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2025-02-19
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2025-03-30
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riding the echo down

Chapter 3

Summary:

We both make it, he considers. This Felix is sprawled against a practice room mirror, unselfconscious and settled in himself, with hair that tumbles around his shoulders; however many years later, here, he has a future that has Minho in it. Something thrills ugly and pleased in Minho’s chest. Ambition, maybe; he had never been as ruthless as the other trainees, never quite understood how badly they wanted to make it, until somebody had threatened to take that away. Now, Minho draws himself up a little taller and thinks, We win.

“I forgot what I was going to say,” Minho tells Felix. He wants to wince at the way his own voice wavers, but folds it inside, habitually, easily. He speaks slower than he usually would, so that Felix can follow the sentence.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

— 3

Ga na da ra ma ba sa. Minho is mostly teasing; he knows Felix is, at least, past the stage where reciting hangeul will help him. But the rhythm of it unspools itself steadily, reassuring. Odd, to be so settled by someone he — really, barely knows.

They cloister themselves in practice rooms together, Minho and Felix, have done these past few days in the break between shoots. There’s a kinship there, Minho thinks. A drive simmering on low, burning its understated way through the bottom of the pan. Between Felix’s Korean and Minho’s English, they don’t talk much in the half-dark un-time of the dance studios, but Minho thinks they understand each other well enough.

There’s a tension in the way Felix holds himself, posture hunched and eyes fixed straight forward like he’s resisting the urge to check what’s behind him, like he, too, chafes under the cameras. Like he is flaying raw each word that presses up behind his teeth before he waves it on through his lips. A strip-search of sorts. Felix carries a sort of rough-edged raw masculinity that seems at odds with the way he dances, sinuous and sensuous, mature beyond his years in the way he moves even as his eyes burn so very seventeen; Minho looks at him, this boy away from home, and thinks We’ve got something in common. What are you hiding?

Ja cha ka ta pa ha. Gya nya dya —

“How d’you say underdog?” Felix had mumbled under his breath to Chan in English, the other day, in the corner of a studio; Minho, watching, had enough of the language to follow the sentence but not enough to reply. To catch the last word. Still, Felix had glanced over his shoulder as Chan replied, voice too low for Minho to overhear, and his eyes had snagged on Minho’s, and — Felix’s broad grin was a little too uncomfortable, his eyes a little too solemn. So Minho had put two and two together, easily enough. They had something else in common, too, he figured, from the burning-dark way Felix flinched whenever Chan was kind to him and the soft edge to him as he weathered Chan’s brusqueness, from the way they looked at each other.

So there was that.

It’s dim enough in the practice room — four days since the last block of filming Stray Kids; two days until the next — that Minho almost misses the moment at which he slides a foot out of one time and into the other, almost bored by his own motions, JYP Standard Skill thirty-two because the version of that sweeping sidestep he’d learned from Bada had, apparently, too much flair for the company’s liking. The room is still dim. Minho is still clad in baggy dance clothes and his own sweat. He feels the shiver go through him, the unwinding of his body, and wonders for a second if he’s torn something critical in his spine; it feels like tumbling into pieces, like finding the loose thread in his chest and pulling until his body shrivels in the wake of the unpicked seam.

“Yongbok-ah,” he says, “do you think it’s more like —?” And turns, and hesitates. Something in his stomach flips over. Ah, Minho thinks, then fuck, then, He looks good.

Felix blinks at him: skin paler but less sallow, with that classical idol pinkness that the company is already trying to sculpt Minho towards, reminding him not to spend too much time in the sun, changing the shade of foundation from the one he’s always used. Blond. This Felix looks almost womanlike, to the point that noona had crept onto Minho’s tongue in the moment before he’d put together who it was. His features, etched more comfortably into his face by the years, have a sort of nobility, elegance, that Minho has only ever seen out of the corner of his eye in the Felix he knows.

“Hm?” Felix says, and Minho swallows, spotlighted by his own words. He hopes Felix is not looking too closely. He hopes the light is dim enough to hide the ways in which Minho, too, has been made different by time. He hopes Felix does not know him well enough to notice.

We both make it, he considers. This Felix is sprawled against a practice room mirror, unselfconscious and settled in himself, with hair that tumbles around his shoulders; however many years later, here, he has a future that has Minho in it. Something thrills ugly and pleased in Minho’s chest. Ambition, maybe; he had never been as ruthless as the other trainees, never quite understood how badly they wanted to make it, until somebody had threatened to take that away. Now, Minho draws himself up a little taller and thinks, We win.

“I forgot what I was going to say,” Minho tells Felix. He wants to wince at the way his own voice wavers, but folds it inside, habitually, easily. He speaks slower than he usually would.

“You do that,” Felix says. In the half-light, it’s difficult to make out the shape of his smile, but Minho thinks it’s different, new — a slyer, teasing thing, so unlike the boy Minho knows who is quiet, almost sullen, until the moment he breaks into that broad brilliant grin. “No worries, hyung. You want to go again, or —?” He waggles his phone at Minho demonstratively, and Minho manages to put together that he’s controlling the sound system. “Take a minute, maybe.”

His accent is closer to Hyunjin’s that Chan’s; he speaks city-boy Korean, quick and effortless, with only the faintest rasp of the foreign in his vowels. Minho feels bowled over. Not by the language, precisely — he had known this time was years removed from his own, and that kind of thing tended to happen, swept you up from da la ma to fluency the way Minho had picked up his Japanese. But this Felix holds himself so differently, speaks so differently, a quirk to his lips and a glimmer to his eye that Minho has never once seen him wear at seventeen. He grasps for words. What a thing, to shed your skin in the way Felix seems to have done. To reinvent it.

“Yeah, take a minute,” Felix says, just a little insouciant, a sort of teasing edge to his voice that Minho almost doesn’t understand until he remembers that, in fact, he is supposed to be older than Felix. That Minho is the hyung here. Felix gets to his feet sort of gingerly, moving with a hesitance that Minho feels judder through his own body, an unwillingness to trust, then holds out his phone. “Can I do the bridge, please?”

It’s 11:11 pm, according to Felix’s phone. Minho does not let his eyes stray to the date.

He settles himself by the mirrors, just next to Felix’s sweat patch, and tries not to ogle as Felix moves to the centre of the practice room — it’s a bigger studio than the cramped trainee room Minho is meant to be in right now. Fit for a whole group, Minho supposes. Curiosity is a dull, gnawing cramp in his belly. He blinks at the guide track open on Felix’s phone, drags the slider to roughly where he thinks a bridge might be in any given song; Felix makes an eh noise, says “Maybe a couple bars earlier.” The song is very clearly half-produced. The voice on the guide track, Minho thinks, is Jisung’s. He had barely known that Jisung could sing.

He knows, though, that Felix can dance. But not like this.

The world seems to unspool itself for the physicality of it: Felix’s body, the litheness of him, the choreography half-remembered in the part of Minho that belongs in this time. Minho, nineteen, bites the inside of his cheek. It’s been a very long time since he has been able to watch dance and see a performance, rather than a set of steps, the whole rather than the parts; it comes of professionalism, of living and breathing something, the ease with which he breaks it down. Not this. Not now. Even here, clearly tired, Felix’s dancing is the meeting of grace and danger, is a caged tiger and its bitten-back hostility; Minho’s mouth feels a little dry.

Minho — does not have the freedom to be impulsive. He has not earned that luxury. Still, it bubbles up in him with too much sudden fervour to be tamed, quick and brittle: “I’m surprised they didn’t make you cut your hair.”

Felix breaks out of a movement and laughs, easy, sweet in its tenor. Frankly, his laugh is humiliatingly perfect. Minho kind of envies it. The guide track meanders on through the room, and Minho itches to move to it — he does not know the rhythm, but thinks he can feel the echoes of it written in his muscle memory, in the ghost of his future self that he’s become — but Felix pauses here, seemingly satisfied, and Minho fumbles to pause the music along with him. “Who’s they,” Felix says, amused, and then — as he blinks at Minho, looking a little closer — “Are you okay, hyung? You look a little — Did you sleep last night?”

“That,” Minho says, “is for me to know and you to wonder.” It feels strange to take this tone, use banmal, with a man who looks to be twenty-four, twenty-five maybe, taller and elegant and settled where Minho feels like a larval grub, pubescent, in comparison. Felix seems deific in the low light, or faerie maybe, dokkaebi — unearthly, anyway, whatever form that takes. Wan but quicksilver. So unlike the sun-browned dongsaeng whose Korean goes only slightly further than textbook and sits in his throat like gravel and stones — this Felix is like a bruise, and Minho wants to press on it, wants to live in that ache. It seems unfathomable, to have changed like this.

Felix’s lips twist. “Are you sure, hyung? We can wrap up for the night.”

“I’m sure,” Minho snaps. He turns his back, feels the rounding of his own shoulders. Ahead of him, the mirror looms; in his periphery stands Felix, reflected. He has never been quite sure why he’s so afraid to hide these slips sideways, only feels a vague sense of duty not to fuck things up, tangle things further, for his future self — an odd sort of protectiveness. Felix will not learn that Minho is nineteen and out of time. That way lies the unknown, and Minho does not make a habit of dealing in futures he cannot predict.

But Felix looms closer in the reflection, hooks his chin over Minho’s shoulder from behind, presses his entire chest flush against Minho’s back; Minho feels his entire body shutter, lock, tension rippling through him scale by scale, myofilament by muscle fibre. This body that he breaks down and builds up. Felix touches him so easily. In the mirror, Minho’s eyes flicker to Felix and he sees that Felix’s eyes have fluttered closed; he seems pleased, to be close to Minho like this. A low content hum rumbles through both of them. It vibrates in Felix’s chest; Minho feels it against his spine, the juddering sweet sound of contentment.

“Yongbok,” Minho says. He does not known what he’s so afraid of.

Felix nuzzles into the junction of his throat and his shoulder, then darts out his tongue to touch the skin before dissolving into laughter; it’s a joke, then. A joke to press his mouth against Minho’s body. But his arms are still looped around Minho’s hips, holding him tight, close and lovely, and he sing-songs, “Minho-hyung, Lino-hyung, let’s go back to the dorm, hey? I’m tired, I’m tired,” a joke until it’s not. Minho does not know how to fathom this closeness. Whether it’s skinship, the way Felix had tried so hard to slip into with all of them, or whether it’s — something else, something deeper. Whether it means something.

He says, hoarse, “Run through it once more. Then we’ll go.”

“Ugh.” Felix presses fervently close to him for a moment later; one hand slides down the slope of Minho’s spine to palm his ass appreciatively. Minho stands, rigid, not quite understanding. He had not thought it safe to make these jokes. Felix gropes him only half like he doesn’t mean it, makes a grumbly little sound that’s part suggestive and part petulant, then slips away; the cool air hits Minho all at once, against the sweat-damp skin beneath his T-shirt, and chills sweep through his body like fluency.

“One more, for you, hyung,” Felix chirps. A silly brightness in his voice, but he smiles broad and sunlit like the Felix Minho knows. Minho watches their bodies unwind in the mirror, watches time unfold itself until the mirror is the room and the room is tomorrow and the reflection is today; there is still music playing.

Then you can make it up to me, comes the echo of a voice. Minho could almost have imagined it. He does not think about what it might mean.

The thing about ambition is that it tastes the same as fear when it burns up the column of his throat, like acid reflux, from the roiling pit of something that simmers low in his belly; the differences matter less when they burn the same on the way up. He turns to see boy-Felix, seventeen-year-old Felix, with his head tilted slightly askew, his cheeks almost jarringly round in contrast. Thinks, We are going to make it. I’m not going to let us not make it.

“Yongbok-ah,” Minho says, sing-song. “Let’s work hard, mhm? From the top?”

Felix — sweat-drenched, faintly mutinous — makes a face, but hauls himself obediently to his feet. He gets up easier than he will in the future. Probably an injury will do that; Minho makes a note to keep alert to it, to at least soften the blow if he cannot prevent it entirely. (He has never tried to change the future. Doing so might mean he loses it.) He sees the way Felix’s eyes flicker, momentary, to the camera in the corner of the room, so Minho moves to put himself between Felix and the lens. As best as he can offer. Just for a moment.

He and Felix understand each other well enough. Felix looks between Minho and the camera, then smiles, tight-lipped and wan and freckled. Says, in English, “Bit of a lost cause, hey?”

Minho blinks at him while he processes the words. “I don’t believe in lost causes,” he says in Korean, and smiles back, as honest as he can. “Come on now, Yongbokie. Let’s dance.”

Notes:

university is making my life difficult i fear this is of a strange quality. alas. i tried.