. Tao is easier for them to say than Zitao, and despite his almost scary appearance, the kid is one of the most easygoing kids Minseok knows.
“I,” Tao says, frowning as he searches for his words, frustration finally dimming bright in his eyes as he bites at his lip, giving up on whatever he’d meant to say. “Thank you.”
“Eat, eat,” Minseok says, and points at the food. “Eat!”
Tao looks like he wants to say something more, but with so little Korean at his disposal, he’s helpless to do anything but shovel food into his mouth. Minseok grins as he watches him. If Tao notices that Minseok barely touches his own plate, he doesn’t say anything—but only because he can’t.
They begin to spend more time together as Tao gets put through intensive dance training on account of his martial arts, and Minseok has Chinese added to his schedule once a week. There’s a group that’s supposed to debut, they’ve all known it for years, and they’re pretty sure that the new Chinese kid is going to be in that group. Resentment can run high, and Minseok usually turns a blind eye—they all do. But when Minseok catches a couple trainees with Tao’s extra sets of practice clothes in the washroom, he stops them.
“Don’t you care?” they hiss at him under their breaths. “You’ve been here just as long as we have, he’s been here for months. And he can’t even speak Korean properly!”
“I know, hyung,” Minseok says tiredly, trying an easy going smile at the older boy, but it falls flat. The others don’t look impressed. “But doing this isn’t going to solve anything.”
Nothing will solve anything, they leave unsaid, but they don’t stop him as he leaves.
Tao is standing just outside the washroom when Minseok exits. Minseok freezes in surprise before he grins, handing Tao his clothes. Tao worries at his lip and doesn’t meet his eyes, hands held stiffly at his side. Minseok shoves them at him again, and Tao takes the bundle quietly, walking only when Minseok slings an arm around Tao’s shoulders pulling him down the hall.
“I,” Tao says. “I heard.”
“Ignore it,” Minseok says, forcing cheerfulness into his voice, but Tao doesn’t buy it.
“I am going to debut?” Tao asks, or maybe it just sounds like a question because his words are heavily accented and slurred and too unsure for it to be a statement of any kind. Minseok nods and says yes anyway.
“Probably,” he elaborates, even though he’s not sure if Tao has the vocabulary to understand. “You’re talented and good looking, so that’s what the others think. And you’re not that bad a dancer, and from what I’ve heard, you’re good at rapping too, and singing, right? And you’re Chinese. And young.”
Tao frowns at him, cheeks puffed out slightly in concentration. “I…don’t understand,” he finally says, and Minseok chuckles.
“That’s alright,” he says, letting him go and patting him on the shoulder. “Sometimes you don’t need to. Sometimes, it’s probably better not to.”
-
Minseok is acutely aware of the way the tail-end of puberty did nothing for his face, of his too round cheeks and too small eyes, of his not tall enough stature and his awkward bone structure, that sometimes the other trainees call him the chubby one behind his back. He knows that he’s getting to the boundless age of ‘too old’, that he’s approaching the reality of ‘not talented enough’. He knows that if he doesn’t make it now, he’ll never get a chance.
He could be a dance teacher, or a choreographer—he wouldn’t mind, it’d be fun. He likes helping the new trainees out anyway, and it wouldn’t be too huge of a change. It wouldn’t be the same, but he’d live. He’d manage.
Everyone does, somehow.
-
Joonmyun sweeps him into a hug as soon as they see each other again, and Minseok awkwardly pats him on the shoulder. “I’m glad we all get to debut,” Minseok says.
“I know,” Joonmyun says. “I know.”
Schedules get hectic, Minseok scrambling to study Chinese, pronunciation, intonation, rap, singing, and of course, dancing. Jongdae is still new and lost, but his voice could stir an angel with jealousy, and Minseok lets him follow him around like a puppy. Wu Fan would have been unanimously voted leader even if the company hadn’t picked him, and Minseok is more than happy to provide back up. Yixing helps Jongdae with his Chinese, while Wu Fan goes over his homework with him, Lu Han throwing in the odd sentence every now and then while copying his entire music collection over to Minseok’s ipod. Even with a debut in China, the company is adamant that Tao study Korean, but with Minseok and Jongdae both tied up in learning his mother tongue, the manager hyungdeul practice with the Chinese boy instead.
They give them Chinese names as well, Xiu Min and Chen, although Lu Han rolls his eyes and calls them Minseok and Jongdae anyway while Yixing slips up half the time and calls Jongdae in Chinese as 钟大 instead, Tao alternating between hyung and 哥. Wu Fan just quirks an eyebrow and immediately calls Jongdae Chenchen in something that even Minseok can tell isn’t Chinese—Tao laughs and says it sounds like dui zhang is calling for a dog.
He bumps into Jinho one day in the halls—he hasn’t seen the younger boy around in a while. As far as he knows, Jinho has been busy with his studies, ever since SM the Ballad finished promoting a year ago.
“Congratulations, hyung,” Jinho says. His face is still young, although his eyes glow with age, and Minseok pulls him into a tight hug.
“Thanks,” Minseok says. “Good luck. I’m sure they have something better planned for you.”
“I trust you,” Jinho says, and Minseok inexplicably remembers a park bench and an evening from years ago, even if he no longer remembers what was said.
“Good,” Minseok says. They wave goodbye and part ways because Minseok’s phone rings with a text telling him to get his ass back to the dorm now.
“I’ll see you later!” Jinho calls to him from down the hall. “On TV!”
Minseok waves at him—his heart is beating too loud in his chest for him to hear his own thoughts, to trust himself to answer. Jinho’s a good kid. But then again, they all are.
-
Amber sends him a text while they’re in the airport waiting for their flight to Beijing. Jia you, ge! it reads. But it’s still hyung, not oppa! Minseok chuckles and tucks his phone back into his pocket, still grinning. Jongdae is practically bouncing off the walls with suppressed excitement, and even with Yixing’s generally subdued nature in public, you’d have to be blind not to notice the happiness spilling off him in waves, even mingled with nervousness wound tight.
“I like Lin Jun Jie and Zhou Jie Lun,” he says, and from the bright smiles on the media’s faces, he knows it’s the right answer.
Lu Han calls him “金包子”, and Minseok laughs when he hears. Lu Han barely stops himself from calling Minseok fat, but a few months of living together day in day out means that the most irritation Minseok can summon up these days is to toss a pillow at him from across the room if even that.
He tells the interviewer that he’s in charge of screaming, and laughs when the fans laugh. It’s a far cry from singing, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s close enough.
There’s a text he’s kept on his phone all these years, even when he changed it. Good luck, hwaiting! it reads. It’s from Jinho, all the way back in 2008, before any of them had been cast in SM, before they had won first and second at the Everysing competition, before the competition had even started. They’d happened to meet a few days before. The text is dated to the day of the competition. Minseok thinks of it as the day he changed his life.
-
2012. There’s the stage. Lights. The microphone. The crowd. Music. And them.
It starts almost badly, defeatingly, crushingly so. But this is only the beginning. There’s one ending behind them and another in front, but there’s still years before that one comes around. It’s 2012 and 2013, 2014, 2015, 2020 are still to come, and the future can be changed. The future can be different. The future is theirs to make.
-
He says yes, of course.
He never says no, not even in his dreams.
but he never says no, not even in his dreams. (g, ~4k w)
相反的我 (The Opposite Me) is the name of both a Zhang Yunjing song and album. Ridiculous historical/artistic liberties were taken with this, especially in regards to Jino and any events in general.
It starts inconspicuously, like everything does.
If he thinks about it closely, maybe the way the dance teacher had greeted him that morning was a little weird, but Minseok forgets about it before the music has even started. Yixing had said he’d be coming in a little late that morning, go ahead without him, so Minseok shrugs and throws himself into dance practice, revelling in the way his body responds so fluidly, pleased with the progress he’s made over the past few years. It starts inconspicuously, but halfway through the morning, a staff member drops into the practice room and calls him away.
“Take your time,” the dance teacher says, and Minseok nods.
They give him a chance to be famous. He takes it.
-
2008. There’s the stage. Lights. The microphone. The crowd. Music. And him.
He wins second, of course, because it’s 2011 now and the past can’t be changed. But sometimes. Sometimes. Sometimes in his dreams he trips, he falls, he stumbles, he misses that high note, his voice cracks unexpectedly and he gets third, or fourth, or nothing at all. Or he could have said no.
But he never says no. Not even in his dreams.
-
“You’re cute.”
“Excuse me?”
Minseok stares at Lu Han, the other boy staring back with unblinking eyes. Lu Han’s bangs sweep just past his eyelids, partially obscuring his doe-brown irises, but not hiding the way they skip across Minseok’s face in scrutiny, as if he’d never seen him before. Minseok scrunches his nose self-consciously. They’re sitting in the company cafeteria, Lu Han with his hands wrapped around a glass of water and Minseok poking morosely at his less than ample dinner. No matter what he does, his diet never seems to go well.
“You’re really cute,” Lu Han repeats.
Ever since Minseok had found out that Lu Han was not, in fact, Korean as he’d first thought, he picks out the nuances, the tones, the lilting syllables that permeate his words with foreign reminders. Sometimes he finds them, sometimes he doesn’t. This is one of those times he doesn’t, so all Minseok does is roll his eyes. “Look who’s talking,” he says, reaching out to poke one of Lu Han’s cheeks.
Lu Han recoils, lips forming a pout as he swats away Minseok’s hand at the same time he blows air into his cheeks. “No I’m serious!” he says, and in retaliation, pinches Minseok’s cheek between his thumb and forefinger. “It’s so soft!”
“Cut it out,” Minseok snaps, jerking his head away. Lu Han is still staring at him intently. Minseok huffs and turns back to his food.
“I got it,” Lu Han says suddenly, snapping his fingers.
“Got what,” Minseok deadpans. He shoves a spoonful of rice into his mouth.
“包子,” Lu Han says, eyes lighting up as the odd sounding Chinese words roll off his tongue. “Mandu! Steamed buns, your face!”
“My face?” Minseok points to himself and Lu Han nods.
“It’s the same,” he says excitedly. “See, it’s soft, it’s white, and round—”
“Are you calling me fat?”
Lu Han shuts up, and Minseok almost regrets the harsh tone of his own words as Lu Han stares down into his water, bringing the cup up to his face and worrying at the edge with his teeth, not meeting Minseok’s eyes. “Cute,” he says, and suddenly Minseok is reminded that Lu Han is Chinese, that every now and then his words sound nothing like Korean.
Minseok holds back a sigh and forces out a chuckle instead. “No, I know, I need to lose weight.”
“No you—” Lu Han protests by reflex, looking up suddenly, and Minseok laughs this time, openly and loudly, and even Lu Han, the weird one who might as well be a girl, looks at him strangely.
“I do, I do,” Minseok says, waving it away. Lu Han does that pouting thing again, head tilted just far enough so that his bangs fall over his eyes entirely, and he has to brush them aside to tuck them behind an ear. Lu Han grins.
“Sehun and I are going out for bubble tea after practice, want to come?”
“Okay, now you’re just being mean, aren’t you?”
“Maybe!”
-
Minseok is in it to sing. Of course he can dance, sort of, school talent shows and things like that, but if he’s honest with himself, all he really wants to do is sing.
No, wait. Not all. It’d be kind of cool to be a firefighter too. He’s always thought that those giant hoses looked fun to spray around.
“We’ll sign you as a trainee,” they say. “We’ll pay for your vocal lessons, dance lessons, any other lessons. You’ll still have school until you graduate, of course, but this is a great opportunity, it’s SM, after all.”
“Of course,” he says. “I know. I want to. Or I wouldn’t be here, would I?”
The woman smiles at him. “Of course,” she agrees. “Come by in a week, and we’ll have finalised the paperwork.”
Minseok glances at his mother who sits beside him. She gives him a tiny nod. He grins back. “Thank you,” he says. “Thank you.”
“See you next week.”
Minseok is in it to sing, but he quickly finds out that he might as well be in it to dance. The first few classes are a disaster, but then something clicks, and he marvels at the way he looks in the mirror, something approaching grace and power in his movements. The teachers notice too, and they move him to the more advanced class, and then the next, and the next.
“I wish I could dance like hyung,” Jinho says to him almost morosely one day, when they’re sitting on a bench in a park not too far from the company building. Minseok slings an arm around his shoulder, shaking him good naturedly.
“Your voice is beautiful,” Minseok tells him. “Cheer up!”
“But I can’t dance,” Jinho whines. He drums his heels against the floor, pouting. “You know how I dance, I mean, the other day I tripped and knocked over Junwoo, and he hasn’t quit bugging me about it. Seriously, hyung, do you think I’ll ever get to debut?”
Minseok smiles at him, ruffling his hair when Jinho looks up at him with wide pleading eyes. “You’re still young,” he says, and is reminded how he’s really not, two full years older than the other boy. “And look, no one ever said you had to be good at dancing. Look at Jomi hyung, and didn’t he just debut? And do you remember what Kyuhyun hyung was like at first?”
“Yes, but he’s Chinese,” Jinho points out. “And Kyuhyun hyung is better than I’ll ever be.”
Minseok laughs, and pulls Jinho closer to him. “Don’t sweat it,” he says. “Work hard, and you’ll be fine. I believe in you! Don’t you trust me?”
“I do, I do,” Jinho says, pushing Minseok away. “But still, I wish I could be like hyung.”
Minseok chuckles. “I wish I could be like you,” he says, and pats Jinho on the shoulder one final time before he stands. “Now come on, home time, go rest well.”
But Jinho is in it to sing. Maybe, but maybe Minseok isn’t.
-
“I didn’t even really want this,” Amber says to him, or that’s what Minseok thinks she says. Talking to the younger girl is always part guessing game, part imaginative hand gestures while attempting not to poke anyone’s eyes out. She sighs and slumps over his back, draping her arms around his neck. He pats her awkwardly on the hand and she pulls back, sidles over so they’re sitting cross-legged side by side on the practice room floor.
“Do you want it now?” he asks her. He teases his fingers through her hair until she pushes him away, giving him a cross look.
(“It’s short!” he explains every time. “Girls’ hair is never so short!”)
“Maybe,” she says after one of those long moments that Minseok is never sure is because she’s thinking, or because she can’t remember the Korean word. “It’s exciting. I have to want it. Think about it. Super Junior, DBSK, SNSD, their fans, people screaming your name. Minseok oppa, Minseok oppa! It’s exciting. Right?”
“Right,” Minseok agrees wryly, watching Amber pull her knees up to her chest out of the corner of his eye. She rests her chin on her knees, staring ahead at the practice room wall—there’s nothing else in front of them. The mirror is to Minseok’s left. “I can scream your name right here. Amber, Amber, Amber,” he says, poking her with every syllable he says of her name, and she laughs, shoving him until he topples over.
“Stop being mean, Minseok hyung,” she whines.
“I’m your oppa!” he protests, still on the floor. He looks up at Amber, at the girl who’s staring over him into the mirror, an emptiness in her eyes that reminds him of the street in front of his house at three in the morning, that time he’d gone back in the middle of the night when he couldn’t sleep and had stood at the curb, staring into the empty darkness, waiting for something to appear.
“What are you thinking about?” Amber’s question jerks him out of his unintentional reverie, and he grins at her.
“That you’re very pretty,” he says.
Amber laughs in that disbelieving way of hers, and hops to her feet. “They don’t need me to be pretty,” she says. “But thanks anyway, oppa.”
“You should call me oppa more often,” Minseok says, getting to his feet as well.
“Dream on,” Amber scoffs. “Hyung.”
-
Minseok likes to keep his room meticulously neat. Chanyeol laughs at this, but Chanyeol laughs at everything. He’ll sit on Minseok’s bed just because he knows his hyung will chase him off and adjust the blankets that he’s mussed. Minseok acts angry, but they both know that an act is all it is, Minseok stopped being angry years ago.
When he was little, he sorted his socks by colour, blue teddy bears and blue trains and then the white ones with red trains and the plain white socks and at the very end, the black socks with no patterns at all. There’s only one colour in his sock drawer now, and most of his shirts have ended up the same colour, the ones he wears to practice. He likes it when his jeans are folded neatly, and his laundry is kept in the laundry hamper until he tosses it into the laundry machine, and the lotions in the top drawer are all upright and in neat rows.
Lu Han watches him curiously when Minseok unpacks until Minseok finally turns, uncomfortable under the scrutiny. “Is something wrong?” he asks, and Lu Han shakes his head, grinning.
“No, I’m just surprised you’re so neat,” he says. “Wu Fan and I, well…”
Lu Han nods to the pile of clothes on the floor of the closet, and Minseok wrinkles his nose at the mess of laundry. “You’re just messy,” Minseok says.
“Am not!” Lu Han protests, throwing himself onto his bed. “Anyway, keep unpacking, I won’t bother you.”
Minseok shakes his head and goes back to folding his shirts and layering them one on top of each other in the second drawer. He thinks there should be a million other thoughts in his head right now, but the only one he has is so ridiculously inane and commonplace that a smile forces its way onto his lips in place of laughter. He shakes his head at himself, and unpacks the rest of his clothes and tosses his laptop onto his bed before calling it a day.
“By the way,” Lu Han says suddenly, “I don’t like it when people go on my bed.”
Minseok tilts his head as he regards the other boy. “Okay,” he agrees. “Do you want to go to bubble tea?”
“Now?” Lu Han sits up and stares at him, eyes wide. “It’s almost one in the morning!”
“I know,” Minseok says, grinning. “I just thought of it, that’s all.”
Lu Han laughs. “Alright, alright. Let’s get the others,” he says, and dashes off before Minseok gets a chance to agree or disagree.
Minseok likes to keep his life meticulously neat too, but it’s harder to organise lives by colour than socks.
-
“How do you feel about China?”
“I—I like Jay Chou?”
The door closes behind him, and Minseok glances over his shoulder before snapping his attention back to the manager who sits in front of him, a sheath of papers under his folded hands. He sucks in a breath, belatedly aware of what the question means, of everything his own answer lacked. But he’d been taken off guard, and Tao had been sharing his headphones with Minseok just yesterday.
“I.”
“You don’t need to answer right away,” the manager hyung says, and Minseok nods blankly.
2011, and he’s not getting any younger.
“I can’t speak Chinese yet,” he says. “I just started.”
“You’ll learn,” the manager hyung says. “They all do.”
“I’ll learn,” Minseok echoes.
“It’s good you like Jay Chou, by the way. You should mention that in interviews if they ever ask.”
If they ever ask, Minseok thinks to himself once he’s out in the hall again. Interviews.
That’s the thing about chances. That’s the thing about being famous.
That’s the thing about dreams.
He doesn’t go back downstairs to the dance practice room—”take your time,” hyung had said—and heads for one of the vocal practice rooms instead. For the first time in a long time, he sings until the lights go on outside.
-
Zitao calls him oppa the first time they see each other, and Minseok laughs and thinks about Amber. “Hyung will take care of you,” Minseok reassures him, although Zitao just looks at him with blank confusion in his eyes.
He doesn’t see the tall Chinese boy around very often at first, Wu Fan having taken him under his wing and Zitao taking a shine to the even taller Chinese boy. But trainees come and go; debut, quit, give up. When Amber writes hyung in her album message, Minseok makes sure to send her a properly scathing text asking her why she can’t be nice like Jinri and why Joonmyun-ah gets to be her oppa and he doesn’t. Amber sends him back a one word reply: LOL. It’s followed by a second one a few minutes later, this one saying nothing but hyung!.
The next time Tao sees him, he calls him hyung like he should, and Minseok laughs and treats him out to lunch, even though the kid insists on paying. “Think of it as a welcome present,” Minseok tells him, forcing Tao’s wallet back into his pocket. Tao is easier for them to say than Zitao, and despite his almost scary appearance, the kid is one of the most easygoing kids Minseok knows.
“I,” Tao says, frowning as he searches for his words, frustration finally dimming bright in his eyes as he bites at his lip, giving up on whatever he’d meant to say. “Thank you.”
“Eat, eat,” Minseok says, and points at the food. “Eat!”
Tao looks like he wants to say something more, but with so little Korean at his disposal, he’s helpless to do anything but shovel food into his mouth. Minseok grins as he watches him. If Tao notices that Minseok barely touches his own plate, he doesn’t say anything—but only because he can’t.
They begin to spend more time together as Tao gets put through intensive dance training on account of his martial arts, and Minseok has Chinese added to his schedule once a week. There’s a group that’s supposed to debut, they’ve all known it for years, and they’re pretty sure that the new Chinese kid is going to be in that group. Resentment can run high, and Minseok usually turns a blind eye—they all do. But when Minseok catches a couple trainees with Tao’s extra sets of practice clothes in the washroom, he stops them.
“Don’t you care?” they hiss at him under their breaths. “You’ve been here just as long as we have, he’s been here for months. And he can’t even speak Korean properly!”
“I know, hyung,” Minseok says tiredly, trying an easy going smile at the older boy, but it falls flat. The others don’t look impressed. “But doing this isn’t going to solve anything.”
Nothing will solve anything, they leave unsaid, but they don’t stop him as he leaves.
Tao is standing just outside the washroom when Minseok exits. Minseok freezes in surprise before he grins, handing Tao his clothes. Tao worries at his lip and doesn’t meet his eyes, hands held stiffly at his side. Minseok shoves them at him again, and Tao takes the bundle quietly, walking only when Minseok slings an arm around Tao’s shoulders pulling him down the hall.
“I,” Tao says. “I heard.”
“Ignore it,” Minseok says, forcing cheerfulness into his voice, but Tao doesn’t buy it.
“I am going to debut?” Tao asks, or maybe it just sounds like a question because his words are heavily accented and slurred and too unsure for it to be a statement of any kind. Minseok nods and says yes anyway.
“Probably,” he elaborates, even though he’s not sure if Tao has the vocabulary to understand. “You’re talented and good looking, so that’s what the others think. And you’re not that bad a dancer, and from what I’ve heard, you’re good at rapping too, and singing, right? And you’re Chinese. And young.”
Tao frowns at him, cheeks puffed out slightly in concentration. “I…don’t understand,” he finally says, and Minseok chuckles.
“That’s alright,” he says, letting him go and patting him on the shoulder. “Sometimes you don’t need to. Sometimes, it’s probably better not to.”
-
Minseok is acutely aware of the way the tail-end of puberty did nothing for his face, of his too round cheeks and too small eyes, of his not tall enough stature and his awkward bone structure, that sometimes the other trainees call him the chubby one behind his back. He knows that he’s getting to the boundless age of ‘too old’, that he’s approaching the reality of ‘not talented enough’. He knows that if he doesn’t make it now, he’ll never get a chance.
He could be a dance teacher, or a choreographer—he wouldn’t mind, it’d be fun. He likes helping the new trainees out anyway, and it wouldn’t be too huge of a change. It wouldn’t be the same, but he’d live. He’d manage.
Everyone does, somehow.
-
Joonmyun sweeps him into a hug as soon as they see each other again, and Minseok awkwardly pats him on the shoulder. “I’m glad we all get to debut,” Minseok says.
“I know,” Joonmyun says. “I know.”
Schedules get hectic, Minseok scrambling to study Chinese, pronunciation, intonation, rap, singing, and of course, dancing. Jongdae is still new and lost, but his voice could stir an angel with jealousy, and Minseok lets him follow him around like a puppy. Wu Fan would have been unanimously voted leader even if the company hadn’t picked him, and Minseok is more than happy to provide back up. Yixing helps Jongdae with his Chinese, while Wu Fan goes over his homework with him, Lu Han throwing in the odd sentence every now and then while copying his entire music collection over to Minseok’s ipod. Even with a debut in China, the company is adamant that Tao study Korean, but with Minseok and Jongdae both tied up in learning his mother tongue, the manager hyungdeul practice with the Chinese boy instead.
They give them Chinese names as well, Xiu Min and Chen, although Lu Han rolls his eyes and calls them Minseok and Jongdae anyway while Yixing slips up half the time and calls Jongdae in Chinese as 钟大 instead, Tao alternating between hyung and 哥. Wu Fan just quirks an eyebrow and immediately calls Jongdae Chenchen in something that even Minseok can tell isn’t Chinese—Tao laughs and says it sounds like dui zhang is calling for a dog.
He bumps into Jinho one day in the halls—he hasn’t seen the younger boy around in a while. As far as he knows, Jinho has been busy with his studies, ever since SM the Ballad finished promoting a year ago.
“Congratulations, hyung,” Jinho says. His face is still young, although his eyes glow with age, and Minseok pulls him into a tight hug.
“Thanks,” Minseok says. “Good luck. I’m sure they have something better planned for you.”
“I trust you,” Jinho says, and Minseok inexplicably remembers a park bench and an evening from years ago, even if he no longer remembers what was said.
“Good,” Minseok says. They wave goodbye and part ways because Minseok’s phone rings with a text telling him to get his ass back to the dorm now.
“I’ll see you later!” Jinho calls to him from down the hall. “On TV!”
Minseok waves at him—his heart is beating too loud in his chest for him to hear his own thoughts, to trust himself to answer. Jinho’s a good kid. But then again, they all are.
-
Amber sends him a text while they’re in the airport waiting for their flight to Beijing. Jia you, ge! it reads. But it’s still hyung, not oppa! Minseok chuckles and tucks his phone back into his pocket, still grinning. Jongdae is practically bouncing off the walls with suppressed excitement, and even with Yixing’s generally subdued nature in public, you’d have to be blind not to notice the happiness spilling off him in waves, even mingled with nervousness wound tight.
“I like Lin Jun Jie and Zhou Jie Lun,” he says, and from the bright smiles on the media’s faces, he knows it’s the right answer.
Lu Han calls him “金包子”, and Minseok laughs when he hears. Lu Han barely stops himself from calling Minseok fat, but a few months of living together day in day out means that the most irritation Minseok can summon up these days is to toss a pillow at him from across the room if even that.
He tells the interviewer that he’s in charge of screaming, and laughs when the fans laugh. It’s a far cry from singing, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s close enough.
There’s a text he’s kept on his phone all these years, even when he changed it. Good luck, hwaiting! it reads. It’s from Jinho, all the way back in 2008, before any of them had been cast in SM, before they had won first and second at the Everysing competition, before the competition had even started. They’d happened to meet a few days before. The text is dated to the day of the competition. Minseok thinks of it as the day he changed his life.
-
2012. There’s the stage. Lights. The microphone. The crowd. Music. And them.
It starts almost badly, defeatingly, crushingly so. But this is only the beginning. There’s one ending behind them and another in front, but there’s still years before that one comes around. It’s 2012 and 2013, 2014, 2015, 2020 are still to come, and the future can be changed. The future can be different. The future is theirs to make.
-
He says yes, of course.
He never says no, not even in his dreams.
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