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Time drug on in years, months, weeks, days and hours of endless no’s and not quite yet and maybe next times.  Countless hours of dancing until bone is breaking and muscles is tearing, the moment comes when you rip it all apart to put it back together like puzzle pieces a little closer to plastic perfection each time around. Scratching their throats to shreds and then pushing further until they're choking on blood and hacking up pieces of lung.

They’d all spent a significant period of their lives knocking themselves against walls for a chance at being something. For a few minutes on a stage, microphone in hand as they bodies reached their limits under the heavy lights.

Flaking paint across their faces covering all the blemishes beneath, masks they were for the world to see.  Sparkling tops and metallic accessories, pants tight enough to leave red indents over hip.  They shine and shimmer, puppets attached to the strings their maker controls. Bending when told, bowing when forced, mouths opening and closing on command.  They’ve fooled themselves into believing this life is what they asked for.

Flashes of bright blinding lights in their faces, stalked down a street and running from crowds as they fear for their lives on a daily basis. Fame is a treat they’ve been given, and privacy is a perk they’ve had ripped right out of their thin pale shaking fingers. Success tastes like bile.

Food is pushed aside because body image is half of everything they are.  And sleep is stolen in minutes rather than hours, because perfection is everything they should strive to be.  Practicing comes and goes in 100s of 1000s of hours without stopping because if your body knows it, muscle memory is the best way to make it through a stage with aching limbs and drooping eyes and exhaustion weighing down like a heavy bag across shaking shoulders.

But regardless of everything – broken or whole, glued or taped or stapled together - Jongin is still a kid. 

Regardless of number or birth year or experience, he's still a kid.  He gets hurt and throws tantrums and whines excessively bent over and brooding into his bowl of cereal.  And he has these flashing moments of angst-ridden rebellion when he curses so colorfully that Kyungsoo has to give him a look, eyes narrowing and mouth heavy set. Jongin generally calms himself back into maturity. Shifting back and forth across that boundary that lingers when adolescence fades into adulthood, Jongin gets lost in all the grays that make up that shadowed space.

He fidgets and