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Language:
English
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Published:
2025-02-19
Updated:
2025-03-30
Words:
7,355
Chapters:
4/8
Comments:
71
Kudos:
101
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15
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1,637

riding the echo down

Summary:

He feels himself coming unstuck in pieces: first the hands clasped in Bang Chan’s, then the unravelling of his feet against the linoleum hallway floor, and then the flutter in his chest at the touch of a pretty boy. Minho closes his eyes against the nausea of it. When he opens them again, the JYP building with its ugly long hallways and unnerving practice rooms is gone, but — oddly — the boy remains, though he’s across the room rather than close enough to touch.

Seven times Minho's members don't notice he's slipped sideways in time, and one time they do.

Notes:

- It occurred to me that if I wrote and posted 1k, I would hit 100k words posted to Ao3 in 2025 (yes, really) (yes, I don't know what's wrong with me), so I dragged this out of the ideas graveyard and sat down. Fuck it, we ball.

- The videos of Minho with his old dance crew are very much to blame for this fic; its working title was "maknae linoooo :((((" or something adjacent and I am full of thoughts and feelings. (On that note, actual title is from [All in green went my love riding] by e.e. cummings.)

- Rating, tags, etc may change; pairings may crop up unexpectedly. I don't know where I'm going with this!! :D

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Chapter 1

Chapter Text

— 1

“Born in 1997, I’m Bang Chan or Christopher,” the boy says, ducking his head. The world spins hazy at its edges, unweaving itself. “I’m — I’m so excited to meet you, Lee Minho-ssi. I have an offer, and it might sound a little strange, but I really — I really think you’re perfect for it. If you’ll have us.” He’s all frizzy hair and dimples, Minho thinks, a little shorter than Minho himself is, though it’s hard to tell when he’s been half-bowing over and over, in such perpetual anxious motion that it makes it difficult to get a read on him, and Minho swallows and thinks, Why now?

There’s always a why to the now, he knows. So he offers his most approachable smile, the polite one he’d practiced in the mirror, and says, “I’d love to, Bang Chan-ssi. Tell me more.”

He feels himself coming unstuck in pieces: first the hands clasped in Bang Chan’s, then the unravelling of his feet against the linoleum hallway floor, and then the flutter in his chest at the touch of a pretty boy. Minho closes his eyes against the nausea of it. When he opens them again, the JYP building with its ugly long hallways and unnerving practice rooms is gone, but — oddly — the boy remains, though he’s across the room rather than close enough to touch.

One of those stumbles, then: the convergence of parallel lines. The paradox of that statement. Minho’s essence finding someone it knows and has known and will know and turning them into the double helix of DNA, winding around them without regard for when or where or how. He reaches up to his own face and finds, thank fuck, a mask; ducks his head, though it’s a moot point if his future self has done anything even remotely adventurous with his hair.

The boy across the room, too, is Bang Chan. Older, of course, though Minho struggles to place by how much; his hair is dark, though it looks dyed rather than natural, and styled pin-straight across his forehead, and he fills out his loose shirt with shoulders broad enough that it’s probably dangerous for Minho’s health. Threadbare clothes, but a full face of makeup. Minho glances down at himself, sees the loose sweats he’d been wearing for his session at the company building, but doesn’t know if Bang Chan might see something else; the weaving and unweaving is inconsistent, sometimes. Unhelpful. The room is empty other than the two of them and a table of snacks, and Minho glances cautiously around, testing the give of his body against the fabric of a time that isn’t his own.

“Lino-ya,” calls this older Bang Chan from across the room, and Minho can’t place the name even as it twines through the weft of his skin at a startlingly resonant frequency; he startles, then, when he realises Bang Chan is looking at him. A nickname, then. Maybe one he’s heard before, one he’s forgotten.

Bang Chan’s laugh, too, strikes that chord in his bones. Like in this future, Minho knows it inside and out. “You zoning out, hey?”

“Sorry,” Minho says. He blinks once, twice, three times, and doesn’t come unstuck again; the room, and it must be a dressing room, a green room, something like it, holds stubborn and fast around him. “What’s —?”

“Pass the seaweed sheets, over there?” Minho casts around for it and spots it on the table to his left, wobbling up from the couch on shaky legs. He doesn’t look at Bang Chan. Hopefully he looks the same from behind, or time is kind enough to drag Bang Chan’s eyes away from his frame until he slips back away and future Minho reasserts himself into this skin. He fumbles with the packet of seaweed and hears Bang Chan laugh again behind him. It’s a nice laugh. Straddles the line between chesty and high-pitched, a pleasant sort of melodic. “Ah, Lixie sent a stupid reel — wanna see?”

“Send it to me,” Minho says, and dares to toss the packet across the room onto Bang Chan’s lap, catching a glimpse of him in his periphery as he does so. Chan is looking straight at him; he has smile lines, creasing beneath the foundation. Minho swallows. “Hyung,” he dares, and must have guessed right when Bang Chan’s smile broadens; something thrills within his body, the part of him that slips sideways through time, the part which always echoes.

“Your hair looks different in this light,” Bang Chan comments.

Minho stumbles back to the couch and collapses onto it, drags his knees to his chest and then presses them flat against the sofa in a butterfly stretch, leaning forwards; he’s glad, at least, for the mask, though if his hair is different there’s only so much he can do. “Strange,” he says into his own lap. Bang Chan laughs again, which is the third time; he’s the kind of man that gives that affection easily, then. Different than the snatches of gossip Minho had caught about seven-years Chris in the company cafeteria. He doesn’t know this man, doesn’t even know how old either of them are in the here-now his body’s dragged him to, but something warm unfolds in his chest at the implication of gentleness.

“You want me to help stretch you out?” Chan asks. He unfolds himself from the chair, and Minho’s eyes linger on his thighs as he does, taut beneath his loose sweats; legs are safer than looking him in the eye. He ducks his eyes back to the couch like snatching his hand away from a hot stovetop. Whoever Minho will become, he cannot look at men the way he’d like to. He knows better. Bang Chan, self-assured and sweet, crosses the dressing room and sets his broad hands on the shelf of Minho’s back, presses him further forwards into his butterfly stretch, and Minho swallows hard at the brush of fingertips against his shoulderblades. Something zaps between them. It’s the first time Bang Chan has touched him anywhere except to shake his hand, and he does it effortlessly, as if he has done, will do, a thousand times more.

Behind him, Bang Chan makes a little impressed sound, pushes him lower. “You’re flexible today, hm?” he teases, sounding almost — almost —

Minho makes a small strained sound that could be pain, and blinks hard, once, twice, trying to clear his head. There are things he cannot think about. There are things he should not want. Like the faintly greasy undertone to Bang Chan’s voice, as if making a bad joke about — and here are the ways Minho comes unstuck, again, piece by piece. His body unfolding itself in time. The helix unwinding. This time, the lines are not parallel; they angle towards each other, and, at last, they meet. The dressing room dissipates, but for a long moment, Minho can still feel the reassuring pressure of Chan’s weight against his back, the hands sprawled elegant and spidery across his scapulae.

A boy has pulled him aside in a hallway at JYP Entertainment. Minho has thirty-two basic movement patterns left to master. It’s 2017.

“Really?” Bang Chan’s smile doesn’t reach his eyes as easily as it will in the future; still, he seems surprised, and genuinely delighted. “I mean — great! Uh, do you have a minute to talk about it now? If you’re busy, I can —”

“Bang Chan,” Minho says, feeling the ghost of hands against his back, “don’t worry. I have time.”