It’s been a month and a half since Luhan joined SM to fill a temporary absence. But it already feels like he has been there forever. He has a way about him that makes him fit and meld into the little niches and crevices of the company and its people. At any given day he can be seen discussing sneaker styles with Amber in great depth, pulling pranks on staff with Kyuhyun, pouring over sheets of music with Kyungsoo, taking a million selcas with Sehun, comparing heights with SooYoung, or helping Key shop online for designer clothes. Kris can’t imagine what it was like without Luhan forever fluttering around the edges of his vision wherever he goes.

Right now he is kneeling on the floor and tying together a pair of shoelaces with a look of great concentration while the owner of the said shoelaces is busy frowning at his laptop screen. Kris hides a smirk behind a cough and turns his attention back to his vocal instructor. His comeback song is a love ballad in Mandarin, a completely different style, an unknown side of Kris, the management says. No electro pop, no dub step, no dance melodies, no auto tune, just Kris and his voice exposed for the whole world to prod and take apart.

“You will have to train your voice a lot more. Take more time off dance practice and spend it learning to modulate your voice to the correct tone.”

Kris nods. But to him, who had been into a life of using his vocal codes for something other than informal freestyle rap battles with his friends, modulating his voice sounds like a foreign concept no matter how many times he has heard it in the last 2 years.

There is a loud crashing noise and a string of curse words that Kris understands well despite his lacking Korean skills (They were one of the first things Chanyeol had ever taught him when he had arrived in the country.) Kris looks around to see Kyungsoo sprawled across the ground along with the chair he was sitting on and a pile of files. Kris can’t help but laugh even as he rushes over to help Kyungsoo up. He hisses like a cat at Kris and this makes Kris drop the chair again as he clutches his stomach laughing.

“You did this!” he points an accusing finger, a trail of paperclips hanging from one ear. “I know you did this!”

“But! I was all the way there with seonsaeng-nim!”

“Maybe. But you did this. Or this was somehow your fault, I just know it. I can feel it!” Kyungsoo states adamantly.

“You can feel it?” Kris raises an eyebrow at him. “It is like a weird tickling feeling on your shoulder blades? Because that could just be your tiny, narrow shoulder trying to grow out and become manlier, you-”

Kyungsoo shrieks and lunges at him and Kris laughs as he fends off the attacks easily. He is calling Kyungsoo ‘pocket-sized minion’ when he sees that Luhan had been watching all this from a safe distance. And by now Kris is used to the way there is a pleasant hammering in his chest and stars in the air every time Luhan directs a smile at him and only him. But, sadly, this doesn’t stop him from getting distracted by the brilliance of that smile long enough to be pummeled down to the ground by a hysterical Kyungsoo.

Chen has become friends with Floofy. It’s possibly the most horrible that could ever happen to anyone.  Now I have a dog, that I don’t even own, who pees in all my plants and a cat that shreds all my Manchester United posters and yowls like a banshee in the middle of the night when he gets bored and they are friends. The horror.

Kris jams a cap over his hooded sweatshirt and walks out of the back entrance of his apartment.

Myeongdong is a perpetually alive part of the city and the night has barely begun but nobody recognizes him -because nobody expects to recognize him in a tiny barely noticeable stationary shop tucked into a hidden corner of a street end. He picks up a few pencils with bobble heads on them because he knows Kyungsoo likes them and some memo pads with pink unicorns on them for Yixing. He is rounding the corner of a book shelf decorated with smiling Dragons when he bumps into someone.

His first instinct is to hunch down, make his height less conspicuous and pull down the brim of him cap. This is one of the few places that EunHyuk lets him come alone, and he doesn’t want that taken away because of one single fan account.

“jwoesonghammida. Wait- kris?”

Kris looks up in recognition and then does a dramatic shushing motion. Luhan raises an eyebrow at him. “Umm.. there is nobody but us here to hear me…”

“Oh, yeah. But still”

“What are you even doing here?”

Kris looks longingly over Luhan’s head to the neatly stacked writing paper and envelopes in the shelf right behind him. The Blue paper sits there placidly framed by some yellow and pink ones. He just waves his pencils and memo pads in Luhan’s face. “Just some stuff- for Kyungsoo and Yixi- wait what are you doing here?”

Luhan looks unnaturally startled by the question. He messes with his bangs and half looks over his shoulder before he stops himself. “I was just..you know.. buying some stuff…you know, umm hot chocolate. Yeah, hot chocolate. Helps me sleep well.” He nods is vigorously and his hair fluffs up and down with the motions.

Kris narrows his eyes at him contemplatively. “Hot chocolate? In a… stationary shop?” Luhan turned a bright shade of red at this. “ is EunHyuk hyung making you follow me or something?”

“HAH! As if! They don’t pay me well enough for stuff like that.” Luhan scoffs. “I’m pretty sure he is wrapped up in blankets skyping with Donghae right now.”

Kris laughs at this, agreeing. Luhan knows them all so well despite his short time period at the company.

“You know us all so well.” A thought occurs to him. “But… I don’t think we know you half as well as you know about us..?” it’s an open ended questions, an invitation to speak.

Luhan’s smile is enigmatic as he fiddles with some Hello Kitty stickers. When he finally looks up at Kris his eyes are full of something that seems to beg him to understand. “You probably know a lot more than you think you do,” is his only reply.

“Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.” -Neil Gaiman

There is a different shine in your eyes when you speak about basketball. Sometimes I wonder whether your eyes would have been less sad if you were playing basketball in school like you originally planned to instead of ending up alone on a stage.

Alone. Kris thinks. The life of a solo artist is always lonely. No matter how many stage directors and makeup artists and managers are constantly fluttering around him in the end he has to go up on that stage all alone. Nobody to cover it up if he makes a mistake, nobody to laugh with and hug when he wins a triple crown. But lately, he thinks, the stage hasn’t felt like a battlefield he needs to conquer all on his own. Luhan is always in the background ready to mutter familiar Mandarin words into his ears when the Korean fails him, or he is somewhere behind a fluttering curtain making monkey faces and duck noises at him. It’s terrifying and wonderful how much he has gotten used to all that. Even now he takes a look at the time and folds away his yellow letter watching the door to his practice room expectantly.

It’s 12.45 am on a Tuesday and he can almost smell the coffee already. He scratches at his elbow and wonders whether he should start practicing on his own.

He is lying on the floor, eyes closed and listening to the guide track for the comeback song that he has 2 more months to master. The door swishes open softly and closes again. The smell of coffee permeates the air and he feels a warmth settles next to him and he still keeps on listening. Kyungsoo’s voice over the light piano chords seeps into the night air and Kris loves this, loves the feeling of being quite and steady and alone without really being alone.

It’s 1am on a Tuesday night Luhan is right there next to him as he had been every single night for the past two weeks. Ever since that first time when he taught Kris how to twist his body just right to the beat of Growl (and then they had bumped into each other in that shop) Luhan had begun to pop in on his practice sessions every night – with a extra mug of coffee and a little something he has noticed that day that will help Kris dance better. At the beginning both Luha