the holes i can't mend
exo, lay-centric
1950w, g
(yeah, everything goes away.)
我有一个非常深的伤口
“Congratulations Yixing!” Amber slaps him on the back when he walks into the room. “The fandom is blowing up! I think you’re gonna be the new trending member, if you know what I mean.” She winks at Minseok, who only smiles back with little feeling in his eyes, and Yixing doesn’t look at him.
He’s overtaken Lu Han as Jongdae’s new backup vocal and Yifan as EXO-M’s pseudo-leader, and he’s starting to wonder if he ever wanted this in the first place.
It takes two members to leave before Yixing gets more camera time, it takes two members to leave before he gets to sing more lines, before they let him perform one of his tracks at their concert, before he finally gets the title that they promised him before.
It takes two members to leave.
“不到黄河不死心,” says Tao without even looking up when Yixing wonders aloud if he should tell them to give Minseok the center instead. He who hesitates is lost. “要狠吗?” he adds with a sly smirk.
Be more ruthless.
Yixing doesn’t tell him that he’s the one who cries himself to sleep at night, that he’s the one who nearly faints on stage because he’s just so exhausted he can barely keep himself upright. But then he remembers the way Tao cries in front of their fans, cries when he can’t be on stage even if he’ll kill himself to do it. Tao is ruthless. Tao knows what he wants.
Yixing wonders what happened to the boy who joined SM all those years ago, fresh from the country and seeing everything with a sparkle of awe in his eyes. Wonders what made him harden up to the world, turn himself into a superstar who hides his eloquence behind short generic messages telling his fans to be well when he isn’t well himself, hasn’t been well since the day he took to his weibo in a fit of tears and deleted everything that he had ever written.
“You’re more popular now,” Tao says, turning back to his laptop, where he’s looking through pictures of himself on his fansites. “You should be grateful. Now you’ll get more jobs,” he adds darkly, because they are Chinese and they don’t get individual jobs outside of their laughable status of “singer” in Korea.
“Don’t quote Chairman Mao* like it actually applies to us.” Yixing leaves before Tao morphs into something stranger and even less like himself.
It takes two members to leave.
But you’re more popular now.
You can sing. You can compose. You can dance.
You’re more popular now.
But not like this, Yixing thinks, hugging his guitar to his chest, his laptop open to a new song waiting for the first few notes to be played, paper with hastily scribbled lyrics strewn around his desk and on the floor. Not like this.
He wonders how Yifan is doing these days. He’s looking healthier, looking more normal than they, the ones who were left behind, do. And that’s how he’s starting to see it; that they were the ones who were left behind, they are the ones who are getting dragged in the mud.
He’s starting to think that they might have lost.
But he’s supposed to be the loyal one, he’s supposed to be the calm, balanced one who keeps the harmony. He’s the dependable one. He’s the last person who would be expected to leave.
At least, that was what he thought they thought of him. They don’t look at him the same way anymore. They look at him like they half expect him to up and run any time without saying anything. After Kris’ departure (because it wasn't Yifan who left, it was never Yifan that SM had a hold over), Tao has become the dependable one, the loyal SM dog. Not him.
He’s starting to think that this is why they’re giving him so many opportunities now. Look what you can do now that there are two empty spaces, they’re telling him. You shouldn’t wish for them to come back. They’re the enemy. They’re the one who will take everything away from you.
“Keep going,” says Lu Han tiredly when Yixing calls him under the covers, in the dead of the night with Jongdae snoring in the other bed. “This is your dream. This is what you’ve worked so hard for, isn’t it? They’re giving you what you want so you’ll stay. So take it, Xing.”
You didn’t have to leave, Yixing tells him.
For a while Lu Han doesn’t say anything. “But it’s benefited you, hasn’t it?” he asks quietly.
Yixing hangs up.
He hates Yifan for leaving without telling anyone. He hates Lu Han more for letting him know.
But most of all, he hates himself for not going with them.
“Yixing is the nicest person ever,” his fans cry out, but he thinks they would like him a whole lot less if they ever knew about the dark thoughts that run through his brain and occasionally seep themselves into songs that he deletes immediately after recording to hide them from the company.
Because now he’s stuck, stuck knowing that if he leaves there will be no one left to keep Tao from overexerting himself on stage, stuck here in this still foreign, hostile city that refuses to accept him, stuck just because he refuses to leave a fellow countryman behind.
This is not our dream, he cries out silently while he watches Baekhyun and Chanyeol push each other around and smiles while they laugh at his Korean. We’re just the intangible beings floating around in someone else’s dream. We’re not the ones holding it up.
He hates Yifan for leaving first. He hates Lu Han for taking what was left of his faith with him.
For the first time since the news broke that Yifan left, Yixing lets himself get angry. It’s after the interview for Exo’luXion with the dumb, dumb interviewer that he honestly wanted to shake and ask her if she even knew what to do in her job. But it’s not the reporter who breaks the dam. It’s Kyungsoo.
He keeps a straight face for the rest of the interview, and keeps it in until they go back to the dressing room. It hurts, it physically hurts, stings him incessantly like a swarm of bees at the thought that they call each other brothers but don’t support each other’s work, that they have to pretend like they even like each other when Kyungsoo is the most insufferable, nasty -
He snaps.
“You had no right to say that to Jongdae,” he says, his voice quaking - whether from rage or from the fact he doesn’t do this very often, he doesn’t know. “We wrote those lyrics together. It’s a serious song about a serious issue, and if you don’t like it then don’t sing it.” His hands are shaking, and he clenches them into fists to hide them.
要狠吗.
Be more ruthless.
“It was nothing Xing, he was just trying to lighten the atmosphere,” Tao starts as Jongin and Sehun watch wide eyed from the side. “Don’t take it to heart.”
“No,” Yixing says. “I want to hear it from him.” He turns back to Kyungsoo. “Don’t you think about the way we would feel to hear you being spiteful about our song?” It’s a poorly constructed sentence, he knows, but he’s too caught up in his anger to bother about proper grammar and vocabulary. “Don’t you think it might hurt us?”
Jongdae is tugging on his arm but he’s not going to back down now.
Be ruthless.
“Calm down,” Kyungsoo says evenly. He’s trying to be respectful, Yixing knows, trying not to snap back. Not because he wants to be, but because he grew up in a culture where being older meant you could never be rude. And Yixing hates the fakeness of it all, he hates that he will never get proper feedback from them because nobody wants to offend an elder. “It’s just a song,” says Kyungsoo.
Yixing thinks back to the times he spent playing til his fingers bled, thinks back to when he lost all his songs and just sat there and cried, not because he had lost years and years of hard work but because he had lost all the memories that went with them; Yifan stumbling over words and forgetting the melody, he and Lu Han cackling over the cornier lyrics that they couldn’t bring themselves to sing.
The original Promise started with Lu Han by his side, with Yifan encouraging him, with Tao making tea and writing little snippets of lyrics. The original Promise was theirs. And he would never get it back.
It's just a song.
Yixing feels something break.
“I didn’t rewrite that song for the fans,” he yells as Tao and Minseok hold him back. “I wrote it for Lu Han! I wrote it for Yifan! I sure as hell,” he wrenches himself away and snarls in Kyungsoo’s face, “didn’t rewrite it to give a shit about whether you found it too serious for your taste, you two-faced bastard.”
The silence in the waiting room catches up to him later when the concert is over and everyone avoids his eye.
He realizes it's because everyone knows that they are all two-faced bastards.
I don’t know if you’re reading this, he writes to the number Lu Han gave him. But I want you to know that there isn’t a day that goes by that I don't wish you were still my leader.
Tao finds him sitting alone in the coat room the day after the Call Me Baby MV drops and the flood of new fans pour in.
He doesn’t say anything, just slides down beside him in silence and buries his head in his hands, and Yixing thinks that is some sort of sick reversal of the early days when it was Tao crying and him sitting beside him, back when they were an army of four and not two lone warriors fending for themselves with broken swords.
“单枪匹马**. That’s all we have,” says Tao brokenly.
Yixing lifts his head. “No,” he says. “No. You and I. That’s what we have. You’re not alone. You have me.”
He hates Yifan for leaving, he hates himself for letting Lu Han leave, he hates the newfound fame that comes with filling in their places, the pressure that comes with it, but he would not abandon Tao to this hell. He would not.
要狠.
Be ruthless.
("I can't take this anymore," Lu Han whispers to him under the cover of darkness and the hum of the airplane engine roaring in their ears. "That was our last concert together. I'm sorry Xing."
For a second Yixing doesn't know what to say, just remembers the way Lu Han's eyes filled up towards the end of the concert, the amount of times he woke up in the middle of the night finding Lu Han slumped over the toilet bowl because of the drugs they give him to keep him standing. He doesn't think about the implications, doesn't think about who will fill in for Lu Han's parts in future songs. This is all they have left together, this last airplane ride before Lu Han's future snatches him away. So he just says,
"Okay."
)
It takes two members to leave before Yixing finally gets the spotlight his (Chinese) bandmates always told him he deserved.
But by the time it happens, he finds that he doesn’t really want it anymore.
Not like this.
Never like this.
----------------------------------------------------------------
*Tao says "要狠吗? yāo hěn ma?" which is a modification of the words Chairman Mao said to one of his Red Guards during the Cultural Revoluton, "要武吗 yāo wǔ ma," which means 'be more violent/warlike' when she said her name was Binbin (gentle)
**单枪匹马 (dān qiāng pǐ mǎ) literally means a single spear and a single horse, which loosely translates as taking on the offensive on your own, but Tao is using it as a double entendre
1950w, g
(yeah, everything goes away.)
我有一个非常深的伤口
“Congratulations Yixing!” Amber slaps him on the back when he walks into the room. “The fandom is blowing up! I think you’re gonna be the new trending member, if you know what I mean.” She winks at Minseok, who only smiles back with little feeling in his eyes, and Yixing doesn’t look at him.
He’s overtaken Lu Han as Jongdae’s new backup vocal and Yifan as EXO-M’s pseudo-leader, and he’s starting to wonder if he ever wanted this in the first place.
It takes two members to leave before Yixing gets more camera time, it takes two members to leave before he gets to sing more lines, before they let him perform one of his tracks at their concert, before he finally gets the title that they promised him before.
It takes two members to leave.
“不到黄河不死心,” says Tao without even looking up when Yixing wonders aloud if he should tell them to give Minseok the center instead. He who hesitates is lost. “要狠吗?” he adds with a sly smirk.
Be more ruthless.
Yixing doesn’t tell him that he’s the one who cries himself to sleep at night, that he’s the one who nearly faints on stage because he’s just so exhausted he can barely keep himself upright. But then he remembers the way Tao cries in front of their fans, cries when he can’t be on stage even if he’ll kill himself to do it. Tao is ruthless. Tao knows what he wants.
Yixing wonders what happened to the boy who joined SM all those years ago, fresh from the country and seeing everything with a sparkle of awe in his eyes. Wonders what made him harden up to the world, turn himself into a superstar who hides his eloquence behind short generic messages telling his fans to be well when he isn’t well himself, hasn’t been well since the day he took to his weibo in a fit of tears and deleted everything that he had ever written.
“You’re more popular now,” Tao says, turning back to his laptop, where he’s looking through pictures of himself on his fansites. “You should be grateful. Now you’ll get more jobs,” he adds darkly, because they are Chinese and they don’t get individual jobs outside of their laughable status of “singer” in Korea.
“Don’t quote Chairman Mao* like it actually applies to us.” Yixing leaves before Tao morphs into something stranger and even less like himself.
It takes two members to leave.
But you’re more popular now.
You can sing. You can compose. You can dance.
You’re more popular now.
But not like this, Yixing thinks, hugging his guitar to his chest, his laptop open to a new song waiting for the first few notes to be played, paper with hastily scribbled lyrics strewn around his desk and on the floor. Not like this.
He wonders how Yifan is doing these days. He’s looking healthier, looking more normal than they, the ones who were left behind, do. And that’s how he’s starting to see it; that they were the ones who were left behind, they are the ones who are getting dragged in the mud.
He’s starting to think that they might have lost.
But he’s supposed to be the loyal one, he’s supposed to be the calm, balanced one who keeps the harmony. He’s the dependable one. He’s the last person who would be expected to leave.
At least, that was what he thought they thought of him. They don’t look at him the same way anymore. They look at him like they half expect him to up and run any time without saying anything. After Kris’ departure (because it wasn't Yifan who left, it was never Yifan that SM had a hold over), Tao has become the dependable one, the loyal SM dog. Not him.
He’s starting to think that this is why they’re giving him so many opportunities now. Look what you can do now that there are two empty spaces, they’re telling him. You shouldn’t wish for them to come back. They’re the enemy. They’re the one who will take everything away from you.
“Keep going,” says Lu Han tiredly when Yixing calls him under the covers, in the dead of the night with Jongdae snoring in the other bed. “This is your dream. This is what you’ve worked so hard for, isn’t it? They’re giving you what you want so you’ll stay. So take it, Xing.”
You didn’t have to leave, Yixing tells him.
For a while Lu Han doesn’t say anything. “But it’s benefited you, hasn’t it?” he asks quietly.
Yixing hangs up.
He hates Yifan for leaving without telling anyone. He hates Lu Han more for letting him know.
But most of all, he hates himself for not going with them.
“Yixing is the nicest person ever,” his fans cry out, but he thinks they would like him a whole lot less if they ever knew about the dark thoughts that run through his brain and occasionally seep themselves into songs that he deletes immediately after recording to hide them from the company.
Because now he’s stuck, stuck knowing that if he leaves there will be no one left to keep Tao from overexerting himself on stage, stuck here in this still foreign, hostile city that refuses to accept him, stuck just because he refuses to leave a fellow countryman behind.
This is not our dream, he cries out silently while he watches Baekhyun and Chanyeol push each other around and smiles while they laugh at his Korean. We’re just the intangible beings floating around in someone else’s dream. We’re not the ones holding it up.
He hates Yifan for leaving first. He hates Lu Han for taking what was left of his faith with him.
For the first time since the news broke that Yifan left, Yixing lets himself get angry. It’s after the interview for Exo’luXion with the dumb, dumb interviewer that he honestly wanted to shake and ask her if she even knew what to do in her job. But it’s not the reporter who breaks the dam. It’s Kyungsoo.
He keeps a straight face for the rest of the interview, and keeps it in until they go back to the dressing room. It hurts, it physically hurts, stings him incessantly like a swarm of bees at the thought that they call each other brothers but don’t support each other’s work, that they have to pretend like they even like each other when Kyungsoo is the most insufferable, nasty -
He snaps.
“You had no right to say that to Jongdae,” he says, his voice quaking - whether from rage or from the fact he doesn’t do this very often, he doesn’t know. “We wrote those lyrics together. It’s a serious song about a serious issue, and if you don’t like it then don’t sing it.” His hands are shaking, and he clenches them into fists to hide them.
要狠吗.
Be more ruthless.
“It was nothing Xing, he was just trying to lighten the atmosphere,” Tao starts as Jongin and Sehun watch wide eyed from the side. “Don’t take it to heart.”
“No,” Yixing says. “I want to hear it from him.” He turns back to Kyungsoo. “Don’t you think about the way we would feel to hear you being spiteful about our song?” It’s a poorly constructed sentence, he knows, but he’s too caught up in his anger to bother about proper grammar and vocabulary. “Don’t you think it might hurt us?”
Jongdae is tugging on his arm but he’s not going to back down now.
Be ruthless.
“Calm down,” Kyungsoo says evenly. He’s trying to be respectful, Yixing knows, trying not to snap back. Not because he wants to be, but because he grew up in a culture where being older meant you could never be rude. And Yixing hates the fakeness of it all, he hates that he will never get proper feedback from them because nobody wants to offend an elder. “It’s just a song,” says Kyungsoo.
Yixing thinks back to the times he spent playing til his fingers bled, thinks back to when he lost all his songs and just sat there and cried, not because he had lost years and years of hard work but because he had lost all the memories that went with them; Yifan stumbling over words and forgetting the melody, he and Lu Han cackling over the cornier lyrics that they couldn’t bring themselves to sing.
The original Promise started with Lu Han by his side, with Yifan encouraging him, with Tao making tea and writing little snippets of lyrics. The original Promise was theirs. And he would never get it back.
It's just a song.
Yixing feels something break.
“I didn’t rewrite that song for the fans,” he yells as Tao and Minseok hold him back. “I wrote it for Lu Han! I wrote it for Yifan! I sure as hell,” he wrenches himself away and snarls in Kyungsoo’s face, “didn’t rewrite it to give a shit about whether you found it too serious for your taste, you two-faced bastard.”
The silence in the waiting room catches up to him later when the concert is over and everyone avoids his eye.
He realizes it's because everyone knows that they are all two-faced bastards.
I don’t know if you’re reading this, he writes to the number Lu Han gave him. But I want you to know that there isn’t a day that goes by that I don't wish you were still my leader.
Tao finds him sitting alone in the coat room the day after the Call Me Baby MV drops and the flood of new fans pour in.
He doesn’t say anything, just slides down beside him in silence and buries his head in his hands, and Yixing thinks that is some sort of sick reversal of the early days when it was Tao crying and him sitting beside him, back when they were an army of four and not two lone warriors fending for themselves with broken swords.
“单枪匹马**. That’s all we have,” says Tao brokenly.
Yixing lifts his head. “No,” he says. “No. You and I. That’s what we have. You’re not alone. You have me.”
He hates Yifan for leaving, he hates himself for letting Lu Han leave, he hates the newfound fame that comes with filling in their places, the pressure that comes with it, but he would not abandon Tao to this hell. He would not.
要狠.
Be ruthless.
("I can't take this anymore," Lu Han whispers to him under the cover of darkness and the hum of the airplane engine roaring in their ears. "That was our last concert together. I'm sorry Xing."
For a second Yixing doesn't know what to say, just remembers the way Lu Han's eyes filled up towards the end of the concert, the amount of times he woke up in the middle of the night finding Lu Han slumped over the toilet bowl because of the drugs they give him to keep him standing. He doesn't think about the implications, doesn't think about who will fill in for Lu Han's parts in future songs. This is all they have left together, this last airplane ride before Lu Han's future snatches him away. So he just says,
"Okay."
)
It takes two members to leave before Yixing finally gets the spotlight his (Chinese) bandmates always told him he deserved.
But by the time it happens, he finds that he doesn’t really want it anymore.
Not like this.
Never like this.
----------------------------------------------------------------
*Tao says "要狠吗? yāo hěn ma?" which is a modification of the words Chairman Mao said to one of his Red Guards during the Cultural Revoluton, "要武吗 yāo wǔ ma," which means 'be more violent/warlike' when she said her name was Binbin (gentle)
**单枪匹马 (dān qiāng pǐ mǎ) literally means a single spear and a single horse, which loosely translates as taking on the offensive on your own, but Tao is using it as a double entendre