BLACK DAY 5: Dance, Earthworm
Title: Dance, Earthworm
Written by: sydneycarts
A remix of " Bicycle Pump" by exollent
Pairing: Lu Han/Lay, Lay/Sehun
Rating: R
Warnings: Body swap.
Summary: Lu Han knows that Yixing has traveled a long way to fall in love with Oh Sehun.
This one time, they're on their twentieth run-through of "History." During the part where Lu Han crouches in front of Minseok, right before Kris' rap, Minseok squints and touches his finger to the back of Lu Han's neck. "Is this… slime?"
Lu Han slaps a hand over his neck. "Shhh." Kris has launched into some seriously inspired spoken word.
Through the third eye hidden in his sweaty head of hair he can see Minseok shrug and resign himself to a sleepy understanding. It's past four a.m. Nothing makes sense anymore.
"That was close," Yixing whispers when they're back in their room.
Lu Han rubs his neck again. It's fine now, if a little rubbery. The pores have closed. "At least it wasn't a tentacle?"
"You have to thank Kris for the impromptu Maya Angelou recitation," Yixing says, and he hands Lu Han his phone.
That was your best performance since we came to this planet, Lu Han texts Kris.
Respect, fool, Kris writes back.
One of the first things they were told after being chosen as ambassadors was, "Do Not Fall In Love With A Human."
"I Am Serious. Don't Do It," said Lalagrapefruit, who was in charge of cleaning out Lu Han's pod. "They Smell Bad And Also You Are Gay And That Will Be Difficult In Ess Kay."
"Ess Kay?" Lu Han asked.
"Oh." When Lalagrapefruit was nervous, her antennae drew back into her eyelids like a hesitating barnacle. "This Is Hearsay But. I Think You Will Be Sent To The Country Called South Korea." Swiffers were a species of gossipmongers. They couldn't help it, given their line of work. The juiciest rumors always originated in a pod.
Lu Han looked at Yixing, who was busy concealing the last suction cup on his face. It grew smaller and smaller until it was just a dent, inconspicuous except when he smiled.
"Don't worry about me," Lu Han said in the human accent he'd perfected over the last two hundred years. "I won't fall in love with just anything."
And he didn't. It was Yixing, who ended up breaking the law. Yixing took one look at Oh Sehun that first day in the dance studio and slipped his smarmy hand into Lu Han's. Back home that meant panic, save me. On Earth it meant something else. All three of Lu Han's minds blanked out, but one of them filtered in the warmth of Yixing's skin, the jump in his pulse.
"Come with me to the bathroom, Lu Han-hyung," Sehun was saying, his voice pinched into a whine. He was pointedly ignoring Yixing.
The mating rituals here were elaborate.
"Maybe I'll write him a song," Yixing muses.
He isn't going to write Sehun a song, Lu Han knows. He's going to continue projecting himself onto that water bottle Sehun likes to carry around, staring at his throat as he takes hungry gulps into his mouth. He'll watch Sehun with the kind of gaze that doesn't seem to fall anywhere, hiding its purposefulness.
When they first showed Yixing a montage of his host body, belonging to the local child star of a Chinese province, Yixing recoiled and looped his arms around himself twice. "I Have To Be That?" The question gargled with uncertainty.
"Yes."
"I Don't Know If I Can Make My Face Move Like That."
The original Zhang Yixing was a spunky kid with a voice that shot out of a reed, thin and sweet, and more ambition than his thirteen-year-old body knew what to do with. His plane left Changsha for a singing competition in Beijing and never touched ground. Thirty-seven dead, the pilot survived to be prescribed therapy for the rest of his life. In these claustrophobic sessions he confesses that they come to him sometimes, faceless passengers who wander into the cockpit in search of the restroom or a cup of lukewarm water to take their allergy pills with. None of it ever happened, but guilt could be creative.
The others suffered more ordinary deaths. Lu Han was knifed by a mugger outside an arcade on a day that he'd decided to skip school, spending the afternoon beating his own scores at every machine. Wu Yifan met his end in a car crash, his face alone preserved throughout the impact. Huang Zitao was an angry kid who jumped from the fifth-floor window of his chemistry class.
"We're Doing Them A Favor" had been the rationale. The amnesia guns, shaped like friendly balloon animals, were ready and loaded. "It Will Be Like They Never Died." The four Shifters, later Ambassadors-Lu Han, Yixing, Kris, and Zitao-each stood at the top of their respective classes. They specialized in different skill sets but shared the unique ability of imitation, the truest form of invisibility. Their hosts had shared something else: the desire to be known and loved.
It was a great experiment for a noble cause. They were hired to investigate differences between subcultures within the larger and more elusive Earthian culture. There were millions of years of data on the planet and still nobody understood a thing.
Some truths you had to experience firsthand, Lu Han found out. He didn't tell anyone when he was dragged into private lessons. "It's Easy To Change Yourself, But Can You Change Others?" They sat him in front of a fish tank and watched as he sprouted gills and scales, shrunk into an ugly head-and-tail, flopping uselessly on the floor, while the creature trapped behind the glass grew into him.
The penalty for falling in love with a human is a thousand years in a weightless space cave. Yixing has enough self-control to undo the obesity epidemic that has afflicted this hopeless planet but Lu Han sees the way he looks at Sehun and believes that just because you can tolerate pain doesn't mean you should have to. Lu Han is about as smart as the rare species that cannibalize on their own young, except in lieu of offspring, which he understands he will never have, he feeds on himself. This masochistic streak has to be the reason he says to Yixing one day: "I have a plan."
Sehun's bone-chilling shriek when he wakes up in Lu Han's skin is another reason, in retrospect.
Lu Han wakes to the panic scrawled over his own face and every feeler stands on end, prickling with the awareness of being inside another host. Sehun's taut epidermis containing him and the heaviness of his internal organs, the longer wingspan. Less strangely, the faint gnawing sensation when he sees Yixing in the kitchen later has stayed the same.
The first ten years of his training he'd toiled away memorizing every feature of his host body. The twin punctures in the middle of his face were to allow in oxygen, the air of choice on Earth. He would travel on two legs, not four or six or twelve, depending on his mood or the weather. Rather than all-purpose appendages, human limbs were classified into "transportational" and "for everything else." It took another decade for him to remember not to scratch his head with his new foot. "Feet Are Gross And Smelly," Lalagrapefruit reminded him on more than one occasion. "Hands Are Better. Soft. For touching." She was an okay friend but an awful employee, regularly shirking janitorial duty for her idea of a perfect afternoon-curled up in her imitation pod while studying human holograms. Lalagrapefruit had a limited social circle, preferring to indulge her eclectic interest in Earthian anthropology rather than hang out with the other Swiffers on their non-Swiffing time. Lu Han liked this about her, and the fact that she was a good listener.
"Changing someone into yourself is really hard," he confided, which wasn't something he could tell the other ambassadors, because it was as bad as saying, I don't want to. I'm not cut out for this. Give me my life back. And none of that was true. This was his life now. "Especially when it's not even the real ‘you' they're changing into."
At the time he'd been practicing person-to-person transformations and would always come up short-the object missing Lu Han's nose or ear on the bad days; an Adam's apple, a fourth of a toe on the better ones.
"Hrm," purred Lalagrapefruit thoughtfully. "You Are Probably Not Looking Close Enough. Pay More Attention To Yourself. I Mean, Not Yourself. Your Host Self. You Know What I Mean."
"I know what you mean," Lu Han echoed. But it wasn't just about attention. The sheer act of pitching his own image onto the body of another object drained him of what felt like half his life force. He was exhausted after an hour of charading as someone else while the object charaded as him. It took months to build up to a day of holding the illusion, years to build up to a week.
Becoming the other person was easier. In Sehun's case, Lu Han first closed his eyes and thought of Yixing. Without asking for permission, he swapped his own eyes for Yixing's, and saw Sehun there. Every feature was as clear as a drawing that had been traced over many times and colored in finely within the outline, with the hand of a conscientious child. Oh Sehun, from the strong bridge of his nose to the rounded protrusion of his lips, which Yixing wanted so badly to press against his own. Lu Han closed his eyes and swapped them back. There were some things he didn't need to know, even if he already knew them.
True to his species' form, Sehun doesn't take it very well.
"I tried fapping in the shower today. But when I looked at your dick, my brain mentally screamed no in ten different languages."
Hyperbole, Lu Han thinks, as someone who actually does know ten different languages, only three of them usable on this planet. But he's sympathetic. This-Changing-doesn't ever happen to people. Sehun's allowed to brood.
"But think of all the fun we can have while we're like this."
"Like what?"
Like, Lu Han finds out from Yixing, Sehun singing in the shower every morning, hammering the upper register with Lu Han's vocal cords. "He sounds really good," Yixing telepathizes. "Really good."
He sounds like me, Lu Han tries not to think. He keeps it in the outermost mind, sheltered from Yixing. "You better be making the most of this, Zhang Yixing," he shoots back.
The next message is clogged with doubt and gratitude, the weight of which buries him with the force of a thousand fiery asteroids. "I-I don't know how I can ever-you-the best-"
"God, stop trying to be so nice. I can't even hear what you're thinking."
Jongin's voice crackles through the laptop mic like a broken firework. He is listing his grievances to Sehun over Skype. Lu Han, on his way to the kitchen, catches the phrase "baby-faced Satan" and stops his feet. This means his efforts are paying off. It's not easy thinking of a different prank to pull on Jongin every day. Earlier that morning he refilled his tube of toothpaste with mint shampoo. He likes torturing Jongin, but this is not about torturing Jongin. He's starting a fire and hoping that Sehun will look up and catch the smoke signal. I'm having fun, it reads. You should too. Maybe then Yixing will stop feeling so guilty.
The longest he's ever held a swap was ten days and over a distance of two rooms. This time they span two countries. He isn't sure how long he'll last.
"He's got too much energy," Jongin chokes out from Lu Han's stranglehold a moment later. "I'm going to kill you, hyung."
Lu Han releases his grip around Jongin's neck to laugh and gently ruffle his hair. Earlier when Jongin said, I just want my best friend back, he'd sounded devastatingly young, exactly his human age.
A few months after Lu Han landed, they'd had a conversation about it. Lu Han folded his hands together around the hot glass mug, inside of which his tea was lazily steeping from green to golden-brown. He was acclimating, learning to ignore the instinct to appraise his surroundings like artifacts. Someday all of this would be suspended behind glass, and their collective heroism inscribed upon placards, their likenesses cast on a wall in the Universal Museum of Art. That day was a millennium into the future. He stared into his mug and watched the tea leaves float to the top. "What Do You Like About Him?"
Sitting cross-legged on his bed, Yixing cradled his own cup. His head knocked against the wall as he internalized the question. "Do You Ever… get nostalgic about something that doesn't belong to you?"
"Tell me more."
Yixing glanced around the room out of habit and extended his arms a couple feet across Lu Han's bed, securing them around Lu Han's waist, hoisting him onto his own bed. He dropped him gently, so that they sat facing each other. Like two rubber bands his arms snapped back into place.
"See, this is the same as looking into a mirror," Yixing said, all matter-of-fact as he penetrated his eyes into Lu Han's."It's tiring."
Lu Han felt particulates of himself disengage and evaporate; the definition of a human sadness. "And with Sehun-"
"With him I forget that this is a job. He's a silver lining." Yixing's smile carried the downtrodden weariness of a veteran time-traveler. "And so young. So Young, Lu Han."
"He's more than a silver lining." Rule one of being in love with your best friend was always Be a good best friend. "Don't rationalize your feelings. You've totally fallen for him."
"What if I have?"
Protect your bodies, they'd been taught, but more importantly, protect your minds, which hold the most vital part of yourselves, the part we need. Save yourself. There was no real camaraderie in a worst-case-scenario. Three out of four was better than two, was still better than zero. They diffused their minds across their bodies, preempting the nastiest consequences of a physical injury. Lu Han backed up his memory regularly, scattering them down his bloodstream like microscopic love-lettered bottles. Yixing was stuck with a poorer model and suffered from recurrent cramps and pains. They hadn't managed to repair all the kinks before zapping them down. The first time Yixing fell down and didn't immediately get up was the first time Lu Han lurched forward with cripplingly sudden resolve. Something inside his chest had made the decision for him. "If you have," Lu Han said, and thought hard: I'll protect you first. I'll save you when you are no longer able to save yourself. The faint twitch of the last suction cup on Yixing's face was the only proof that he'd heard.
Up close Sehun's eyebags materialize into caverns, and the fact that they are attached to Lu Han's face is almost enough to distract from what comes out of his mouth. "I kissed Yixing."
Lu Han brings a hand to his own lips.
"I kissed your best friend and he kissed me back."
Sehun doesn't describe the kiss, but Lu Han doesn't need him to. The heat is palpable in his every nerve, sizzling off his skin. Sehun won't allow himself to revel in it, but he can't help the physical reaction.
"I don't know whether Yixing even thought about me while he was kissing me. You might be having fun prank-calling restaurants from Jongin's phone in Mandarin and making his life miserable but-"
"I'm not having fun," Lu Han says finally. "And I know, you've loved him for a while now."
Sehun's silent on the other end. He looks the way Lu Han often feels. "Yeah, well."
"He wants to pull your pants down," Lu Han hears himself saying. He pauses, getting down the timing for a joke. "Don't ever let him pull your pants down, Oh Sehun."
A projection of Kris is standing in the doorway with his arms folded across his chest when Lu Han turns around. Lu Han's impressed, and a little flattered. Kris' projections are rare and getting rarer the longer they stay on this planet.
"This isn't going to work, Lu Han," it says.
Lu Han brings his shoulders up and down. "What's wrong with some temporary gratification? For now they both get what they want."
"What happens when the swap ends?"
"‘It's Better To Have Loved And Lost Than To-‘"
"Don't Mess Around," Kris interrupts. "It's cruel, what you're doing. Teasing them like this."
"I'm not trying to be cruel."
"I don't mean just to them."
By all accounts Lu Han is older, in Here and Home Years. When Lu Han was learning to crawl, Kris was suspended in a sealed airtight vessel, buoyed by a nurturing placenta. They'd passed around some of the scans of him naked and sleeping, sucking on his single underdeveloped feeler. "Baby Kris," they cooed in delight, "Embryo Jelly," and Kris would glow a phosphorescent pink, storm back into his now adult-sized crib. But while Kris shot up like an angry weed, Lu Han stayed gnarly and ambiguous. All the adolescent Shifting stunted his growth, Zitao joked, dooming him to the illusion of eternal youth. He feels it keenly now as Kris' projected hand comes down on his head and rests there for a moment, tender as a father's, weightless as air.
The night after SM Town Shanghai, he wakes up as himself. The warm cage of skin is undeniably his own. He burrows himself deep in it, like an earthworm dancing through familiar dirt.
"We'll have to be quiet," he hears. Yixing's voice.
Sehun's says, "Yixing."
Lu Han opens his eyes to the image of a naked Sehun lowering himself onto Yixing, his pale buttocks two faint spots of blue in the dark. Neither of them is wearing anything. Yixing is leaning back against the wall between their beds, watching with a dazed, dizzy interest as Sehun slides over his cock. One hand runs idly up Sehun's spindly ribcage, pinching his nipple.
Lu Han holds his breath as Yixing works up a heavy rhythm. Maybe he's waiting for something to go wrong. Slime, a betraying tentacle. Nothing. This is Yixing at his best, his hardest. His hips drive into Sehun with furious love, furious desperation, the summation of centuries of restraint, the collective story of their lives. Sehun, licking his lips and arching into it. Come on, hyung, he moans, again and again.
Lu Han watches until he is unable to. He's hard, too, aching to wrap a hand around himself and stroke until everything leaks out of him, until nothing is left. All the make-believe fluid and organs and safeguarded in them copies of his memory, a repository of his Time Here-all of it can go. He wishes he could go.
"I was sleeping," he says loudly.
In the dark Yixing meets his selfish gaze. His hands are still gently perched on Sehun's waist, his eyes foggy as Sehun growls a needy whine.
"You can stay and watch us," Yixing says softly as he pushes into Sehun again.
It's not an offer he would be able to forgive himself for taking.
The next morning everyone gets a mass text from Lalagrapefruit, who has been collecting and fixing broken human cellphones for her personal museum. She sends messages faster than Zitao, using the nubs on her antennae as opposable thumbs.
They Know, it reads simply. A moment later: Yixing Bigger Than Expected.
And then: Sorry. Not The Right Time To Joke. (Not Joking Tho)
Don't Worry About It, Lu Han is in the middle of typing as Zitao vocalizes the one thought running through all their twelve minds. "We're fucked."
Yixing doesn't say anything. His tear ducts are already wetting.
"If anyone's going to be locked up in a space cave, it should be me," Kris says. "I should've stopped this whole thing from happening."
"Shut up," Lu Han says. "Stop trying to take responsibility for shit you have nothing to do with."
"It's my fault," Yixing cuts in. "I had a lapse in judgment. It won't happen again." He pauses to smile weakly at the implication of his promise, like he has a choice. "Will you guys at least visit me in my space cave?"
They wrap their arms around him and don't let go for a long time. Zitao, predictably, is the first one to cry.
It takes a millennium to forget yourself, they told him like they'd been sifting through his minds. It's been less than half of that, but Lu Han dreams now in Korean. Not the language he was taught at home but the language he was told he'd have to learn when he got here. Some nights he wakes up with four arms and doesn't remember what the other two are for. Some nights he recoils from his own slime that has slicked up the bedsheets. In another decade the first phase will be over. He'll retire, fade into obscurity, adopt a dog, take up residence in the mountains. Or move back to Beijing, stare up in wonder at the thick smog, wait for his lungs to give in before the rest of his body. Ride the slow burn into old age. They never told him how to die, only what to do afterwards. He'll tumble out of his decrepit casing, equipped now with enough knowledge to finally go home. They'll pick him up in a cornfield, as the story goes.
From time to time it comes to him in a dream. In the dreams the light that zaps them up reminds him of being onstage. Right before he tilts his head toward the sky he looks at where Yixing would've been and mouths, "We're going now."
Written by: sydneycarts
A remix of " Bicycle Pump" by exollent
Pairing: Lu Han/Lay, Lay/Sehun
Rating: R
Warnings: Body swap.
Summary: Lu Han knows that Yixing has traveled a long way to fall in love with Oh Sehun.
This one time, they're on their twentieth run-through of "History." During the part where Lu Han crouches in front of Minseok, right before Kris' rap, Minseok squints and touches his finger to the back of Lu Han's neck. "Is this… slime?"
Lu Han slaps a hand over his neck. "Shhh." Kris has launched into some seriously inspired spoken word.
Through the third eye hidden in his sweaty head of hair he can see Minseok shrug and resign himself to a sleepy understanding. It's past four a.m. Nothing makes sense anymore.
"That was close," Yixing whispers when they're back in their room.
Lu Han rubs his neck again. It's fine now, if a little rubbery. The pores have closed. "At least it wasn't a tentacle?"
"You have to thank Kris for the impromptu Maya Angelou recitation," Yixing says, and he hands Lu Han his phone.
That was your best performance since we came to this planet, Lu Han texts Kris.
Respect, fool, Kris writes back.
One of the first things they were told after being chosen as ambassadors was, "Do Not Fall In Love With A Human."
"I Am Serious. Don't Do It," said Lalagrapefruit, who was in charge of cleaning out Lu Han's pod. "They Smell Bad And Also You Are Gay And That Will Be Difficult In Ess Kay."
"Ess Kay?" Lu Han asked.
"Oh." When Lalagrapefruit was nervous, her antennae drew back into her eyelids like a hesitating barnacle. "This Is Hearsay But. I Think You Will Be Sent To The Country Called South Korea." Swiffers were a species of gossipmongers. They couldn't help it, given their line of work. The juiciest rumors always originated in a pod.
Lu Han looked at Yixing, who was busy concealing the last suction cup on his face. It grew smaller and smaller until it was just a dent, inconspicuous except when he smiled.
"Don't worry about me," Lu Han said in the human accent he'd perfected over the last two hundred years. "I won't fall in love with just anything."
And he didn't. It was Yixing, who ended up breaking the law. Yixing took one look at Oh Sehun that first day in the dance studio and slipped his smarmy hand into Lu Han's. Back home that meant panic, save me. On Earth it meant something else. All three of Lu Han's minds blanked out, but one of them filtered in the warmth of Yixing's skin, the jump in his pulse.
"Come with me to the bathroom, Lu Han-hyung," Sehun was saying, his voice pinched into a whine. He was pointedly ignoring Yixing.
The mating rituals here were elaborate.
"Maybe I'll write him a song," Yixing muses.
He isn't going to write Sehun a song, Lu Han knows. He's going to continue projecting himself onto that water bottle Sehun likes to carry around, staring at his throat as he takes hungry gulps into his mouth. He'll watch Sehun with the kind of gaze that doesn't seem to fall anywhere, hiding its purposefulness.
When they first showed Yixing a montage of his host body, belonging to the local child star of a Chinese province, Yixing recoiled and looped his arms around himself twice. "I Have To Be That?" The question gargled with uncertainty.
"Yes."
"I Don't Know If I Can Make My Face Move Like That."
The original Zhang Yixing was a spunky kid with a voice that shot out of a reed, thin and sweet, and more ambition than his thirteen-year-old body knew what to do with. His plane left Changsha for a singing competition in Beijing and never touched ground. Thirty-seven dead, the pilot survived to be prescribed therapy for the rest of his life. In these claustrophobic sessions he confesses that they come to him sometimes, faceless passengers who wander into the cockpit in search of the restroom or a cup of lukewarm water to take their allergy pills with. None of it ever happened, but guilt could be creative.
The others suffered more ordinary deaths. Lu Han was knifed by a mugger outside an arcade on a day that he'd decided to skip school, spending the afternoon beating his own scores at every machine. Wu Yifan met his end in a car crash, his face alone preserved throughout the impact. Huang Zitao was an angry kid who jumped from the fifth-floor window of his chemistry class.
"We're Doing Them A Favor" had been the rationale. The amnesia guns, shaped like friendly balloon animals, were ready and loaded. "It Will Be Like They Never Died." The four Shifters, later Ambassadors-Lu Han, Yixing, Kris, and Zitao-each stood at the top of their respective classes. They specialized in different skill sets but shared the unique ability of imitation, the truest form of invisibility. Their hosts had shared something else: the desire to be known and loved.
It was a great experiment for a noble cause. They were hired to investigate differences between subcultures within the larger and more elusive Earthian culture. There were millions of years of data on the planet and still nobody understood a thing.
Some truths you had to experience firsthand, Lu Han found out. He didn't tell anyone when he was dragged into private lessons. "It's Easy To Change Yourself, But Can You Change Others?" They sat him in front of a fish tank and watched as he sprouted gills and scales, shrunk into an ugly head-and-tail, flopping uselessly on the floor, while the creature trapped behind the glass grew into him.
The penalty for falling in love with a human is a thousand years in a weightless space cave. Yixing has enough self-control to undo the obesity epidemic that has afflicted this hopeless planet but Lu Han sees the way he looks at Sehun and believes that just because you can tolerate pain doesn't mean you should have to. Lu Han is about as smart as the rare species that cannibalize on their own young, except in lieu of offspring, which he understands he will never have, he feeds on himself. This masochistic streak has to be the reason he says to Yixing one day: "I have a plan."
Sehun's bone-chilling shriek when he wakes up in Lu Han's skin is another reason, in retrospect.
Lu Han wakes to the panic scrawled over his own face and every feeler stands on end, prickling with the awareness of being inside another host. Sehun's taut epidermis containing him and the heaviness of his internal organs, the longer wingspan. Less strangely, the faint gnawing sensation when he sees Yixing in the kitchen later has stayed the same.
The first ten years of his training he'd toiled away memorizing every feature of his host body. The twin punctures in the middle of his face were to allow in oxygen, the air of choice on Earth. He would travel on two legs, not four or six or twelve, depending on his mood or the weather. Rather than all-purpose appendages, human limbs were classified into "transportational" and "for everything else." It took another decade for him to remember not to scratch his head with his new foot. "Feet Are Gross And Smelly," Lalagrapefruit reminded him on more than one occasion. "Hands Are Better. Soft. For touching." She was an okay friend but an awful employee, regularly shirking janitorial duty for her idea of a perfect afternoon-curled up in her imitation pod while studying human holograms. Lalagrapefruit had a limited social circle, preferring to indulge her eclectic interest in Earthian anthropology rather than hang out with the other Swiffers on their non-Swiffing time. Lu Han liked this about her, and the fact that she was a good listener.
"Changing someone into yourself is really hard," he confided, which wasn't something he could tell the other ambassadors, because it was as bad as saying, I don't want to. I'm not cut out for this. Give me my life back. And none of that was true. This was his life now. "Especially when it's not even the real ‘you' they're changing into."
At the time he'd been practicing person-to-person transformations and would always come up short-the object missing Lu Han's nose or ear on the bad days; an Adam's apple, a fourth of a toe on the better ones.
"Hrm," purred Lalagrapefruit thoughtfully. "You Are Probably Not Looking Close Enough. Pay More Attention To Yourself. I Mean, Not Yourself. Your Host Self. You Know What I Mean."
"I know what you mean," Lu Han echoed. But it wasn't just about attention. The sheer act of pitching his own image onto the body of another object drained him of what felt like half his life force. He was exhausted after an hour of charading as someone else while the object charaded as him. It took months to build up to a day of holding the illusion, years to build up to a week.
Becoming the other person was easier. In Sehun's case, Lu Han first closed his eyes and thought of Yixing. Without asking for permission, he swapped his own eyes for Yixing's, and saw Sehun there. Every feature was as clear as a drawing that had been traced over many times and colored in finely within the outline, with the hand of a conscientious child. Oh Sehun, from the strong bridge of his nose to the rounded protrusion of his lips, which Yixing wanted so badly to press against his own. Lu Han closed his eyes and swapped them back. There were some things he didn't need to know, even if he already knew them.
True to his species' form, Sehun doesn't take it very well.
"I tried fapping in the shower today. But when I looked at your dick, my brain mentally screamed no in ten different languages."
Hyperbole, Lu Han thinks, as someone who actually does know ten different languages, only three of them usable on this planet. But he's sympathetic. This-Changing-doesn't ever happen to people. Sehun's allowed to brood.
"But think of all the fun we can have while we're like this."
"Like what?"
Like, Lu Han finds out from Yixing, Sehun singing in the shower every morning, hammering the upper register with Lu Han's vocal cords. "He sounds really good," Yixing telepathizes. "Really good."
He sounds like me, Lu Han tries not to think. He keeps it in the outermost mind, sheltered from Yixing. "You better be making the most of this, Zhang Yixing," he shoots back.
The next message is clogged with doubt and gratitude, the weight of which buries him with the force of a thousand fiery asteroids. "I-I don't know how I can ever-you-the best-"
"God, stop trying to be so nice. I can't even hear what you're thinking."
Jongin's voice crackles through the laptop mic like a broken firework. He is listing his grievances to Sehun over Skype. Lu Han, on his way to the kitchen, catches the phrase "baby-faced Satan" and stops his feet. This means his efforts are paying off. It's not easy thinking of a different prank to pull on Jongin every day. Earlier that morning he refilled his tube of toothpaste with mint shampoo. He likes torturing Jongin, but this is not about torturing Jongin. He's starting a fire and hoping that Sehun will look up and catch the smoke signal. I'm having fun, it reads. You should too. Maybe then Yixing will stop feeling so guilty.
The longest he's ever held a swap was ten days and over a distance of two rooms. This time they span two countries. He isn't sure how long he'll last.
"He's got too much energy," Jongin chokes out from Lu Han's stranglehold a moment later. "I'm going to kill you, hyung."
Lu Han releases his grip around Jongin's neck to laugh and gently ruffle his hair. Earlier when Jongin said, I just want my best friend back, he'd sounded devastatingly young, exactly his human age.
A few months after Lu Han landed, they'd had a conversation about it. Lu Han folded his hands together around the hot glass mug, inside of which his tea was lazily steeping from green to golden-brown. He was acclimating, learning to ignore the instinct to appraise his surroundings like artifacts. Someday all of this would be suspended behind glass, and their collective heroism inscribed upon placards, their likenesses cast on a wall in the Universal Museum of Art. That day was a millennium into the future. He stared into his mug and watched the tea leaves float to the top. "What Do You Like About Him?"
Sitting cross-legged on his bed, Yixing cradled his own cup. His head knocked against the wall as he internalized the question. "Do You Ever… get nostalgic about something that doesn't belong to you?"
"Tell me more."
Yixing glanced around the room out of habit and extended his arms a couple feet across Lu Han's bed, securing them around Lu Han's waist, hoisting him onto his own bed. He dropped him gently, so that they sat facing each other. Like two rubber bands his arms snapped back into place.
"See, this is the same as looking into a mirror," Yixing said, all matter-of-fact as he penetrated his eyes into Lu Han's."It's tiring."
Lu Han felt particulates of himself disengage and evaporate; the definition of a human sadness. "And with Sehun-"
"With him I forget that this is a job. He's a silver lining." Yixing's smile carried the downtrodden weariness of a veteran time-traveler. "And so young. So Young, Lu Han."
"He's more than a silver lining." Rule one of being in love with your best friend was always Be a good best friend. "Don't rationalize your feelings. You've totally fallen for him."
"What if I have?"
Protect your bodies, they'd been taught, but more importantly, protect your minds, which hold the most vital part of yourselves, the part we need. Save yourself. There was no real camaraderie in a worst-case-scenario. Three out of four was better than two, was still better than zero. They diffused their minds across their bodies, preempting the nastiest consequences of a physical injury. Lu Han backed up his memory regularly, scattering them down his bloodstream like microscopic love-lettered bottles. Yixing was stuck with a poorer model and suffered from recurrent cramps and pains. They hadn't managed to repair all the kinks before zapping them down. The first time Yixing fell down and didn't immediately get up was the first time Lu Han lurched forward with cripplingly sudden resolve. Something inside his chest had made the decision for him. "If you have," Lu Han said, and thought hard: I'll protect you first. I'll save you when you are no longer able to save yourself. The faint twitch of the last suction cup on Yixing's face was the only proof that he'd heard.
Up close Sehun's eyebags materialize into caverns, and the fact that they are attached to Lu Han's face is almost enough to distract from what comes out of his mouth. "I kissed Yixing."
Lu Han brings a hand to his own lips.
"I kissed your best friend and he kissed me back."
Sehun doesn't describe the kiss, but Lu Han doesn't need him to. The heat is palpable in his every nerve, sizzling off his skin. Sehun won't allow himself to revel in it, but he can't help the physical reaction.
"I don't know whether Yixing even thought about me while he was kissing me. You might be having fun prank-calling restaurants from Jongin's phone in Mandarin and making his life miserable but-"
"I'm not having fun," Lu Han says finally. "And I know, you've loved him for a while now."
Sehun's silent on the other end. He looks the way Lu Han often feels. "Yeah, well."
"He wants to pull your pants down," Lu Han hears himself saying. He pauses, getting down the timing for a joke. "Don't ever let him pull your pants down, Oh Sehun."
A projection of Kris is standing in the doorway with his arms folded across his chest when Lu Han turns around. Lu Han's impressed, and a little flattered. Kris' projections are rare and getting rarer the longer they stay on this planet.
"This isn't going to work, Lu Han," it says.
Lu Han brings his shoulders up and down. "What's wrong with some temporary gratification? For now they both get what they want."
"What happens when the swap ends?"
"‘It's Better To Have Loved And Lost Than To-‘"
"Don't Mess Around," Kris interrupts. "It's cruel, what you're doing. Teasing them like this."
"I'm not trying to be cruel."
"I don't mean just to them."
By all accounts Lu Han is older, in Here and Home Years. When Lu Han was learning to crawl, Kris was suspended in a sealed airtight vessel, buoyed by a nurturing placenta. They'd passed around some of the scans of him naked and sleeping, sucking on his single underdeveloped feeler. "Baby Kris," they cooed in delight, "Embryo Jelly," and Kris would glow a phosphorescent pink, storm back into his now adult-sized crib. But while Kris shot up like an angry weed, Lu Han stayed gnarly and ambiguous. All the adolescent Shifting stunted his growth, Zitao joked, dooming him to the illusion of eternal youth. He feels it keenly now as Kris' projected hand comes down on his head and rests there for a moment, tender as a father's, weightless as air.
The night after SM Town Shanghai, he wakes up as himself. The warm cage of skin is undeniably his own. He burrows himself deep in it, like an earthworm dancing through familiar dirt.
"We'll have to be quiet," he hears. Yixing's voice.
Sehun's says, "Yixing."
Lu Han opens his eyes to the image of a naked Sehun lowering himself onto Yixing, his pale buttocks two faint spots of blue in the dark. Neither of them is wearing anything. Yixing is leaning back against the wall between their beds, watching with a dazed, dizzy interest as Sehun slides over his cock. One hand runs idly up Sehun's spindly ribcage, pinching his nipple.
Lu Han holds his breath as Yixing works up a heavy rhythm. Maybe he's waiting for something to go wrong. Slime, a betraying tentacle. Nothing. This is Yixing at his best, his hardest. His hips drive into Sehun with furious love, furious desperation, the summation of centuries of restraint, the collective story of their lives. Sehun, licking his lips and arching into it. Come on, hyung, he moans, again and again.
Lu Han watches until he is unable to. He's hard, too, aching to wrap a hand around himself and stroke until everything leaks out of him, until nothing is left. All the make-believe fluid and organs and safeguarded in them copies of his memory, a repository of his Time Here-all of it can go. He wishes he could go.
"I was sleeping," he says loudly.
In the dark Yixing meets his selfish gaze. His hands are still gently perched on Sehun's waist, his eyes foggy as Sehun growls a needy whine.
"You can stay and watch us," Yixing says softly as he pushes into Sehun again.
It's not an offer he would be able to forgive himself for taking.
The next morning everyone gets a mass text from Lalagrapefruit, who has been collecting and fixing broken human cellphones for her personal museum. She sends messages faster than Zitao, using the nubs on her antennae as opposable thumbs.
They Know, it reads simply. A moment later: Yixing Bigger Than Expected.
And then: Sorry. Not The Right Time To Joke. (Not Joking Tho)
Don't Worry About It, Lu Han is in the middle of typing as Zitao vocalizes the one thought running through all their twelve minds. "We're fucked."
Yixing doesn't say anything. His tear ducts are already wetting.
"If anyone's going to be locked up in a space cave, it should be me," Kris says. "I should've stopped this whole thing from happening."
"Shut up," Lu Han says. "Stop trying to take responsibility for shit you have nothing to do with."
"It's my fault," Yixing cuts in. "I had a lapse in judgment. It won't happen again." He pauses to smile weakly at the implication of his promise, like he has a choice. "Will you guys at least visit me in my space cave?"
They wrap their arms around him and don't let go for a long time. Zitao, predictably, is the first one to cry.
It takes a millennium to forget yourself, they told him like they'd been sifting through his minds. It's been less than half of that, but Lu Han dreams now in Korean. Not the language he was taught at home but the language he was told he'd have to learn when he got here. Some nights he wakes up with four arms and doesn't remember what the other two are for. Some nights he recoils from his own slime that has slicked up the bedsheets. In another decade the first phase will be over. He'll retire, fade into obscurity, adopt a dog, take up residence in the mountains. Or move back to Beijing, stare up in wonder at the thick smog, wait for his lungs to give in before the rest of his body. Ride the slow burn into old age. They never told him how to die, only what to do afterwards. He'll tumble out of his decrepit casing, equipped now with enough knowledge to finally go home. They'll pick him up in a cornfield, as the story goes.
From time to time it comes to him in a dream. In the dreams the light that zaps them up reminds him of being onstage. Right before he tilts his head toward the sky he looks at where Yixing would've been and mouths, "We're going now."