Kai is blushing and it looks deep red under the vivid sunlight.

It’s the first thing Kyungsoo sees from way up close (way with many As to sound like it’s spoken over a cliff- waaaaaay, like this) when he opens his eyes and the taste of pineapple syrup from his lips.

The taste of pineapple doesn’t sit well with Kyungsoo. Because it is intense and unfamiliar; it’s sweet, disarmingly so, and a little sour and it doesn’t suit him. It’s not a taste he enjoys being forced onto his lips that way.

Which is exactly where the problem lies.

He’s being forced.

That’s what’s happening.

He just wanted to stop being confused. To settle the situation somehow and go back to normal. He thought, for a moment there, that the glowing sun and the blanket warmth would settle things somehow, by magic (after all it’s not like supernatural events are not part of Kyungsoo’s everyday life right now). The sun is shining everything is less ugly than you thought so quit being so worried, the answer he was hoping to find here was along those lines.

The answer he gets is a fleeting press of mouths (because that’s what you call the kisses that are not real kisses) and an overwhelming sweetness. But not overwhelming, exactly. Overwhelming can mean good and exciting. Kyungsoo doesn’t feel good or excited, so he rakes his mind to find a word for bad overwhelming. A word to describe what it feels like when someone is squeezing his ribcage violently, trying to compress his insides, as if they’re recyclable. 

His thoughts are not recyclable.

Kai, just another character from Kyungsoo’s manga, but who even remembers that anymore, might think he can take all of Kyungsoo’s logic and purpose and rearrange them into a new tune which goes, no part of you feels foreign and aren’t we connected, over and over again like the radio is ing broken, yet Kyungsoo is not okay with that plan. He’s not okay with pineapple syrup and sleeping on the couch (regardless of how restful it might be) and watching Iron Man 2 and essentially having someone who didn’t even exist some weeks ago, turn him into a different person.

Kai must get that; understand at least some parts of that monster growing to gigantic proportions inside Kyungsoo. Belatedly, he steps back, biting his lower lip and lowering his eyes away from the shorter guy.

“I’m sorry.” He whispers and it comes out of a scratched up throat, like the words were covered in thorns.

“What do you think you’re doing? What the hell!?” Kyungsoo screeches. There’s practically no pretty way to say this and no way to brush it off.

“I’m sorry, I- I wasn’t thinking.” Kai takes a second step backwards, swallows hard. Maybe he’s worried that Kyungsoo will slap him. Which he won’t, because only girls slap their boyfriends if they’re cheating on them, or if they come home pissed drunk and Kyungsoo is not anyone’s girlfriend. And no one is pissed drunk, no one is cheating, only perhaps this is a kind of cheating (the kind that sneaks on you without you noticing). Well, more importantly, Kyungsoo is not anyone’s girlfriend, he’s not Kai’s anything. So slapping is out of the question.

He contemplates punching his face, though. He thinks about it very seriously.

“Of course you weren’t!” He has so much to say about that. About how Kai is fictional and Kyungsoo has a pretty real manga titled Black Falcon and how he hasn’t even told Kai that he’s gay, so the guy practically assaulted him, this is a ing crime you know and you can go to prison for it, you can, for crying out loud who kisses other people without even a warning.

Kyungsoo has so much to say, yet he’s already tired with feeling it all, he thinks arguing about them would be life-draining.

Kai waits for a moment, cautiously, before adding, “I just took my own advice too seriously. I’m sorry.” He struggles to look composed, Kyungsoo can sense him fighting, with his smooth arms and his wide shoulders, trying to scold all his limbs into stiffness and failing.

“Just don’t do that again.” It’s like talking to a little kid. To a certain extent, Kai has always been a kid for Kyungsoo. Stranded in a different world and accepting that he used to be a hero from an action comic, Kai is surprisingly insightful about some things, yet needs someone to look after him at the same time. And Kyungsoo kind of falls into that role and now it’s reached a point where he is talking to Kai in that horribly petulant, horribly motherly tone.

Perhaps the horrible one is him.

“Okay.” Kai says and keeps his word in the future.

It rains the day after that and it looks like the clouds are breaking open with the sheer force of the water. So Kyungsoo feels satisfied, feels like saying thank you to someone up there, because things were growing and piling up around him and the rainstorm seems to have stopped everything.

The dirty drops of water crash on the windows of his apartment and even Kai who is usually full of energy and running all over the place, is eating cereal in front of the TV, long legs crossed on the sickly green couch and fingers coming up to clean a smear of milk from his chin.

Kyungsoo watches from the kitchen, with his face turned to the window and his eyes inevitably following the other person in the room. Kai is always hard to ignore and for Kyungsoo the natural thing to do would be to pat himself on the back and say good job for making such an impressive protagonist, but if he said that right now, it would ooze with sarcasm because, congratulations you made him so good even you cannot ignore him, really you deserve a standing ovation. He cannot possibly rejoice about his drawing skills, when he’s trying so hard to look away and to stop thinking about Kai all the time and he’s doing such a lousy job at it.

Kyungsoo used to think of a thousand things before Kai became an active part of his life. And now even the sound of the rain gets muffled by the crunching noise of Kai eating All Bran and some entertainer in the TV shouting, are you ready for this challenge ready and… go.

He’s never really enjoyed variety shows before. Kyungsoo knows that a lot of the things they say there are scripted. Most of the jokes have been written down in paper beforehand and rehearsed among the actors. This thought really bugs him, to be honest, and even when he wills himself to watch these programs, (they’re obviously funny, Baekhyun says, what’s wrong with you) he still ends up with the uncomfortable feeling of knowing he’s being lied to. The whole show doesn’t look fake, he tries to nitpick at each scene and each person to find the flaws, but essentially, it doesn’t look fake.

It just is. And he can’t stand that.

Kyungsoo makes a full circle of thoughts and denial and more thoughts to finish up at the same place he was two days ago.

The boy sitting on his ugly-colored couch doesn’t seem unlike any other pretty boy with tanned skin and thick lips. Kai doesn’t feel mismatched in Kyungsoo’s place. Doesn’t look like he’s all that different from a guy Kyungsoo would smile at, from across the room and consider pinning on that couch and kissing senseless.

But Kai is different. He just is.

Sometimes, Kai himself reminds him of these differences. It happens when he asks Kyungsoo to take him to an amusement park because he’s never been to one before. Or when he wakes up, at night, drenched in sweat and spluttering in the darkness, nonsense about the Syndicate kidnapping Kyungsoo and please, please be here, be alive.

And Kyungsoo is compelled to say, it’s okay, I’m here, it’s just a dream, because these nightmares are partly his fault and even if they weren’t Kyungsoo is helpless to that trembling voice. The voice which isn’t really, strictly, the one he gave Kai in his manga, but the one Kai chose, all on his own, possibly just to mess with Kyungsoo’s heart even more.

Baekhyun and Chanyeol come and go, all that time, working lazily on an already satisfying chapter, but mostly whispering rudely about the weird sounds in the kitchen and the laundry that is piling up suspiciously and the number of cups in the drain, behind Kyungsoo’s back.

Unsurprisingly, things start to get messy because of Chanyeol. Kyungsoo knew that would happen, yet could not have prevented it any more than he could have prevented the breadcrumbs on his keyboard, or the fidgety muttering that echoes around the studio when they’re tight on a deadline.

Chanyeol is working on some digital clean-ups of a frame (which is what he is supposed to be doing) and at the same time, making some ridiculously underhanded joke in a loud voice(which is what he’s forbidden from doing, ever since last summer when he went around and calling Kyungsoo in a terribly incorrect English accent –it actually sounded more like dombess- for whole days). Chanyeol pauses dramatically and delivers the punch line of the joke, Kyungsoo thinks it might be about chicken, because his tall assistant is making chicken voices and he’s been flapping his hands for a while now. Baekhyun sniggers inside his palm and Kyungsoo is in the process of rolling his eyes, when he hears, clearly and loudly, a snorted laugh from the kitchen.

He freezes immediately, holds his breath and hopes that, against all odds, if he remains perfectly still and inconspicuous, the two guys will just ignore the laughter from his kitchen and go back to work. It’s a silly idea; almost just as silly as saying, “He’s just a cousin I’m letting stay with me for a couple of -” in a frantic voice, while Baekhyun is already barging, in the part of Kyungsoo’s apartment that is not the studio, cackling and calling Kyungsoo a little minx.

“Oh, look at you now, lying and hiding a hot-sounding guy in your chambers. You’re making me proud, you little minx.” Kyungsoo makes to grab his friend by the arm, but Baekhyun is too fast and Chanyeol is even further ahead, rampaging around the apartment with no shame, or reserve whatsoever.

They are clearly looking for something more scandalous than the empty take-out boxes and the crumbled blue blankets on the couch. After all, his assistants live off of embarrassing Kyungsoo and the bigger the scoop, the better.

However, Kyungsoo himself falters on the small things.  He stumbles on the pile of manga next to the coffee table, the smell of pineapple tea (Kai has squealed when they found it at the supermarket and Kyungsoo had bought it, because all this strange-colored coffee was making Kai jumpy) that’s all over the room and the muted Running Man episode on the TV. That’s when he realizes; regardless how not real Kai is, this… everything around him, is definitely real. The jokes might have been scripted in the show, but the reaction is genuine.

Most of the jokes he can remember come directly from Chanyeol’s low-standard, childish sense of humor. That means, essentially, that there are a lot of ual innuendoes and juvenile puns and at least one animal walking into a bar, at some point. Most of the times, the jokes turn out to be so bad that Baekhyun laughs at Chanyeol, instead of the joke and Kyungsoo doesn’t laugh at all. In other cases, the punch line is so obvious that someone else guesses it, before Chanyeol gets the chance to finish the joke. Usually, Kyungsoo doesn’t enjoy this kind of predictable, childish jokes. And yet, right now, he thinks he can finally see the appeal.

Everything that is happening to him lately is like one of Chanyeol’s bad jokes. There is a fake boy, a boy that Kyungsoo made to be fake, and when this boy comes to life, he is not cool at all, nothing like Kyungsoo would admire, but he leaves his traces everywhere and he kisses Kyungsoo with pineapple syrup on his lips and Kyungsoo tries to roll his eyes and say that the joke is scripted, he scripted that joke, dammit, he’s not going to fall for it. He held on to that belief, repeating, like a mantra that, he’s not even real, he’s not like any other pretty boy I can just pin on the couch and have my way with, until now, that he is looking at his wrecked life and feels such an overpowering fondness that he cannot take it anymore.

He takes a moment too long, but he laughs at the punch line eventually.

“Oh my god, he’s hiding under the covers. How typical. Chanyeol, come help me move the comforter.” Baekhyun’s voice calls out from the bedroom and Kyungsoo blinks and swallows the smile, cannot possibly get caught laughing right now.

“Can you please leave him alone?” He yells at the two guys, feeling a little proud of Kai for having the good sense to hide his face.

When Kyungsoo goes in the bedroom, he finds Baekhyun and Chanyeol leering over Kai, who is still under the covers and he looks cocooned, because he’s clearly clutching them for dear life.  Chanyeol barks a laugh, poking at Kai with interest and, definitely, a good deal of amusement. “And you kept insisting that all you care about is Black Falcon…”  

“Oh he cares about Black Falcon. Quite a bit, I would say.” Kai has the audacity to joke in a situation like this.

“Yah, Ka-” Kyungsoo would like to continue pretending to be sane to his friends and immediate work associates and no one can argue against that. Thankfully even his mouth, in a distressing situation like this, managed to do an automatic shutdown before spouting Kai’s name. He gives himself a moment of celebration for this success, only to have it end prematurely with the realization that if only Black Falcon had a more normal name it wouldn’t have been so dangerous to say it out loud.

“Ka-?” Baekhyun leans closer to Kyungsoo, hungry for gossip like one of those wild animals in the zoo, when it’s feeding time.

Kyungsoo is not an amateur in this. He knows the process of naming a character from his manga. First of all, you need to have a clear picture of the character, both the outer appearance and his personality. Then you come up with a name that expresses and includes those two sides and fits the character nicely. Also the name has to roll off the tongue and be at least a bit catchy, to draw the readers in. The problem here is, Kyungsoo cannot afford to be sent to a mental hospital right now (he vows to go there voluntarily after all of this is over, just not right now) because of his slow creative process.

This is essentially one of those times which call for desperate measures. So he frantically, scans the room for some sort of inspiration and his eyes land on the Chinese characters at the bottom of JJ Lin’s concert poster. He reads each one of them and stops at the character 鍾, Jong, which means clock and bell but that’s hardly important, he reprimands himself. At least it sounds like half of a real Korean name and that counts as a win.  

“Kim. Jong. In.” He breathes out each syllable ruefully, before he manages to overthink it. And upon receiving no you’re bluffing, shut up, that’s not his name, reaction, he continues, “Yah, Kim Jongin, didn’t I tell you to be quiet when I work?”

A/N: So uni is happening and I'm sorry for taking so long to update but I am going nuts lately. T_T

So this was supposed to be the part of a bigger chapter but it came out too long so I seperated it. The story looks like it will turn into 6 chapter. Possibly. 

Thank you a ton and a half for all the love and the subscriptions and the comments. I hope you will continue to support this story.