{exo} turnout // kailu, AU (2/3)
+
He tears along the gilt staircase, breath hot against the shield of his black helmet. It's been a long time since Jongin's had to fight in such a quiet space, and the reverberation of each exhalation is louder than he remembers. He's paranoid, suddenly, that someone is sneaking up on him, taking advantage of his sensory blind spot. The easy answer, he knows, is to switch out of something so confining, or maybe to modify it so he can pick up slight sounds outside. But like most other things in Jongin's life, he has a fondness for doing things his way, the way he's always done it, even if it's not always right.
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees something move and immediately snaps his gun in that direction, aiming while he jumps from a VIP box to a banister on the lower gallery. For once, something in ballet helps him in the arena: keeping his gun trained while moving is a hundred times easier since he knows how to spot. When he finally settles into a crouch, he realizes it's just one of the curtain tassels swaying in the breeze. Still, he doesn't put his gun away, and waits patiently for someone, anyone, to find him. The empty stage, framed on three sides with burgundy velvet brocade and finished with a hardwood floor so polished it can hardly be real, unnerves him, but he suspects it's just Baekhyun's idea of a joke. When are you going to show me what you can do, Baekhyun likes to tease him, and Jongin wonders what the hell Baekhyun thinks it is that he can do. Maybe pick up an opponent and pirouette him to death. Or choke him with a pair of pointe shoes.
The one benefit of being chosen to participate in the exchange program is that the university suspends Jongin's usual class schedule. So for the second time that week, Jongin's at EXO, down in the arena levels, chasing down Peking Opera. The last two times at EXO, he'd come up empty-handed, without a single sighting of the red and white lianpu. It'd been disappointing, but if nothing else, the dream brawls gave Jongin a good way to work off his irritation and keep his intense desire to claw Kris' vocal cords out of his throat to a bare minimum.
He has a good feeling about today, though. Right on cue, the distant sound of a piano playing the kind of monotonous, vaguely classical music so popular with ballet teachers everywhere reaches Jongin, like a fog rolling into the auditorium. It's either a trap or a message, and Jongin finds himself tossing his gun in the air in lieu of a coin. He catches the handle, glimpses the little scratch on one side that means he's going to look for the source. It doesn't occur to him until he's already bounding up the emergency exit staircase that in shared dreaming, where you can control almost everything around you, chance is a bad bet.
Jongin knocks out a fairly stout, middle-aged man wearing a sick mask and a baseball cap near the ticketing booth. It's the only other dreamer he meets as he scours the theatre for the source of the piano music. Eventually, he runs out of entrances to and from the main seating area, so he stands very still, listening. The music disintegrates, fades, comes back strong, and most definitely originates from somewhere above Jongin. When Jongin turns around, the wall behind him melts into an emergency exit. He grins, checks his gun for ammunition, and opens the door.
What he finds is disorienting. The stairs curve around in flights and seem to extend way past what Jongin considered the first floor, where he had been moments earlier. Above him, the stairs dead-end below where the second level of the theatre had been, ending in a simple green-grey door, capped on the top by a green exit sign, the running man flickering twice like a coy invitation. Jongin takes a few hesitant steps up towards the exit sign, then thinks better of it and turns around to go further down. Within seconds, he rounds the corner and sees Peking Opera waiting for him.
"You made it," Peking Opera says, lips parting, lasciviously red.
Jongin pitches forward, but in an instant, the ground drops away from him and he is balancing precariously on the edge of a step, a tight grip around his neck, right under his helmet, the only thing keeping him from dropping. What Jongin had assumed to be stairs leading further down turn out instead to be an abrupt drop into nothingness. His whole body is turned around, painfully, by the hold on his neck. It constricts his throat, making it impossible for him to protest.
"Whoops, watch where you're going," Peking Opera says nonchalantly.
"How did you-?" Jongin wheezes, clawing at Peking Opera's hand.
"Have you ever heard of Lionel Penrose?" Jongin tries shaking his head, doesn't get too far, and settles for trying to throw his body weight and right himself. But Peking Opera tightens his grip, and Jongin feels one foot almost slipping off the edge of the step, so he stops struggling. "I guess dance academy doesn't make you study a lot of Escher," Peking Opera continues, his tone conversational. "What you're standing on right now is a true-to-life example of the Penrose stairs. It's a staircase that loops into itself. Each part of the staircase is consistent, but the connections between them make the whole the thing inconsistent. So, you thought you were going down towards me." Peking Opera pushes Jongin's neck a little further, just enough for the vertigo to hit. "But to me, you were turning your back."
"Showing off," Jongin chokes out.
Peking Opera laughs, quick and silvery. "Yes, I suppose I am."
"I was waiting for you all last week."
"I know," Peking Opera says, chuckling. "I saw you. But I thought I'd give you a break. I heard you've been pretty busy lately, Billy Elliot."
So, Jongin thinks, satisfied, he was a good friend of Baekhyun's after all. "Never too busy," Jongin manages to say, "for you."
"That's the sweetest thing anyone's ever said to me," Peking Opera jokes. "Makes me regret having to drop you. And I guess," he says with a hint of malice, "I mean that literally."
By the time Jongin gets his breath back, he's already falling too fast for his body to handle, and he breaks his neck before he actually hits the ground. He wakes up panting, his hand wrapped around his own throat, as if trying to choke himself. He thinks that this is how addiction begins, by wanting the pain. Ballet was the same way in the beginning, when he relished the feel of dancing past the point of exhaustion. He pushes again, just lightly, on his throat, to relive the ache. It's not the same. His dreams that night are full of stairs, a smear of red and white, the threat of falling. They loop in on themselves, always ending at the same place, the emptiness rising up to meet him, lifting him, holding him close with a force that was almost affection.
+
As a general rule, professional dancers take about two weeks to learn a piece. School performances at K-ARTS usually take at least two months to learn, practice, and rehearse. For the exchange program, they only have up until the arts festival, which means they’re given a little over a month to put on "into your world". It makes sense: They have leeway to make stupid mistakes before the whole thing is staged, the piece doesn't have a part for a corps de ballet, and no one is exactly expecting the next Nutcracker. But two weeks in, some pitfalls start to emerge, and between the four dancers and two choreographers, there's a weird sense that a month is just not long enough.
"And by pitfalls," Jongin mutters to Kyungsoo after his and Lu Han's third rendition of the fish dive fails to live up to Kris' critical eye, "I mean Kris is actively trying to kill me."
"Don't be too hard on him," Kyungsoo says, handing Jongin a towel for his sweat. "It's his piece, after all. He's very attached to it."
Jongin gnaws at the mouth of his water bottle, earning a stern look from Kyungsoo, who insists the habit will give him cancer. "Do you think it's possible he's an assassin sent by the seniors who are jealous of my success?" he asks, very serious, and Kyungsoo hits him in the face with his own towel, so disdainful that he can only express himself through petty violence.
Across the room, under Kris' watchful gaze, Lu Han is practicing a dive with Yixing. Jongin's not above feeling a twinge of proprietary jealousy over the scene: Yixing supporting Lu Han's waist and Lu Han experimentally hooking his legs over and over again on Yixing's back. The two of them have slipped into Chinese, the soft melodic drone of their voices cocooning them from everyone else. Even Kris, who stands to one side, has the air of someone unceremoniously thrown out from a circle. After a while, exhausted, Yixing lets Lu Han descend. His movements are graceful, each one intentional, but Lu Han fumbles somehow, falling from Yixing's support and tumbling to the ground on all fours, like a cat. They burst out laughing the minute he stands back up, and stop when they spot Jongin, who had run halfway across the room to try and catch Lu Han, knowing full well he'd never make it.
"My prince," Lu Han offers, smiling tightly. Yixing quietly withdraws, like he's giving Lu Han away, and Jongin mentally kicks himself for caring at all.
Compared to Yixing, Lu Han's dancing is nothing spectacular. He lacks the same accuracy of placement or awareness of his own lines. But there are moments where something emerges from the whole feel of Lu Han’s dance, an illusion of otherworldliness that even Jongin can't emulate. In those moments, Lu Han's dancing seems haunted by the promise of something more. He isn't incompetent by any means, and from the first time he and Jongin had danced together, they’d fit well. But it takes a few times, carefully watching Lu Han perform interlinked series of pas de bourrée, so delicate he seemed to be floating off the floor, for Jongin to understand why Kris had cast him, and not Yixing, as the illusion. Nothing about Yixing had mystery. Everything was already out there, etched in the lines of muscle along his thigh, or the way he holds his spine stiff and perfect in an à la seconde turn. But nothing is obvious in Lu Han's dancing. Sometimes it seemed to Jongin as if the dancing was a hidden part of Lu Han, and each step was a shedding away of his body, moving Lu Han ever close to the inhuman, incorporeal spirit that must be his true form.
Jongin has never been good at acting, but this side of Lu Han makes it easy for him to listen to Kris when he bellows, "Convince me that you've never seen him before, that you're surprised by his presence. Convince me that you see him even when he's no longer on the stage, that while Kyungsoo and Yixing are dancing to what is there, you are dancing to what you think you still see."
"Kris has a line for everything. You don't have to take everything he says seriously," Lu Han says, fidgeting with the waistband of his tights. It is after rehearsal, and only Jongin and Lu Han are left in the studio, trying to sort through Kris' comments for the platonic ideal he alone had of what the first act should look like.
"You don't," Jongin tells him as he collapses onto the floor, limbs finally allowed to be ungraceful. "But it's not your reputation with him that's at stake."
Lu Han laughs, like he's delighted Jongin ever listens to anything he says. That was the other thing about Lu Han, Jongin thinks as he turns over onto his side, watching Lu Han's feet move across the floor, toes scraping the wood. He'd never classify Lu Han as childish, but Jongin could never imagine the Lu Han who wasn't dancing to be the same one as the Lu Han who occasionally emerged when dancing. He was too easily amused, too playful. Jongin can't count the number of times he's seen Lu Han smugly steal food from Yixing or poke Kris during a particularly long-winded lecture, hoping for a bathroom break. He wonders if Lu Han has ever seen himself dance, or if maybe he isn't quite in control of the way he looked, like there really was another Lu Han waiting in the wings.
The lights blink twice in the studio, then dim halfway. Lu Han halts in the middle of the allegro and looks at Jongin, waiting.
"The university doesn't like dancers to stay this late," Jongin explains. He doesn't move from the floor, soaking in the faint sounds of Lu Han dancing, trying to guess which part of the choreography Lu Han is at. Maybe the part where Jongin rises from a crouch, and they move together, miming a symmetry they don't actually share.
"What do you do normally, then?" Lu Han asks. He comes over to where Jongin is sprawled on the floor and sits down gingerly, knees raised, feet flat on the floor, his hands behind him. That, too, looks like part of a dance, and Jongin absently runs through his meager repertoire of modern dance moves, thinks how he could bend and draw up Lu Han's body from the floor to cross the room.
"Sometimes I dance in the half-dark," Jongin admits. "But in about an hour, they'll actually shut off the lights. And then we'll have to go home."
Lu Han seems to consider this very seriously. Finally, he gets up, dusts off his legs, and offers Jongin a hand. "Let's go, then," he says. "I'm tired enough as it is."
For no reason at all, Jongin follows Lu Han all the way from the studio to the apartment he shares with Yixing. They get bubble tea along the way, chatting idly about places in Seoul Lu Han would like to visit, if they ever get a day off. "Bukhansan is nice," Jongin agrees. "I guess so is Namsan Park."
"We should go to Myeongdong together sometime," insists Lu Han. "And make Kris wear really silly clothes for our amusement. It's only fair."
"Would he agree?" Jongin asks, dubiously.
"Don't let him fool you," Lu Han says, laughing. "He loves shopping."
Yixing and Lu Han's apartment is a small, sparsely furnished one-bedroom with a small office they've converted to a second bedroom by shoving a bed up against the built-in bookshelves. The university provided the living arrangements, Lu Han explains, moving around the kitchen with the air of someone who usually lets someone else handle the hospitality. "Junmyeon put Kris up at his apartment," he continues, fussing around with some instant coffee, carefully reading the instructions for the measurements. "Up until then, one of us was sleeping on the couch."
"Which one?"
"Oh, we rotated. Which is only fair, I think." Lu Han hands Jongin a steaming mug, complete with milk, without asking. "Duizhang's a little tall for the couch they gave us though, so sometimes he just slept on the floor."
There's a small list of topics in common-video games, food, Kris-that they run through before, inevitably, the conversation comes back to dance. "Kris is a romantic," Lu Han says, very archly. "He grew up on recordings of Fonteyn and Nureyev in Romeo and Juliet while the rest of us probably saw Red Detachment of Women as our very first ballet."
"I don't even know what that is," Jongin admits.
"Oh, it's a Chinese classic. All of our parents know it. Whenever you tell anyone over the age of forty that you do ballet, they'll ask you if you still study Red Detachment."
Like all dancers, Lu Han's body seems poised to jump into a variation every time a dance is mentioned. He mimes throwing a grenade, then running away from the explosion in a series of bourrée en couru. When he catches Jongin watching him, he laughs, embarrassed. "Very silly stuff," he says, sitting back down and reaching for his now-cold coffee. "But our parents grew up on it. Yixing likes The White-Haired Girl better, but only because he saw the Shanghai Ballet revival a year ago."
They pull out Lu Han's iPod. It's a mix of things: classical pieces, the music Kris chose for "into your world", Chinese pop ballads and, to Jongin's delight, Korean pop music, mostly by idol groups. "This one," Jongin says, thumbing to a song he thinks he recognizes. The beat is strong, stuttering, and Lu Han moves his shoulders and feet, miming what Jongin can only assume is the music video dance.
"Some really popular girl group, right?" Jongin asks.
Lu Han laughs, doing a strange half-wave, half-jazz hand movement with both hands under his chin. Jongin doesn't get the joke. "You would like them," Lu Han says, pretending to disapprove.
"I don't even know them," Jongin protests. "It's just that someone I knew used to make me listen to this song a lot."
"Ex-girlfriend?" Lu Han asks shrewdly.
Jongin turns red and looks away. "Hmmm," Lu Han murmurs. "Let's listen to something else, then."
Actually, Jongin wants to say, it wasn't a girlfriend at all, just another dancer he'd met in an open workshop for contemporary hip-hop. It'd been about a year ago, after Jongin stressed his ankle past the point of discomfort and pushing towards permanent damage. That earned him another personal visit to Lee Soo-Man, who had ordered Jongin off his demi-pointe and into alternative dance while he healed. Miserable, left out of the summer session performance, and unable to bug Kyungsoo, who was cast in an important secondary role, Jongin spent most of the time sleepwalking through his other classes and overworking the rest of his body by learning how to pop and lock. He'd picked up Oh Sehun along the way, first as a reluctant tutor and then as a pastime. Most afternoons found them listening to American top-20 hits or practicing handstands to Epik High, and they'd spent an extremely ill-advised evening drinking shitty beer at a party at Sehun's college and fooling around on the couch. But when the PT approved Jongin's return to ballet, Jongin had buried himself in it again, and after the fourth, tenth, fifteenth time he'd ignored Sehun's awkward attempts to arrange a time to hang out, the texts stopped coming. Jongin could blame it on the isolating world of professional ballet, but Sehun had phrased it best in his last text: ur an asshole.
The moment for Jongin to explain comes and goes, so he just lets Lu Han switch to Tchaikovsky's "Serenade for Strings in C major." With the headphones stretched between the two of them, they can't dance too far apart. Lu Han does a salsa turn away from Jongin and, in a thin parody of MacMillan's balcony scene, scampers in tiny steps back to Jongin, his face very serious. Jongin puts his hands on Lu Han's waist. Lu Han complies, leaping up, and Jongin carries him in a boat lift across the kitchen.
When Jongin sets him back down, arms shaking, Lu Han immediately jumps onto the kitchen counter, swinging his legs. "You know," he muses, "this is the longest time we've spent together."
"If you stretch the dance practices together," Jongin begins, and Lu Han interrupts, "Alone, I mean."
Jongin starts, but tries not to show it, pressing his hands against the countertop on either side of Lu Han's thighs. Somewhere, he's missed something in the conversation, dropped a line or a whole scene maybe. He thinks of Sehun, which bothers him-a year of disuse has rendered the memory of Sehun, mouth wet and swollen, into mere impressions, instead of a lesson Jongin can learn from. For all their touching at the studio, the faint hint of sexuality that lingers over their pas de deux, this is the first time Jongin sees Lu Han as someone he might be interested in, if they'd met again as strangers. Lu Han's toes graze against Jongin's shirt as he kicks his feet. It's intimate, unasked for, and Jongin finds himself trembling.
"I should go," Jongin says eventually. He peels himself away from the counter and goes to retrieve their coffee cups from where they'd set them down to dance.
"You don't want to stay the night?" asks Lu Han.
A beat. Jongin licks his lips, considers his options as he circles back around to Lu Han. He doesn't look up as he hands the cups to Lu Han. Finally, he asks, "Where would I sleep?"
Lu Han sets both their coffee mugs in the sink and, with as much care as he took in making the coffee, runs water over them. His arms arch to meet the tap, delicate as an allonge. "On the floor, I guess," he jokes.
"Pass."
"Then at least let's go sightseeing this weekend," Lu Han says, in a tone of voice that seemed to imply it was already settled. "Just the four of us dancers."
"Not just the two of us?" Jongin asks, before he can stop himself, and this time Lu Han is the one who halts, surprised. "Forget it," Jongin says hurriedly, shoving his shoes on and reaching for his gym bag. "I'll have Kyungsoo make an itinerary."
Lu Han jumps off the counter in a lunge, as if hanging in the space between him and Jongin are a thousand words he has to catch before he can say them. In the end, he says nothing, just waves at Jongin. The water is still running over their coffee mugs in the sink. Like a scene unfinished, a dress rehearsal missing its final staging, the weird atmosphere of Lu Han's kitchen seems to grab hold of Jongin, wanting him to make amends. Lu Han stands in the center, lit from an overhead bulb, like something offered for Jongin to inspect and claim, if only Jongin knew how.
So instead, baffled and not quite convinced of his own feelings, Jongin leaves.
+
"In retrospect," Jongin huffs as Lu Han turns the map on his phone another ninety degrees in the wrong direction, "we shouldn't have split with Kyungsoo."
It's Saturday, and Jongin and Lu Han are lost in Insadong. For the whole morning they'd been with Yixing and Kyungsoo, tea shopping and looking for souvenirs for Yixing and Lu Han's classmates back in Beijing. Just an hour ago, Yixing had pointed at a small stonework store and said, very seriously, "I want to buy one with a deer, so I can put a curse on it and put it under Lu Han's pillow," and Kyungsoo had offered to go with him as a translator.
Thirty minutes later, bored and anxious from standing silently by Lu Han's side, Jongin had gone in to look for them and came back out empty-handed. Yixing wasn't picking up his phone, and Kyungsoo was the one who had the address of where they were supposed to meet next. "We could just go home," Jongin had suggested, fitting his baseball cap closer around his head, and Lu Han had given him a look of scandalized disappointment.
Now, Lu Han looks up from where he is mangling his map app and asks, indignant, "How do you know I didn't do this on purpose? Weren't you the one who wanted to go sightseeing, just the two of us?"
"That's not what I said," Jongin snaps back, embarrassed. "I didn't mean-I thought you-"
Lu Han breaks into a peal of laughter, pointing at Jongin's face. "You have the best expressions when you're embarrassed." He slides his phone back into his pocket, rolling his shoulders and pointing his toes as if this were the beginning of another ballet and Jongin is his only spectator. "Come on," he says, "let's keep shopping. We're bound to find them eventually."
This, Jongin suspects, is a blatant lie. Thousands of people pass through Insadong on the weekends, and without Kris hulking over Yixing, both he and Kyungsoo would be impossible to find. But Jongin tags along anyway, as they move from stand to store to gallery. They pass the Asia Eros Museum without comment. Lu Han spends a long time forcing Jongin to follow him as he surreptitiously takes pictures of a toddler in a stroller. "You're going to get us arrested," Jongin hisses as Lu Han drags him into another alley to wait for the family, and Lu Han calls him a coward.
Most of their time is spent thumbing through endless plastic containers of phone charms. "I want a matching one with Yixing," Lu Han explains as he holds up two tiny glass horses in pink and gold. "What do you think of these?"
"You guys are really close," Jongin tells him. It's not really an answer, but Jongin's phone hasn't had a charm since his high school girlfriend made him get a Pororo figurine to match hers. He'd taken it off and hooked it on Kyungsoo's phone the second week of their acquaintance, and he hasn't replaced it since.
With each movement of Lu Han's fingers, the charms clink against each other, a tiny bell-like sound lost in the bustle of buskers and tourists brushing shoulders. Lu Han examines the horses critically, then puts them back down with a resigned sigh. "I'd probably break this one," he says, as if to himself, then more loudly, to Jongin, "Aren't you close with the people you dance with? Kyungsoo, for example."
"We're close," Jongin admits. "But we live together."
"In Beijing, I live with Yixing and duizhang too," Lu Han says with an air of finality, and Jongin doesn't push it. They leave the shop, the twin horses still at the top of the phone charm pile, upright as if about to take off with Lu Han. Jongin thinks about buying them, but Lu Han grabs his wrist, the two touches of his fingers light and dry. "Don't get lost," he whispers, "or else I'll really be in trouble," and Jongin wants to point out, you speak Korean, but doesn't.
They wind up at a Buddhist gift store around the corner. Jongin's interest in shopping has long faded and, mind drifting, he thinks back to rehearsal. Kris and Junmyeon, unable to agree on the ending of the third act, left Jongin with the burden instead. "I'm not a choreographer," Jongin had protested, but Junmyeon, shaking his head, pointed out that he didn't need to actually write any of the steps.
"Just interpret them," Kris said, handing over the final notations. "You'll be the only one on stage who will know."
Jongin has seen Giselle-every dancer at his level has-but to him it's a story whose ending is already finished. Think of obsession, Kris had murmured, while Junmyeon cajoled, think of dedication. Jongin doesn't know the difference.
"About what Kris is always telling you," Lu Han says suddenly. Jongin looks up, startled. Being surprised by things that Lu Han says or does, he realizes, is beginning to become an everyday occurrence. Lu Han fingers some tiny paper lanterns in the shape of lotus flowers hanging low from the ceiling. Against the lit paper, Lu Han's fingertips glow faintly pink, like he's drawing the light out of the lanterns and into his own body. Jongin watches out of the corner of his eye, waiting. "You know what he means, right?"
"About what?"
"About dancing and acting. You don't actually have to feel any of the things you're pretending to."
Jongin jams his hands in his pockets. "I don't actually feel them. I mean, I do, but I-" With his eyes squeezed shut, he thinks back to the studio, Kris's gaze intent and searching as he hands over the notation sheets. Like he was entrusting Jongin with something very special, handing away some part of him that Jongin doesn't know how to respond to. Jongin had stayed up until three in the morning, thinking of the steps, whether the final jump, the final crouch, the final pose, knees bent, arms beseeching, was death or disillusionment. He'd never been good at this. You dance like a machine, Yunho always said, like something winds you up and sets you off, recklessly, into the world.
When he opens his eyes again, Lu Han is no longer there. Instead, standing in front of Jongin is a man in Lu Han's shape and size, wearing a wooden mask. Flat and crudely cut, it has none of the elegance or color of the lianpu, but it is a mask all the same, and Jongin would never mistake who he is. "You can't keep living like that," Peking Opera says in Lu Han's voice. "You have to figure out what part of the performance is the stage, and what part of it is just you."
"What if that is who I am?" Jongin asks hungrily. "What if the stage is really all I have?"
Peking Opera doesn't answer. The question lingers between the two of them, brighter and heavier than a paper lantern, and somehow more real. Maybe this is just a dream, Jongin thinks. Maybe I will wake up and realize it's still Friday. He's impressed by how clever, and how close to Jongin's life, Peking Opera must be to conjure up this exact scenario, to draw him into this particular labyrinth of reality and fantasy. Without his motorcycle helmet, Jongin is naked, too honest. Yet in this instant he thinks that there is no one who could possibly understand him better than this man, masked, silent, deadly. Jongin trusted Peking Opera to drop him off buildings, strangle him with wire, leave him gasping and vulnerable in the pathway of a summoned avalanche. This was the same, and in real life, just as painful.
But Lu Han takes off the mask, and the moment is broken. His face is neutral underneath. Jongin blinks and, as if coming out of a dream or breaking through the surface of an ocean and into the sun, wipes the back of his hand across his eyes, trying to clear his head.
"I don't know," Lu Han says very simply, hanging the mask back on its rack and turning towards some personalized name stamps. "I guess that's what Kris wants you to figure out."
An hour later, they spot Yixing and Kyungsoo in line at an ice cream store. "Why didn't you answer your phone?" Lu Han whines as Yixing orders for all four of them.
"I forgot to charge it completely yesterday," Yixing explains, holding his phone out with a rueful shake of his head.
"You didn't call me either," Kyungsoo points out. He is talking to Jongin, narrowing his eyes as he hands Jongin some chocolate ice cream and a large stack of napkins. "We thought you ditched us on purpose."
Jongin puts his elbow on Kyungsoo's shoulder and pushes down. It's a familiar gesture, one that existed before Lu Han and Yixing and Kris came into their lives. Jongin weighs down on it now, hoping for comfort. None comes. Still shaky, he takes a bite of his ice cream to give himself a moment to think. "My phone ran out of batteries too," he lies. "I took too many pictures of you earlier wearing that hanbok."
Kyungsoo blushes furiously and reaches for Jongin's pocket. "I'm going to erase all of them," he warns, and Jongin laughs, beating his hand away with a spoon and yelping, "Then what am I going to use for blackmail?"
Behind them, Yixing and Lu Han have sat down at a table. During their time apart, Yixing has picked up matching phone charms of his own: two steamed buns, the angry one huffing steam for Lu Han and the beaming, angelic one for Yixing. "Is this how you see me?" Lu Han asks in mock annoyance as they string their charms on, heads bent together. They finish at the same time and admire their handiwork.
They fit just like we fit, Jongin thinks, his arm still slung around Kyungsoo's neck as Kyungsoo tries to keep Jongin from running into chairs and spilling his ice cream everywhere. He feels hot and restless, despite the breezy autumn afternoon. Lu Han doesn't look up, like he's forgotten Jongin and Kyungsoo are even there. Yixing is the one who waves goodbye when they split in front of the station entrance, his phone in hand, charm clicking against the hard plastic of his phone case.
"I wish it'd been you instead of Lu Han," Jongin tells Kyungsoo later as he settles into a stretch on their apartment floor. Kyungsoo is in the kitchen, putting away their groceries, but he falls silent at Jongin's words. After a while, when Jongin says nothing else, the sounds of cabinets and drawers opening and closing, of plastic bags being tied up for storage, start back up. Jongin imagines Lu Han's kitchen, the light falling on each strand of Lu Han's hair, his eyelashes, his toe lightly brushing Jongin's leg as he swung them in time to a beat Jongin couldn't remember. In his head, Kyungsoo and Lu Han blend together, jumping and turning from countertop to tile floor. Their image fades, replaced by Peking Opera, who tells Jongin with a smile, only in dance is the next step always obvious.
+
He pushes through a fallen tarp covering, almost smashing the cheap electronics and counterfeit purses of a nearby display. "Watch where you're going!" the vendor shrieks, pushing Jongin's legs out of the way. Jongin stumbles over, briefly considers shooting the man before he remembers-he's probably not even real, just one of Tao's background characters. Baekhyun had once called them NPCs: non-playable characters.
"Sorry," he mutters, feeling stupid. A few more shoulders bump past him, hard enough to bruise. The smell of fried food, waffles and kimbap wash over a vaguely concealed odor of ozone and trash. Jongin spins around wildly, trying to find his bearings. This isn't any street in Seoul he knows, but then again, like all good dreamers, Tao never builds from memory.
The alley winds its way into another passage, this one dark and unoccupied. Jongin steps in, shoulders hunched and wary, and is rewarded with a punch to the stomach, followed by an uppercut to the chin. It knocks his helmet off. The sound of it ricocheting off the walls, breaking free pieces of old brick and dirt that rain down on Jongin's hair, is deafening. "Fuck," Jongin shouts, trying to push against the stranger shoving him into the wall and scrabble for the helmet at the same time. A hand strikes him in the face, loud but not hard.
"Calm down," says the familiar voice, low in his ear. "I'm not here to fight."
When the stranger draws back, face finally in Jongin's line of sight, Jongin is surprised to see that, this close, the lianpu is not face paint, but rather an actual mask. At first he thinks it's made of fabric, like a thinner ski mask, but instead it seems to be plastic, molded but not quite sitting on Peking Opera's face, so that every expression moves the marks of paint without any of the underlying features showing through. Jongin wants to reach up and touch it, to guess the material with his fingertips.
"Usually when people say they don't want to fight," Jongin pants, "they don't start with a gut punch."
Peking Opera chuckles. He grabs a handful of Jongin's hair and shoves back roughly, forcing Jongin to hit his head against the wall and expose his throat. "So this is what you look like under that thing," Peking Opera muses. Jongin imagines a hand touching his neck, stroking his collarbones in admiration. But Peking Opera has his other hand firmly twisting Jongin's wrist, trying to get Jongin to drop the spiked baseball bat he's holding.
"Didn't you know?" taunts Jongin.
"Oh, I know everything," Peking Opera says, humming low in his throat as he threads his fingers through Jongin's hair. His hands are covered in thin leather gloves, as if his form was determined only by the shape of things covering him. He continues, "But it's better to see it anyway. More intense, in dreams."
Jongin pauses. His head is still spinning from where he was thrown back against the wall, and everything he thinks of saying sounds stupid. He lets the bat go, hoping to have his hand freed. But Peking Opera holds him down, smiling serenely, like they have all the time in the world.
"This isn't very private," Jongin jokes, jerking his head towards the mouth of the alley. "Next time, let's get a hotel room."
"We'll do that, eventually," Peking Opera says. Jongin hears, in dreams. Peking Opera shifts. Suddenly his knee slips between Jongin's legs, and he cants up, his expression unchanging. Jongin licks his lips. In Insadong, he had felt naked without his helmet. Now, it feels liberating, like he could say anything he wanted, without consequences.
He can. He does. He whispers, "I want you to take off your mask." When Peking Opera doesn't respond, he continues, "It's not fair with only me."
"That would be telling," Peking Opera purrs, "and it's against the rules."
Jongin bucks his hips, and they both hiss at the contact. It is sharp and good, a physicality that reminds Jongin of their bodies lying asleep elsewhere, of the very first time Jongin completed a grand allegro without pause or criticism. "What do you want?" Peking Opera asks. "Do you want to fuck me? Or do you want to kill me?" His head is tucked into Jongin's shoulder. But even if Jongin could see his face, he’s sure there would be no expression.
"What if," Jongin breathes, "I want both?"
"That's the thing," Peking Opera murmurs. His lips are incongruously warm against Jongin's earlobe, through the material of his mask. "You can't have both."
He puts both of his hands around Jongin's head. They kiss, hard, not quite touching. Jongin tastes the surface of the mask. It's like nothing he's encountered before. Peking Opera's gloved hands against his face are brutal, tender, two measures of barely restrained power. Jongin wants them on his cock; he feels as if he could come from one touch only.
Then, Peking Opera twists.
He wakes up, as always, alone on his dreamcade cot. In the distance, there is a sound of another dreamer leaving. Jongin waits for their footsteps to fade, then comes out. "That's the seventh time you've finished in the bottom half," Baekhyun teases as Jongin pays for his time. "You're really losing your touch, Black Rider."
"That guy really has a thing for breaking my neck, huh?"
Baekhyun frowns, scratching the back of his head. He puts Jongin's money away without even looking at it. "What guy?" he asks. He's a good actor, so he sounds actually confused.
Jongin grins. "It's okay," he says, reassuringly. "I don't want to know his name. But you should tell him, next time, I'll be waiting, with my mask off." Baekhyun stares back, unmoving. "Tell him I hope he'll do the same," Jongin says, and waves goodbye.
The night air is crisp, untouched. Jongin feels like the only person in the world who's alive, like the chilly air is his alone to break open and explore. In the dark, his body throbs, keeping him awake, aroused and buzzing pleasantly. His mind is full of questions, demands, the crushing feeling of something solid pressed knowingly against bruised skin. His desires are fatalistic, like struggling through quicksand.
What does he want? Kris had asked him that afternoon, as Jongin struggled over the last act yet again, the final firebird leap that ends with him crumpled on the floor, arms outstretched to the audience, pleading. Does he want to lose himself in the illusion of dance? Or would that be giving in, losing the reality of dance?
That would be telling, Lu Han chided from where he was watching, as always, leaning against the barre.
I want him to tell me, Kris had snapped back, and Lu Han withdrew, like a wounded animal, leaving without waiting for Jongin to finish.
All these questions, Jongin thinks. All these people who want him to draw lines, all these lines he can't draw. He knows his answer: that fucking is a kind of a death, that losing the illusion is just like dying. The ballet Jongin knows is all about reaching, approaching, the impossibility of a body moving against gravity. Nureyev had said something like that about dancing, borrowing a high relevé to give the illusion of being on pointe. Jongin sees, now, the power of Lu Han's arms, spanning across the sink to turn on the water. His arms outstretched during a fouetté sauté, reaching for Jongin. Those same arms, wrapped around Jongin's head, turning. Lu Han, taking off his mask. Peking Opera, lifting Jongin's helmet.
Jongin knows illusions, and knows these are both illusions. Lu Han is not Peking Opera, just as Jongin isn't Black Rider. But to dance, you live in the space between illusion and reality. It is not in a dancer to choose one or the other, but to toe between the two. That, Jongin is sure, is the only right answer.
+
Clubbing is Lu Han's idea, of course. "We have the whole day off tomorrow," he pleads when Yixing hesitates. "And we still haven't seen Hongdae."
"You'll get us all in trouble," Yixing complains. "Jongin's not even old enough to get in."
"I have a fake," interrupts Jongin, as he descends from a petite sauté.
Yixing, taken aback, finally turns to scrutinize Jongin. After a long pause, he asks, "Does Kyungsoo know?"
"I assume so." Jongin throws back his chin, rolling the defensiveness out of his shoulders as he grins defiantly back at Yixing. "Since one of his friends made it for me."
At last, giving in, Yixing takes a drink of water and considers the two of them. "I'm not covering for either one of you if duizhang finds out," Yixing says. Then, as if remembering something funny but sad to himself, he adds, "Don't get lost."
Lu Han is well-researched, well-stocked with cheap soju and ways to convince Jongin to drink, and they show up in Hongdae well past tipsy. Lu Han's arm stays wrapped around Jongin's waist from the minute they get in a taxi and head towards Seogyu-dong, and Jongin's face hurts from the smirk that he can't seem to wipe from his face.
The club they descend on is blaring a techno beat so loud that Jongin almost fumbles his ID. The bouncer gives him a look that seems to threaten pain and amusement in equal amounts, but Lu Han drags Jongin inside by the waist, twisting him hard enough to give him whiplash. "Xie xie," Lu Han yells at the bouncer over his shoulder, who, taken aback, just barely manages to hand Jongin his ID before Lu Han throws both of them onto the crowded dance floor.
"This time you really are going to get me arrested," Jongin screams at Lu Han, his mouth smashed into Lu Han's jaw.
"He probably doesn't even remember your face," Lu Han screams back. Jongin tries to say something else, but almost immediately Lu Han is lost in a group of women wearing different variations of the same black zippered dress, who pit him violently against the one foreign girl in their midst.
Lu Han is in Yixing's grey v-neck and a pair of tight black pants. Before leaving, he'd borrowed Jongin's baseball cap, and wears it now cocked at an angle, like Jongin had taught him. With his skinny shoulders, well-built arms and good sense of rhythm, Jongin could mistake him for an older b-boy, someone who would hang out with people like Sehun on the weekends. Jongin wants to watch him from a distance, but the crowd keeps jostling him closer to the group, and eventually he gets roped into dancing with one of the girls whose left arm is covered in tattoos. "Do you want a drink?" she yells at Jongin, thrusting her beer at him, and when Jongin shakes his head, she brings it to his face anyway, tipping it back. He drinks to keep it from pouring onto his face, and spends the next fifteen minutes checking himself critically for any sign of being drugged.
"Your friend's cute," another girl says, right into his ear, her lip gloss leaving a sticky mark on the rim.
"You're cute too," he tells her, because he thinks that's what expected.
Jongin catches snippets of conversation around and directed at him-Yonsei, birthday, boyfriend, cool. Each song blends into each other, and the lights make all the girls, except for the foreigner and one of them with a half-shaven head and pink hair, look identical. Without learning names or faces, Jongin finds the dancing oddly mechanical. He amuses himself by dusting off what he learned during his time off from ballet, which gets him roped into a dance circle, then a dance-off, which he loses with grace. Three girls want to take a picture with him, each pressing her lips to his face. One of them has a boyfriend, who good-naturedly offers him a bar napkin so he can wipe the lipstick print off his cheek.
He develops territorial feelings towards his spot on the dance floor, afraid to wander too far and lose sight of Lu Han. "You new to this?" an older man asks, slightly angrily, when he notices Jongin stalling, and Jongin nods, relieved to be understood. The only song he recognizes is an abrasive remix of "Gangnam Style", which has everyone, including a reluctant Jongin, galloping not quite on the beat.
Eventually, he pushes through to where Lu Han is trying with frantic hand motions to explain something to a shirtless young man next to him. The young man keeps nodding and pointing at Lu Han's hair, like he's trying to barter for it. Jongin cuts in between them, surreptitiously elbowing the young man away, and screams, "Are you ready to leave?” in Lu Han's ear.
Lu Han turns into his mouth, almost kissing him. "Yeah, I'm having a great time," Lu Han laughs, clearly mishearing Jongin, and with a proprietary pat on Jongin's ass, disappears into the crowd again, leaving Jongin with the shirtless young man, who silently offers Jongin a swig from a bottle of vodka.
In Jongin's imagination, this night goes differently. He'd forgotten how noisy, how crowded, how pointless the whole clubbing experience was. He'd done this once before, for someone's birthday, and enjoyed it more for the novelty than anything else. Annoyed, he moves from the dance floor to the bar and surveys the scene, picking out Lu Han's faded grey shirt with frustrating ease. He'd imagined it-well, he doesn't quite know. Like in the movies, he and Lu Han would dance and everything around them would slow down, fade into a photographic glow. Just the ravings of a teenager, he thinks, as the bartender passes him a beer that was clearly meant for someone else. Kyungsoo would have warned him about this, if Kyungsoo had known.
He's still sulking drunkenly when Lu Han finds him. "Bored?" Lu Han says. Jongin can't tell if the music has been turned down or if his ears have just gotten better at discerning speech from the loud, incessant dubstep bassline. "You want to go somewhere else?" Lu Han tries again, flicking the condensation off Jongin's stale glass of beer and drawing little lines of water down Jongin's exposed neck. It’s a childish gesture, completely at odds with everything else in the club. For some reason, Jongin finds it endearing, almost cute. He thinks of the first time he met Lu Han, the coy and shy boy that chose to hide behind Yixing rather than apologize.
"No," Jongin says slowly. He pulls Lu Han down by the arm, close enough to kiss. Lu Han's face is perfect from this distance, shining slightly in the green strobe light, his eyelashes twice as long in the half-dark. "I want to dance with you," Jongin says, forming each word clear and loud so Lu Han will hear him.
"You dance with me all the time," Lu Han jokes, but he doesn't try to pull away when Jongin puts both hands on Lu Han's waist and gets up.
They stand there, hip to hip, not looking at each other. Swaying awkwardly, not even to the beat, Jongin takes in the damp feel of Lu Han's shoulder, sweating through the thin t-shirt, the way his ribs expand to fit the air in his lungs, how skinny he is under his clothes. He tries to compare it to Peking Opera pressed against him, and can't. After a while, Lu Han rubs his nose fondly into Jongin's neck. "I feel like I'm in middle school," he admits, cracking himself up.
"Hey, asshole," Jongin snaps, embarrassed, "I'm trying my best, okay?"
"Okay," Lu Han says, still laughing. He presses his lips against Jongin's ear, and Jongin feels a shiver start, like a tremor building up to an avalanche. "Don't be mad," Lu Han pleads.
"I'm not," Jongin tells him. I'm scared, he wants to say.
Another round of tequila shots from the first group of girls, then another group of girls. Lu Han's dancing gets clumsier; Jongin's, friendlier. A few Yonsei language students zero in on Lu Han as one of their own, their Chinese fast and greedy as they buy Lu Han another drink. "I have to-"Lu Han begins, in Korean, before he throws his head back in a laugh and follows it up with something that sounds like "dee dee." Jongin moves towards him, but a man in a glitter jacket, wearing a facemask with studs, butts shoulders with Jongin and accuses him of stepping on his toe. In the confusion and mutual apology that follows, Jongin loses Lu Han.
He blacks out in a toilet stall and wakes up with a start in a taxi, his head against Lu Han's shoulder. "You were drooling," Lu Han whispers, brushing Jongin's bangs clumsily out of his face and almost poking Jongin in the eye. When Jongin wipes at his mouth, Lu Han giggles.
"Where are we?" Jongin mumbles. The last thing he remembers doing is admiring the synchronized dance moves of five guys in the center of the dance floor, cat-calling along with the spectators next to him. "They're the new trainees," a too-skinny girl with pitch-black eye makeup like a ghoul had shrieked at Jongin, "from the YG family." He nodded, uncomprehending. Minutes later, one of the dancers had puked only a meter away from Jongin.
Now, he feels stiff, inflexible, like he's been bent in this position for a long time. He looks down, pats his jeans. He still has his fake ID, the money folded in his back pocket, his house key. His shoes are beer-soaked and, strangely, covered in glitter.
"Headed back to the apartment," Lu Han tells him, as if there were only one they shared.
The apartment is empty when they stumble in. Drunkenly, Jongin wonders if maybe Lu Han had lied to him about Yixing living here, or maybe he had hidden Yixing in a closet somewhere, out of the way. The image makes him laugh, and laughing makes him slightly nauseous. Lu Han helps him with his shoes, fumbling the laces, and together they toss their sweaty clothes, Jongin's simple black tank and Yixing's t-shirt, into a pile by the foot of Lu Han's bed. They tumble, Jongin first, onto Lu Han's bed, limbs tangled easily.
"Are we going to sleep together?" Jongin whispers. Lu Han shakes his head. Less drunk, or maybe simply better at being drunk, he slips away from Jongin, landing lightly on his feet as he rolls off the bed. Jongin gets up on his elbows, feeling desperate. His head spins and sends him back down on Lu Han's pillow, stupid and drunk. "Why not?" Jongin asks.
"Not enough room," Lu Han jokes.
Jongin frowns, shaking his head. "That's not what I mean," he slurs.
"I don't want to," Lu Han whispers back. Jongin's stomach drops. Then, even more softly, like the silence was a person in the next room they're trying not wake, he adds, "Not right now."
Jongin’s eyelids are too heavy. He lets them fall and counts his heartbeats, shallow, like the beats of an entrechat. Lu Han leaves, comes back again, a comforting weight on the bed next to Jongin. Everything smells like Lu Han, who presses a glass of water against his lips. Jongin shakes his head, trying in vain to grab Lu Han by the waist and keep him there. His hand brushes against Lu Han's stomach. Lu Han lets out a breathy laugh and twists away, but lies down next to Jongin on the bed, on top of the sheets. Fading in and out of dreams, Jongin can feel more than hear Lu Han singing to himself in another language, "tsuki no stage ni odoru, kimi wo yume mitanda." His warmth rises and falls with each exhalation. Jongin wants to see his face, to touch it and know it isn't plastic. His body is somewhere far away, dreaming. Eventually everything is silent and still, and he is asleep.
+
When he wakes up, he's alone, naked, in Lu Han's bed. A cursory glance of Lu Han's bedroom turns up none of his clothes. The contradictory smell of eggs frying and fresh coffee wafting from the kitchen makes him more hungry than sick, though his head pounds uncomfortably, as if he was still at the club, the bassline thumping through speakers at a distance.
"I closed my eyes when I took off your pants," Lu Han tells him when he pads out into the kitchen, wrapped in Lu Han's sheets. "So if you're saving yourself for marriage-"
"Don't be stupid," Jongin growls.
Lu Han is making fried eggs and rice porridge. When Jongin opens the lid of the pot, peering in confusedly, Lu Han smacks his hand away. "There's toast if you want it," he says, pointing to the refrigerator, then the toaster. "But congee is what I eat when I'm hungover."
"Did I do anything stupid yesterday night?"
Lu Han raises an eyebrow, still watching the frying pan with curiosity, as if this were his first time watching an egg cook. "Don't you remember?"
"Yeah," Jongin admits.
Lu Han takes a deep breath, then flashes Jongin a tight smile over his shoulder. "Good," he says, going back to stirring the porridge. "Sit down while I finish this?"
Jongin does. It's something he does often with Kyungsoo, too-sitting on the kitchen stool and, hawkish and hungry, watching Kyungsoo dice vegetables or break noodles into a pot. The sounds of the pot bubbling and the oil sizzling wash over Jongin like a warm bath, drowsy and familiar, and he's startled when Lu Han's voice breaks through, asking, "How do you feel? You were pretty drunk last night."
"I'm not trying to apologize for anything," Jongin mumbles. He reaches for the mug of coffee, but Lu Han, without turning around, smacks his hand with the back of his spatula and points to a second cup a little further off by the coffee machine. Jongin reluctantly gets up to retrieve it. "Anything I said, I meant. Even if I was drunk when I said it."
"Like the part where you said Kris was the finest specimen of man you'd ever met and you wanted to ride him like a buffalo?" Lu Han asks, keeping a straight face.
Jongin glares, hurt. "I'm serious," he snaps.
"So am I," Lu Han retorts.
In the silence Lu Han moves the pot off the heat, serves himself a bowl of porridge and stirs preserved radish from a foil package into the rice. He hums tunelessly, scratching the back of his ankle with his feet. In boxers and an oversized t-shirt, waving his spatula like a conductor's baton, he is unlike the Lu Han in the studio who gazes at Jongin before they leap into twin jetés, or the Lu Han out of the studio who can't stop having footsie wars with Yixing over late night tteokbokki. Jongin wonders if there is a Lu Han that belongs only to himself, if this is a peek at him. Something special, given just to Jongin for the morning.
When Lu Han finally speaks, he is in the middle of flipping over an egg. "You know we're not the first time your university and mine have swapped dancers?" He glances over his shoulder at Jongin, who shakes his head. "Last year they sent this dancer to Beijing. I think his name was Chanyeol. Park, maybe. Park Chanyeol."
With a chopstick, Lu Han pokes his egg in the center for doneness, and slides it from the pan onto a plate. He pours more oil into the pan and breaks another egg. The pause feels like an invitation for Jongin to say something, and he offers, "I didn't know him."
Lu Han pops the chopstick in his mouth, waving away Jongin's comment. "Well, duizhang and him became really fast friends," he says, teeth gritted around the chopstick. "They were always together, eating, dancing, doing the tourist stuff. Duizhang even took him down to Guangzhou to meet his family. You can imagine what Yixing and I thought of that."
"You guys are worse than ahjummas," Jongin grunts. Lu Han pokes his tongue out at Jongin and, in the process, drops the chopstick on the floor.
"Back then, duizhang didn't have enough experience to write a whole piece," Lu Han continues, "so he was just supposed to do a short for Chanyeol to perform at the talent show at the end of the year. He obsessed over it. Even more than this one."
"Really? I find that hard to believe."
"Really. Everyday, he was working on this piece. Going over it with Chanyeol, rewriting the footwork, choosing different music." Lu Han pauses, thinking. He bends down to pick up his dropped chopstick and throws it cavalierly into the sink. "I think he had built it up in his head, that it would be a perfect representation of this friendship he had with Chanyeol. Or maybe deeper than friendship. It was a partnership, like in the wuxia novels, you know?"
Jongin shakes his head. Lu Han laughs, a little ruefully. "I guess you've never read a wuxia novel. Anyway, the thing was, Chanyeol wasn't at all the right dancer for the piece. It went over terribly."
"What do you mean?"
"I don't know. No one is quite sure. Yixing and I once sat in on rehearsals, and it was abysmal. Duizhang couldn't explain how he wanted the moves to look, and Chanyeol couldn't execute them the way they were explained. They were fighting all the time, quietly, which is really the worst kind, not talking to each other but sort of-" Lu Han thrusts his spatula, like a fencer with his epee, at Jongin. "Talking at each other, is the best way I can describe it. In the end, Chanyeol just did the best job he could at the talent show and flew back to Seoul, without any of us even seeing him off at the airport. Everyone afterwards said Chanyeol must have stolen duizhang's girlfriend or something, there was no other reason for them to blow so hot and then so cold."
The other egg done, Lu Han reaches blindly above his head for a plate. Jongin gets up and hands it to him, trying to keep his sheets away from the sputtering oil. He gets a pat on his head for his trouble.
"The funny thing is, I don't think duizhang really meant to fight," Lu Han continues. "It was more like he couldn't see Chanyeol for who he was. He'd written this piece for someone else, someone who only existed in his head. Someone he thought he understood Chanyeol to be. And that image got so warped and twisted until it was like this third party in their relationship." He smiles wryly. "In Chinese, we call that xiao san. Little three."
"Why are you telling me this?"
Lu Han looks at him. For a second, Jongin thinks Lu Han is going to slap him. The moment passes. "No reason," Lu Han finally says, his voice very level. "I thought you might find it interesting. The piece that duizhang wrote is what he cannibalized for the third act of ours, you know. Just a little background," he adds waspishly, "to round out your dancing."
They eat in silence, Lu Han occasionally slurping at his congee, unselfconscious. In the middle of breaking open his egg, Jongin is hit by an intense dizziness, and eats the rest of his breakfast on the couch, still bundled up in Lu Han's sheets like an over-large baby. He offers to help Lu Han with the dishes, but Lu Han waves him away, only coming back to refill Jongin's coffee. "My mother would kill me," he says lightly, "if I let you help me."
Afterwards Lu Han puts on a CD that he painstakingly explains is a mix Yixing made for Lu Han's birthday. "He plays guitar too," Lu Han explains, his eyes lighting up. From a corner he drags out Yixing's guitar and starts thumbing the strings. "He's been teaching me," Lu Han says, and plays a chord.
Something in Jongin flares up and burns, like the memory of the shot he took last night with Lu Han at the bar, arms entwined. The way Lu Han had shaken his hair out of his face, pressed his wet lips to Jongin's ear and said, let's dance then. "About what you were saying," Jongin begins. Lu Han stills, but doesn't stop fiddling with one of the tuning knobs, avoiding Jongin's gaze. "I'm not Kris," Jongin insists. "I'm not writing your steps for you, so I promise, I won't get confused."
Lu Han laughs, shaking his head. "That's not the point of the story, Jongin," he chides. "Don't misunderstand me."
But he puts the guitar down and leans over the couch anyway, close enough to Jongin that their foreheads are touching. They look at each other for a while, assessing. Ballet, Jongin knows, is nothing like life. Relationships, casual fucking or otherwise, don't happen in planned parts, a variation for each person and a coda to wrap everything up. Still, Jongin thinks, if the hallway was their entrée, if the performance is to be their adagio, then surely Lu Han telling him Kris' story is his variation. It is Jongin's turn now, to answer it. He thinks of Peking Opera, two measures of brutality by his head. He puts his hands on Lu Han's face, two measures of tender hesitancy. He closes the distance. They meet in the center, perfectly together, as if moving to a beat that no one, not even the two of them, can hear.
PART THREE