Deer Luhan,

Can I just say that Stay, or Memory Lane or whatever you want to call it, is an absolutely awesome track and that I have uploaded it to the Cloud so I can listen to it incessantly when I get back home?  You are an extremely talented musician.  You’re also an extremely talented dancer, singer, song composer and lyrics writer.  I really appreciate talent in youth: I think it’s a great thing.  But right now, with all my heart and soul, I really wish you weren’t any of those things, because it to be you when you’re me and I’m not actually you and I’m expected to know my own song which I didn’t actually write and don’t even understand.

Leigh

It was the first time I’d rung Luhan instead of the other way around, and he seemed bemused.

“Is something wrong?” he asked me.

“What kind of ridiculous question is that?  I have to pretend to be you – of course something’s wrong!”

“So… is something more wrong than usual?” he guessed.

“There are many things more wrong than usual, but yes: your song.  What do I do about your bleeding song?”

“What bleeding song?”  Luhan sounded genuinely confused.

“You can’t be serious.”  I hit my head against the wall.  “The song.  The one you wrote.  The one you’re supposed to be translating.”

“Am I?”

I banged my head slowly against the wall three more times.  The door opened.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Sehun’s voice.  “You need those brain cells.”

“They’re my brain cells,” I muttered.  “I’m dead anyway if I don’t get this song done, so I might as well start dying early.”

Sehun pulled me away from the wall and plucked the phone out of my hand.

“Hyung, what have you been doing to her?” he demanded, putting it on speaker.  I didn’t catch Luhan’s reply.  “The song you were writing way back when.  Kris offered to help you translate it and you even choreographed parts of it before we went on tour.  Didn’t you call it Stay or something?  They’ve asked for it to be put on at the showcase instead of you dancing with Kai.  We need a Korean version of it pronto.”

“Stay?”  Luhan still sounded confused.  “Oh, wait – Memory Street!” he said in English.

“Memory Street?” I echoed.

“Don’t you have a phrase like that?  To take a trip down memory street?”

“It’s memory lane,” I told him.

“Is it?  Okay.  But wait, Sehun, did you say they want a Korean translation?”

“Yes.”

“But I want that song done in English.  I had the first verse written out in English and it sounded so much better.  Can’t it be sung in English instead?”

“It can’t be sung in anything if we don’t have the lyrics,” Sehun pointed out.

There was a pause.

“Oh yeah,” said Luhan eventually.  “I didn’t think of that.”

“Do you actually think at all?” Sehun scoffed.

“Oi,” snapped Luhan, suddenly ratty.  “Behave.”

“Sorry, Luhan, I agree with Sehun,” I told him.  He began to protest, but I cut him off.  “Where do you keep the song lyrics?”

“On my computer.  They’re under a file named—” he said something in Chinese that was beyond my extremely limited capabilities of translation.

“…Okay,” I said, dragging his computer out from where I kept it under the pillow.  “And what the does that bunch of characters look like?”

He began describing them to me in terms of “it looks like there’s a tree on the top left of the third one” and “I think there’s a man in a box somewhere along the line”.  Sehun plopped down on the bed beside me and hauled the computer onto his lap with a sigh.

“Let me.”  He had it up on the screen in seconds.  We both watched as the scroll bar diminished and what I assumed from knowledge of my own laptop was the page count shooting up.

“Er, Luhan,” said Sehun as the page numbers finally settled, as if comfortable that they’d picked an atrociously high number, “this document is over two hundred pages long.”

“It should be somewhere around the middle,” Luhan said merrily.  “I can remember the opening lyrics offhand—”

“ this,” Sehun grumbled, not even attempting to scroll through.  “Luhan, come home now.”

Luhan chuckled.  “Just kidding.  It’ll be at the end: it’s the last thing I wrote.”

Sehun dragged the scroll bar down to the bottom.  The computer screen froze.

“Well, that was helpful,” I observed.

“It really should be performed in English,” Luhan told us as we waited for the computer to defrost.

“How are we going to translate it from Chinese to English without it being obvious that I’m not you?” I asked him.

There was a pause.

“Well, I suppose if Sehun can read out the Chinese to me, I can give you a Korean translation and you can work from that.”

“And what about the words I don’t know, hyung?”

“We guess.  Nobody’s going to notice the difference.”

“Well, for once, your blasé attitude actually works,” Sehun snorted.

It took about half an hour to get the song and Korean version sorted (Sehun took over typing up the Korean version that Luhan tossed back at us because I was horrendously slow when it came to writing in Hangeul and he could touch-type in it).  I had to admit, the words were very touching – from what I could understand, it wasn’t a love song, as I’d first thought, but about wanting to be back somewhere with somebody who had died or moved away or otherwise lost contact.

“This song actually looks really cute,” I told Luhan, scanning over the lines Sehun had written out.  Luhan laughed.  He seemed to do that a lot.

“Thanks,” he said.

“What about the mp3 version?” Sehun asked, copying the lyrics into a new document and saving them.  “If Leigh’s going to get the lyrics to fit, she’s going to have to have the mp3 demo track.”

“It’s more of an instrumental with light vocals,” Luhan griped.

I grinned.  “Oh, what, you mean karaoke?”

Luhan was not happy about that, and Sehun and I sat there snickering as he lectured us on the merits of good music and the differences between demo, karaoke and instrumental.  But in the end, he still directed us to a music player, and the first song we saw on opening it was the one we wanted.

“Have fun, guys!” Luhan cooed, and hung up.

“He says that like he’s expecting us to get off,” Sehun muttered under his breath.  I thumped him hard on the shoulder.

“Excuse me, Oh Sehun?”

He rubbed his shoulder, his ears turning pink, and turned away to search for headphones for me.  “Ah… sorry.”

A few moments later, he was settling headphones on my ears for me.

“I can do that myself,” I protested, but he’d already finished, one of his fingers brushing against my ear as he pulled his hands away.  I could have sworn it was trembling.  But I took the jack from him as he held it out (okay, yes, his hand was definitely trembling) and plugged it into the computer, eyeing the little red sleeve that coated the end of it.  “Wait, Sehun, are these yours?”

He nodded.  I frowned.  Sehun’s headphones were the Holy Grail: touch them and you died.  Even Kris was scared of borrowing them.  I’d actually seen Baekhyun and Chanyeol foregoing music in the car rather than ask Sehun for those particular headphones, even when Sehun wasn’t using them.

Oh, well, I thought to myself.  It was kind of sweet that he was prepared to lend them to me without murderous intent.  Turning back to the computer, I hit the play button for the track and then tapped Sehun’s still trembling hand.  “By the way, Sehun, I think you might need a caffeine fix.  Your hand is shaking as badly as mine does whenever I try to give up coffee for Lent.  My mum says it’s a sign of addiction.”

He flicked me lightly on the forehead with his other hand.  “You’re supposed to be listening to the music.”

“Oh yeah….”  I restarted the track and shoved him off the bed.  “Go get your coffee.  And get me some too, while you’re at it.”  I didn’t even bother to check if he’d gone: Luhan’s song was just too d*mn good.

Memory L