Archive of Our Own ^beta

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.”

Chapter Text

A man in a body. A body in a man. Minho blinks, hard, steadies himself with hands on Taehyun’s thighs, tries not to tremble. He does not want to miss this. He does not want to lose this.

“Minho-yah,” Taehyun says, that pleasant melodic rasp, concerned. From a long way off. He had been so kind when Minho had come to him and asked, listening with his eyes dark and his head cocked slightly to the side, had only asked once Are you sure? and then accepted that Minho knew what he wanted, what he was asking for. Now, beneath Minho, he is all long lines and angles. An abstraction of a body. Taehyun, who Minho has never loved but always liked, who had seen Minho alone in a bar in Itaewon and asked do you dance, little one?, who had ruffled his hair and never touched him more than he’d had to. It had been a natural enough choice: Minho had wanted to have sex with a man one more time, so he had turned to his Vata-hyung. Easy, that. Taehyun knew what Minho would be giving up, what he would never again be allowed to want or have.

Taehyun’s dim-but-not-dark apartment, empty of his roommates for the night because Minho, now that he is a trainee, lives in the JYP dormitories and cannot get fucked by a man where others might see. “Maknae-yah,” Taehyun says, and Minho shudders. He digs his fingers into Taehyun’s thighs and cannot feel the give of flesh beneath him. There go the parts of him. There he goes into the then. He had wanted this badly enough to ask for it, so of course it unwinds itself around him.

He slips sideways into somewhere brighter: afternoon sunlight dappling over his back, he thinks. He’s face-down, head smushed into a pillow; pleasantly sore. Body sweet with the ache of it. He tries to breathe deep, like he’s asleep, feels his chest expand and contract against what feel like hotel sheets, faintly sweat-sticky.

His heart rabbits in his chest with half-remembered arousal — years ago and moments. He assumes, at least. Minho tries not to learn exact dates when he slips forwards, out of some misguided sense of — propriety, of not wanting to know more than his due, but it’s usually years from himself where he ends up. He shifts, testing the give of his own body, and feels that familiar soreness spike dully up his spine of being well-fucked; wonders, Is this mine, or —?

Did he carry it with him, or —?

“Hyung,” someone says, voice ragged with sweetness, teasing. Minho stiffens and does not move. The voice sounds familiar, but he cannot place it; doesn’t dare to look up, in case doing so draws attention to himself, his nineteen-year-old body, his youth. His out-of-placeness. The bed dips, and he feels somebody settle beside him, feels a hand work its way through his hair the way he likes: firm, soothing. Featherlight touches have always put him on edge. Taehyun had not known that. Minho makes a non-committal grumble into the pillow, and above him, the man — because it’s a man, Minho is lying sated face-down in bed and a man is with him — chuckles, so fond that it almost feels voyeuristic to listen to. This is not for Minho, dance trainee who has thrown his lot in with Bang Chan’s medleyed project, who will sign a contract to start filming a survival show next week. But — somehow, somewhen, it’s for Minho all the same.

“Jagiya,” the voice says, fond. “Are you asleep?”

Abruptly, Minho matches the voice to the boy and finds his words stuck in his throat — the first time he had seen Han Jisung, the coiled spitfire of a boy who stuck to Chan’s shoulder like a shadow, he had nearly juddered out of his skin. The first time he’d heard Jisung rap, an entirely different untetheredness had bloomed in his chest: one that said, He’s going to make it. He’s going to be something fucking special. Like seeing da Vinci as a child. He was unimpressive, at seventeen, until the moment he opened his mouth, and then Minho had felt so firmly unseated by awe that it had frightened him.

He has known Han Jisung for a little under a month. He does not know what year it is. He is lying in a hotel room, and he thinks the ache of his ass is contemporaneous, and Han Jisung is stroking his hair so affectionately that Minho thinks he might break.

Minho takes as slow a breath as he can muster, shifting in place, tilting his head to the side as he moves as though resettling in his sleep — just enough to squeeze an eye open, take in this man in his periphery. The doubt drains from him like strained noodles over the sink. The sunlight slants over Jisung’s face, outlined in profile — the baby fat blanched from him by the years, but his cheeks still biteably round, his hair a frizzy bleach-yellow, his skin more tan than Minho has ever seen it. He looks — settled, steady. He looks older than Minho. Minho buries his face back into the pillow and tries to breathe; Han Jisung’s fingers card through his hair, a sweet steady pressure like Minho is not so fragile as the men he usually sleeps with like to treat him.

What does it mean, to be in a hotel room, years later, with Han Jisung calling him jagiya? What does it mean, that he will follow Bang Chan — somewhere, at the very least, somewhere to a dressing room where he will help Minho stretch with firm hands along his scapulae. He had seen Chan made up for the cameras, but he sees Jisung barefaced now. Minho does not often wonder about his future, not like the other boys in Chan’s motley little group have mused about in earshot of him; funny, then, that of all of them it is Minho who slips into seeing it, just enough to wonder.

“I know you’re awake, hyung,” Han Jisung says, love twining around the thread of his voice to form a double helix. Minho buries his face in the pillow and trembles. His body feels heavy, sticky, with the ghost of remembered arousal; in the glance he had snatched of the room, there had been lube on the bedside table.

It’s not quite that he doesn’t know to draw the obvious conclusion. But Minho had been so resigned to losing this that it had felt inevitable, that he had been at peace with it, that he had been willing to let someone fuck him one more time and then fold the part of him that craved intimacy with men deep into his chest to be forgotten. He had known it would be lonely. But he had wanted to be a dancer, and this, it seemed, was the way forward; he’d learn to sanitise himself, to be an idol, if it meant he could dance. He would learn to love it. He had made his mind up so firmly.

“Jisung,” Minho breathes, hoarse, almost — searching.

A huff, and then a sudden weight on top of him — Jisung has flopped his entire body down to lie atop Minho, his chest pressed to Minho’s back, the covers separating them. Minho does not know if his older self had been wearing any clothes beneath the sheets. He is starting to suspect as to the answer. “Hm?” Han Jisung croons into Minho’s ear, chin hooked over his collarbone, and Minho feels a shiver run spiderlike through his body, made of dissonance and desire and the kernel of arousal still lingering in his belly. He barely knows this boy. He has held himself apart from this boy, the few times Chan has gathered his group together, because he is afraid to want him too much.

Minho swallows. He hopes that Jisung cannot feel enough of his body through the sheets to recognise that he is not the Minho of the future, the Minho that Jisung must like, at least, enough to fuck. (Enough to stroke his hair and murmur jagiya like a precious thing, but — that feels more dangerous than the comforting crudeness of sex. Minho has never been afraid of what his body wants.) “I’m sore,” Minho admits, trying not to phrase it like a question. He has always loved feeling this way, the comforting ache in the wake of heat; he does not know what life his future self is living, where he does not have to worry about dancing tomorrow. The hotel sheets — Minho tries not to wonder. In some ways, it’s none of his business.

“Sorry,” Jisung says, sounding unrepentant. “You were the one that begged me for round three, hyung.”

Well. Minho squirms, delighted despite himself at the weight of Jisung’s body caging him against the bed, at the evidence that this man is not the skinny thing Minho had first met in a JYP Ent practice room wearing a stupid backwards baseball cap and a flannel four sizes too large. “And now I’m napping,” Minho mumbles, mulish, and feels himself unravel against the sheets.

Jisung makes a soft noise, like something he’d tried to swallow back but couldn’t, tender. There is a sense of being known in it. “You sleep, then, jagiya,” Jisung says, concise where the Jisung Minho knows would ramble, steady-soft where the boy from 2017 had carried a sort of brittle nervousness around in everything he said. Mellowed by the years. “I’ll wake you when the room service gets here, okay?”

“Okay,” Minho says, chest made wholly of the aching sensation that honeys his body, and his fingers are digging into Taehyun’s thighs, and he’s riding cock like it’s the last time he’ll ever get to do it, and the room is dim around him, and the sun-gilded hotel room is gone. He shudders again, feels pleasure dragging its slow way up the planes of his body. Tomorrow, he will walk by himself to the company building and learn two more dance moves, pleasantly sore the whole time. Tomorrow, perhaps he will see Han Jisung.

“Alright?” Taehyun murmurs, fond, still a little concerned. “You seemed like you went somewhere, Minho-yah.”

“I’m back now,” Minho promises. Loneliness, the lump of it in his throat, is melting layer by layer, until it’s easier to swallow around. He had thought no one would know, until his contract ran out, that he was queer. He had thought he would protect himself well, would be alone in it.

He is not as upset as he should be, perhaps, to know that he was wrong.

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.”

Chapter Text

— 4

Minho has always known he gets bitchy when volume wears his patience down; he snaps at Jeongin for the fourth time in as many run-throughs and then winces, guilty, just sandpapered enough to not quite have it in him to apologise. The throbbing bass makes his skull rattle unpleasantly inside his skin. Chan shoots him a warning sort of look, and Minho presses his lips together, ducks his head in something like contrition, bites out, “I need a minute.”

He finds Kim Seungmin in the hallway outside of the practice room. Minho glances at him once out of the corner of his eye, then hesitates, looks again — Seungmin has the fingers of both hands twisted together in some odd, intricate pattern, fidgeting frenetically, muted. Minho has never seen Seungmin like this, visibly on edge. He likes the kid. Seungmin had been the first to smile at him in the company cafeteria, first to compare his training schedule to Minho’s and point out the sessions they had in common, the first to invite him to lunch, with a mousy hesitance but an understated insouciance squirming beneath it; Minho has never, once, seen him fidget this way. It seems too familiar. Minho wants to ignore him, feels frustration serrating his edges, but — something drags him closer, makes him say, “There’s an empty studio around the corner.” He swallows, adds, “Soundproof.”

Seungmin visibly winces, looks up to meet Minho’s eye. “Thanks,” he says. It’s flat in a way that sits oddly in Minho’s chest, like recognising like: the way Minho, too, speaks when he’s just too fucking tired to bother with making it sweet, resigned to the fact that it will come across as rude. Minho knows the ins and outs of his own oddities. Funny, to think of seeing them in someone else. Minho offers Seungmin a tight-lipped smile, the most he can perform politeness, and tries to turn away — but his body sticks in place, swims, the world suddenly molasses. Turning too slowly. And the part of Minho that turns away comes unstuck from the rest of him, peels neatly out of the husk of his skin, his now — he blinks hard against the viscousness of time clumping on his lashes, opens his eyes abruptly into a different room. They aren’t usually so immediate. Minho wants to hide in a room and look at photos of his cats and reread the Wikipedia page for tropical cyclones, and instead, he thinks bitterly, he’s plucked into some future he doesn’t know — but at least this one is quiet.

He’s cross-legged on a soft rug on the floor. Alone in the room. Some deep-seated comfort in him tells him it’s his own, no matter how unfamiliar — he ducks his eyes quickly to keep from seeing anything he shouldn’t, the way he always refuses to look at calendars or phone displays when he slips like this, in case. Hope is enough. He doesn’t need it becoming concrete. Minho kneads his hands into the rug beneath him, admiring the texture, and breathes. It would be nice, if his unstuck-ness had whirled him away from his own time just to let him recuperate for a moment in some far-off dream of his own silent space — but he never seems to jump to anytime that he’s alone. Minho counts one breath, two, and then naturally someone knocks on the door.

He doesn’t know what’s safe to say. What isn’t. “Come in,” Minho says, a little too quiet, and snatches his fingers away from tracing patterns on the rug — he’s always been good at keeping that sort of sensory indulgence to when he’s alone — as the door swings gently open. He should look up. Doesn’t want to. Instead, he glares at the rug, then lets his expression melt away.

“Hyung,” someone says, and of course it’s Seungmin. The voice matches. Minho curls his fingers into his shorts, too exasperated to be surprised. The shuffling of feet, then — “You okay?”

Minho knows his face is blank. There should be nothing to indicate he might not be. But here, with his nerves sandpapered until their softest parts are exposed, Seungmin hovers in the doorway and asks. Like to like, Minho thinks. His slips drag him between moments that resonate with each other: him and Yongbok in two practice rooms, or, those months ago, two microcosms of Minho’s queerness. So, now — like to like. The shape of oddity, the way it eats at Minho’s patience, the way he had looked at Seungmin and thought, The noise is getting to him too.

“Loud,” Minho admits, into the silence of what must be a dorm room, if spacious, more open, than any trainee dorm he’s ever seen. It sounds inane, he knows. Stupid. Odd. Seungmin makes a commiserating noise.

“I was going to ask about your timing for tomorrow,” he says, instead of what the hell are you talking about, or even something affectionate like Hyung, you’re so fucking weird. “It can wait.”

Minho counts the rhythm of his own breath, as futile as it seems sometimes with the way time tends to slip sandy through his fingers, then looks up once he’s taken two; Seungmin, recognisably Seungmin, hovers in the doorway, patient as he glances at something on his phone. It’s not like seeing Chan, or Jisung, the way they’d filled out their frames. Seungmin wears his lankiness comfortably, but he’s still built like a twig. That’s almost comforting. His face has that natural gauntness that blossoms over years, and it makes him look elegant, chiselled, a new sort of clarity to his dark eyes — but his smile, when he catches Minho looking, sits the same on his lips. His braces are gone. Minho misses them like he would miss a limb.

“You’re looking at me funny,” Seungmin says, sounding oddly pleased. Minho blinks at him, because it would be more suspicious to look away now, and tries not to wonder whether he, himself, looks any different — perhaps the unwinding has decided to be helpful for once in his life and smooth over the gaps between then and now. (He doesn’t know how old he’s supposed to be, but Seungmin looks — older now than Minho is, at least. Certainly enough years have passed to change a face. Anybody who looks Minho dead in the face should be able to recognise that he is not when he is supposed to be.) Seungmin blinks placidly back at Minho, then goes back to his phone.

Minho says, small-voiced, “Did you want something?”

“Don’t worry,” Seungmin says, easy, shrugging with one shoulder. He seems so unwound like this. Comfortable in his stance. “You hungry?”

“No.”

Seungmin grins again, then turns and wanders off into the hallway without saying anything else; Minho watches him go, faintly bemused. The years have not been kind enough to give Seungmin anything approaching an ass, either. The whole interaction had been a little off-kilter. But sweet, Minho thinks. Easy, if not effortless.

He blinks again. His phone buzzes in his pocket. He shouldn’t check it, but he finds himself digging it out of his shorts anyway — there’s a strange duality of sensation as he judders between the two sets of clothes he is and was and will be wearing, sees loose pyjama pants for a moment, sees his own lockscreen on an unfamiliar model of phone. It unlocks to his face. In 2017, Minho has Seungmin saved as JYP Kim Seungmin ‘00, which his future self has foregone in exchange for — literally just the word mong and a dog emoji. A joke he doesn’t get. The puppylike glee of Seungmin standing quietly in his doorway, though — it feels right. Cute.

(A sensation swims in and out of his memory for the barest moment — the sound of his own laughter, of his fingers threaded into soft dark hair, of the way a collar would sit stark against Seungmin’s throat. Then he finds himself clutching at the image and losing it — a moment later, does not remember what he was thinking about. Something that had made him smile; he finds his lips parted. Maybe was is the wrong word.)

mong 🐶 has texted him three Wikipedia links to things he has never heard of before, one of which seems to be a Brazilian footballer and the other two historic major weather events. No caption or qualification, just — the kinds of things Minho likes to look at when he’s overwhelmed. A moment later comes a calendar invitation link, labelled J & F movie night elsewhere: dorm empty. Minho blinks at it. He does not dare open the link to accept it; he hadn’t known Seungmin used the same calendar app that Minho has done since 2015.

What a miracle, a strange thing, to be — seen without judgment at his oddest. Minho feels stripped raw by the clean, unpretentious ease with which this future Seungmin has looked right through him. He settles there, on the rug in a dorm room that he seems to have entirely to himself, and thinks — Ah. Something paid forwards. And naturally, paradoxically, paid back again.

Minho does not, as a rule, tend to like people who are too much like himself. Seungmin has a habit of quietly making himself an exception to the way things are usually done. Minho feels the sliver of time wavering around him, feels the way his body goes thready at the edges, and lets his breath break its way through his ribcage; so Seungmin follows them to the future, too. And his Yongbokkie, and certainly Chan, and a J who could be Jeongin or Jisung or both. Minho is — so tired. But, he thinks, he wants to do this. Can do this. So that one day, he might live in a dorm with a little more room to breathe, and — with somebody who looks at him and is not put off by what they see.

Minho lets himself freefall. Thinks, I’ll pay it forward.

In the hallway, Minho blinks slowly at Seungmin, the way he does at his feline children when he wants kisses: I feel safe with you, I want you to trust me, I will earn it. “You’re welcome, Kim Seungmin,” he says. “I’ll get them to take another ten.”

This Seungmin, abruptly so young in comparison — his cheeks so round, and Minho wants to squish them, but then he also regularly wants to throw Seungmin around like a little ragdoll and he manages to restrain that impulse too — looks up at Minho with eyes sort of startled-wide, bashful. “It’s fine,” he says, the phrase rote-learned. “Don’t worry about it, hyung.”

“Don’t tell me what to do, Kim Seungmin,” Minho says balefully. Hyung grates less when it’s coming from a seventeen-year-old, at least, rather than his twenty-something un-ghost. “If you complain, I’ll make it fifteen.”

Seungmin — regards him for a long, sticky moment, time like stretched dough, the way it droops in the middle. Looks at Minho like he would a bug, and at the same time like a constellation, and simultaneously stained glass: like there is something beyond his body worth staring at, processing. Picked-over. Then Seungmin smiles, braces-brilliant and sunny; “Okay, hyung,” he says, and Minho has the odd sense he’s been seen right through. “Whatever you say.”

“You’re strange, Kim Seungmin,” Minho tells him. Seungmin’s grin only broadens in reply.