Deer Luhan,

I will admit my respect for you is rising slightly at your ability to leave airports, because I thought I was going to die in Incheon.  I still don’t appreciate being put through this.  You .

Leigh

Sehun, the b*st*rd, forgot to warn me about what arriving in Incheon airport would be like.  It might have had something to do with the fact that even a warning could never have fully prepared me for the hordes and scrum, but it’s still something I hold against him to this day.  Not to mention that I probably should have guessed it wasn’t going to be safe after Sehun had awoken eight hours into the flight to find himself face to face with a drooling fan and yelled so loudly that I heard him through the dubsteb I was listening to.  But my God, the arrivals hall at Incheon….

First, there was the noise.  I’d been along to a couple of football matches in my time because my cousin was a Chelsea fanatic, but even the drunkest of football crowds never got to that volume.

Then there were the cameras.  It felt like being attacked by lightning.

And then there was the inability to queue.

“Flying fudgecakes,” I whispered to Sehun, tugging on his arm to get him to pay attention to me (cue a sharp spike in decibel levels).  “It’s like a human traffic jam.”

“A human traffic jam?” he repeated.

“Yeah,” I said.  “It’s like somebody’s taken away the invisible lines in the middle of the road and the country’s forgotten which side they drive on.”

He looked at me like I’d grown a second head.  “Where the hell are you from?”

“London,” I said.  “And in London, people queue.  It’s practically a national pastime.”

He looked at me like I’d grown a third head.

“And also,” I said, “where are visa control and the ticket desks and what have you so I can get home?”

“You’re joking, right?” he demanded.  “You want to stay in the airport with all this?  Much safer to do it from the dorm.”

I looked at the sea of fans again and had to admit he was right.  There was no way I wanted to do that here.

The security guards and managers were trying to force a way through.  The other members of the group, donning sunglasses (in winter, I might add), followed after them, and Sehun placed a hand in the small of my back (cue another sharp spike in decibel levels) to propel me forwards.

It was like being put through a clothes mangle while trying to wade through gloopy honey.  By the time we were a quarter of the way through the crowd, I had been squished up between Sehun and some other guy wearing a snapback and shorts (in winter), was in danger of inhaling a camera lens that had all but been shoved in front of my mouth, and was in the process of developing a mathematical formula pertaining to the actions of the other EXO members and the noise levels from the fans.  It went something along the lines of (a (k + m) + t(proximity))/OTP x no. of fans = loudness of scream, in which k and m are members and a stood for the action.

By the time we were halfway through, the snapback shorts guy had almost been trampled by rampaging wildebeest fans trying to get a photo of him, and Sehun and I, together with a panda-eyed boy, were crouched protectively over him, shielding our hair from snatching hands.

“Kai, are you all right?” Sehun asked with worry.  Snapback Shorts’ face had gone white.

“Hurts,” he managed.

“Not again.”  Panda Eyes sighed, almost drowned out by somebody screaming, “Tao, get out of the way!  I need to take a photo of my Kai!”

“Again?” I queried without thinking.  “Does this happ—”

Fortunately, I wasn’t speaking loud enough to be heard until somebody wrapped their arms around my neck and pulled me backwards.  How Sehun heard my gurgle of alarm I’ll never know.  Or perhaps he just saw me being dragged away.

My body went into anti-mugger mode, but before I could floor the kidnapper fan trying to photograph my face from close quarters, the manager interposed and wrestled her off me.  I thanked him and dusted myself down.

Panda Eyes and Sehun had Snapback Shorts on his feet, but he wasn’t in a good way and he needed the support of both of them to walk.

By the time we were two thirds of the way through the crowd, I was convinced I wasn’t going to leave the building alive.  The jostling and screaming was making me light-headed and I’d acquired an array of scratches and bruises that surpassed even the ones I’d gained from a mosh pit at Glastonbury several years before.  Plus, I took it from some of the shocked and saner fans’ gasps, my head wound had started bleeding again.

When we finally got out the other end, I was just about ready to kill something.  Unfortunately, I was bundled into a minibus before I could find a sharp object and a victim to help me vent.

“That was traumatising,” I told Sehun as he tumbled into the seat next to me in the back.  He just shrugged.

“We’ve had worse.”

“Worse?”  I contorted my face into something between horrified and jaw-dropped.  “Than that?”

“Well, hopefully Kai won’t have to go to the hospital this time.”

He pulled out his phone and resumed where we’d left off in the photo gallery on the plane.

“Who’s this?”

It was a grinning Snapback Shorts, just without the snapback and shorts.

“Kappa?” I guessed.  I knew it had something to do with Greek.

“Kai,” he corrected patiently, and I facepalmed.  I was so dumb.

“I was right about the Greek,” I muttered.  “‘Kai’ in Greek means ‘and’.”

Sehun paused, about to scroll on to the next photo, and looked up at me.  “Really?”

“Yeah.”

He grinned.  “Fantastic.  New ammo.  Who’s this?”

“Kris.”

“Yup.  This one?”

“Uh….”  I frowned at the photo.  Blue background, crimped hair, and tattoos.  “Are you sure that’s one of you?”

Sehun glanced down at it, as if unsure.  “Yup.  That’s from our Mama music video.”

“Which song was that again?”  He’d spent the first two hours of the flight playing me EXO’s songs because he was so scandalised that I didn’t know them.

“The epic one.”

“Oh, Careless Shoot Anonymous?”

“It’s called Mama.”

“I’m still trying to work out how ‘careless’, ‘shoot’ and ‘anonymous’ even fit in as lyrics.”

“Illuminati.  It’s all conspiracy,” he told me, pokerfaced.

“What, you guys are Illuminati?”

He flicked my forehead.  “Did Luhan choose an idiot as well as somebody who can’t speak Chinese?”

“You’re knocking out brain cells I need,” I admonished him huffily.  He grinned and flicked my head again.  “Ow!”

“So who’s in the photo?”

“I dunno.  You?”

Sehun choked.

Okay, maybe not.  But if that’s Luhan, I think I might cry.  “The tattoos are fake, aren’t they?”

“I think your brain cells are all already dead without me flicking you.”

“Chanyeol?  He had frizzy hair.”

“Different colour.”

“Kappa?”

“He’s Kai!”

“Whoops.”

Sehun shook his head, muttering under his breath, and swiped a new photo into position.

“Me,” I said after half a glance at the screen.  “And get it off.  I hate the guy.”

Sehun looked a litt