He blinks staring into the crowd unseeing, emotion welling behind ribcage and at the corner of eyes.  He looks at the lights which seem so much softer than normal creating a sort of ethereal shadow across the stage, a film of smoke blanketing their feet.  There is no choreography to remember, no placement to get just right so that bodies aren’t colliding, but neither of those facts make this any easier.  His body is stiff from head to toe and the effort he puts into not rocking back and forth on his feet is almost enough of a distraction from what he knows is coming. 

There’s a sort of stabbing at the back of his mind, an offbeat drum cadence pounding from behind his ribcage, fingers tremble and he breathes as deeply as he dares holding the air in his lungs until his chest begins to ache. His throat clenches, an ache settling behind tooth and tongue something deep and a little dark around the edges that leaves his fingers curling into the fabric of his pants for a moment before he forces them apart and struggles to remember how to breathe.

The fingers around his microphone tighten knuckles going white as he counts down in his head; the entire room has fallen into a still silence. He presses shaking hand against his rolling stomach, murmuring under his breath and hoping to just make it through the stage without losing the entire contents of his stomach across the stage. Hand drops back to his side, as he spends the next moments attempting to wipe the emotion from his face, swallowing back another wave of nausea as the first cords ring like thunder in his ears. 

because of the endless schedules, it’s not easy to see your face

He listens as Jaehwan sings, counting beats in his head and attempting to keep time with his fingers tapping out the melody against his leg, a distraction that doesn’t really help much at all.  He stares into the light for a moment, and everything sort of slows down around him.  The silence is almost deafening; as each note, each chord, each word echoes inside his head banging out an unrelenting rhythm.  The fading beat of another heart skitters across the pads of his fingertips the memory fading out into something almost hazy, muscles clenching tightly as he blinks slowly against the dots of light freckling his vision.

The only thing he wants to do is leave.  There has never been a single moment before this, that he has every wanted to physical just walk off the stage and not look back.  Something stirs inside him, a sort of current that runs from toe to finger to head, ringing in his ears and heavy on his tongue.  He wants to curl his fingers into his jacket, directly over his heart that’s beating off rhythm and out of control.

should i quit, when i think about you, i keep getting weak

It’s over half a minute before he has to move a single muscle in his body, before he has to sing – but it feels like a lifetime, listening to the lyrics as they dig a jagged hole right through him.  His throat feels tight as he raises microphone to mouth and he knows he’s not going to actually be able to sing at all.  So he bites the inside of his cheek and mouths out the words, allowing the other members voice to hide the fact that he’s not actually making any noise. He thinks for once how lucky he is that his voice in this song holds no import.

He blinks slowly, chest tight as he continues to open mouth around the words he cannot sing.  His mind is swimming and he sways a little on his feet.  Panic sets in as the seconds tick by, the one minute mark slides by as his throat feels tighter still, blinking slowly he continues to stare out into the distance, heart beating so out of control its bordering on painful.

i want to stick close to you and walk all day

He can hear Taekwoon’s voice ring out into the nearly silent room; filled with fans and camera and the other four members, but all he can hear are the lift and dip and clear emotion in the older boy’s voice ringing in his ears.  His own breathing seems too loud, hand twitching at his sides as his grip around the microphone tightens and for a moment he gives