OVERDOSE ERA

EXO WILL HOST THEIR FIRST SOLO CONCERT IN SEOUL NEXT MONTH (4/7/14)

EXO SHOWCASE OVERDOSE! (4/15/14)

April was off to an intense start with final preparations for their Overdose mini-album making for long working nights and virtually no rest. Kyungsoo and Jongin had no time for coffee hangouts or evening hookups when the managers were constantly dictating their every move. Members were working through illness and injuries, even, so Kyungsoo knew it’d be petulant to want to complain about their lack of free time. Besides, this kind of crunch time for a rigorous idol schedule was where Kyungsoo always felt he flourished and made him feel truly cut out for the system since he, in some ways, got a high off the long hours due to his serious work ethic.

The singer hated seeing how rough these times could be on Jongin, though. Jongin would spend however long the choreography required in the practice room, but his will sometimes outpaced his body, and he was struggling a bit with his waist injury again. The dancer needed to be executing his craft in front of a crowd or camera to feel truly complete. Thankfully, that time had come.

‘He’s such a performer. He gives his heart and soul on stage, and at the same time, the thrill of performing is what fills them back up,’ Kyungsoo muses as they finish up their Overdose showcase. Jongin looks alive again, and Kyungsoo’s heart just might burst from seeing the genuine smile and relief on the younger’s face. For the first time in quite a while, the two are able to steal a brief moment backstage in an abandoned dressing area before getting herded into the van back to the dorms.

Kyungsoo’s sitting on the edge of a make-up table with Jongin standing between his thighs, the younger driving the action of their lips, connecting and reconnecting, while their bodies stay flushed together from the waist down.  The singer’s fingers are roaming through the bleached blonde hair, mussing it up as they make out. Jongin’s playful with a teasing rhythm to his kisses, vacillating from staccato pecks to longer, wet kisses, and Kyungsoo can’t help but chuckle as he realizes what he’s doing. “You’re kissing me to the rhythm of our song??”

Jongin lets out a pleased hum into the older’s mouth as he kisses him to the lyric ‘you’re in, my he-eart’ (and Kyungsoo’s flutters). The dancer smiles brightly, without stopping the kisses. “Such a good sense of rhythm, hyung.”

“You’re ridiculous—“ he pauses as he’s interrupted by Jongin briefly on his lower lip and then releasing it with a quiet pop – “and such a child sometimes,” Kyungsoo teases, secretly enjoying the younger’s exuberant joy leftover from the successful showcase.

The two are interrupted by Chanyeol’s booming voice on the other side of the door telling manager Jaehyuk that the missing pair are probably in the bathroom. They break apart quickly, fixing their hair and smudged make-up in the mirror. Still panting heavily, Kyungsoo summons the will to slow down his breathing and announces, “That was close. Okay, I’ll go out first and slip into the van. Wait ten seconds before you follow?”

“Okay,” agrees Jongin. “But one more thing…” he steals a quick, chaste nip on Kyungsoo’s lips, catching the older by surprise. “You were brilliant tonight, as always.”

Kyungsoo flashes him an appreciate smile as he turns to go out the dressing room door. “Right back at ya.” His mind completes the thought as he strides to the van ‘…both on stage and backstage.’

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SEWOL FERRY CAPSIZES; HUNDREDS OF HS STUDENTS PRESUMED DEAD (4/16/14)

They’re in the middle of rehearsal when they hear the news; everyone stops and they are dismissed to contact family and check the status of loved ones. The next 24 hrs is quiet in the normally bustling dorm as they each hole away somberly.

The Sewol tragedy weighs heavily on them all, realizing how many young people, kids so close to them in age, died in such an awful way. The members are lucky enough to not know anyone personally who was lost in the disaster, but naturally all need to mourn as does the rest of the country. April is supposed to be non-stop performances and promotions for their new mini-album. The Sewol incident puts that to a screeching halt.

They knew that the EXO-K and EXO-M subgroups would be promoting more separately this time around, but the blackout on entertainment and music shows in Korea hastens the split, as EXO-M is sent to promote in China while EXO-K… well… waits. After a week without any public promotions, the boys find their own rhythms and distractions between intense rehearsals to keep up the Overdose choreography and also review the choreographies for their upcoming solo concert.

Kyungsoo is glad to be able to hang out a lot with Jongin during this time, but the heavy atmosphere is conducive to quiet talks over random hobbies. Neither of them are trying to make physical contact beyond friendly skinship, with tender fingers working the tension out of each other’s necks substituting for what had previously been heated kisses (and more) when they were alone. Hooking up right now would feel… wrong given the state of mourning everyone was in. Kyungsoo isn’t totally sure what to make of this. ‘Does this mean that our relationship is not serious, since we’re putting it on pause, or that it is serious and we don’t want to sully it by treating it like a trivial distraction for the current hard times?’ He doesn’t know how Jongin is feeling about it, but he knows that for himself, he doesn’t want to taint what they have, even if it’s just a friends with benefits thing because Jongin is too special of a friend to have things end messily.

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“Kris is gone.” Jaehyuk’s words fall like heavy barbells in the room.

“What do you mean, ‘gone,’” asks Junmyeon to break the silence.

“He’s disappeared, presumably gone back to China, and filed a lawsuit over his contract,” Jaehyuk says, voice trying to hold steady as he knows this news is going to rock their worlds.

As the room descends into shouts from Zitao and murmurs from others, Jongin can’t deal. He feels like the room is closing in on him, and he’s got to escape it. He leaps to his feet and runs for the door, barely chancing a glance back at the other members but noticing Kyungsoo’s dark eyes watching him intently with a look of concern mixed with his own hurt over the news. ‘Sorry, hyung… I can’t handle this right now…’

Jongin’s now dashing through the halls of the SM building, not sure exactly where he’s racing to. What place is actually going to give him shelter from his fears? He initially heads to his favorite practice room on autopilot, but instinctively draws back as he’s about to grab the handle. ‘Too many memories,’ a voice in his head suggests, warning him not to go in as flashes of him laughing with Yifan, helping him perfect his Wolf lines at the beginning of the song where the older hands off the verse to